“What, to the slave, is the Fourth of July,” asked Frederick Douglass in a speech at an Independence Day celebration in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852.

In a 6-to-3 vote, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action. In her dissenting opinion, Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote:

Given the lengthy history of state-sponsored race-based preferences in America, to say that anyone is now victimized if a college considers whether that legacy of discrimination has unequally advantaged its applicants fails to acknowledge the well-documented “intergenerational transmission of inequality” that still plagues our citizenry.

What, to the descendants of the enslaved, is Independence Day? “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”