- Pence supported the Supreme Court ruling which struck down affirmative action in college admissions.
- He said that while affirmative action may have been needed in the past, that is no longer the case.
Reacting to the Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action, former Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday said that he doesn't believe there is racial inequality in the US education system.
Pence, who supported the court's decision, said on the CBS News program "Face the Nation" that while racial inequality in education was once a significant issue in the country, he felt as though the country had moved beyond a need to employ affirmative action in higher education admissions.
"I really don't believe there is. I believe there was," he told host Margaret Brennan regarding the need for affirmative action. "I mean, there may have been a time when affirmative action was necessary simply to open the doors of all of our schools and universities, but I think that time has passed."
"I really believe that the accomplishments of America's students, particularly our minority students, the great achievements that African-Americans have reached in this country on that educational foundation, I think tells us that we've opened those doors and minority students on our campuses have excelled and I'm confident those doors will remain open," he continued. "And we'll continue to move forward as a colorblind society, which is really, the aspiration I believe of every American."
"I really do believe that we can move forward as a country and embrace the notion that we're all going to be judged not on the color of our skin, but on the content of our character, and in this case, on our GPA," he added.
In a 6-3 decision, the court's dominant conservative bloc aligned against the continuation of affirmative action, arguing that the admission practices of Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause.
The court's two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, were on the opposite sides of the ruling, with Thomas decrying affirmative action as "rudderless, race-based preferences" and Jackson in her dissent criticizing the ruling as "let-them-eat-cake obliviousness" to racism.
Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina justice to serve on the Supreme Court, wrote in her dissent that "the devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated."