The See-No-Evil Supreme Court
The Atlantic · LC · trust 36/100
The majority refuses to see evidence of racism.
Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Source: U.S. Supreme Court. July 14, 2026, 8:04 AM ET Share Save This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
The Roberts Court accelerated its assault on the freedoms guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments this term, leaving only the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship intact—and that by only one vote. Across multiple cases dealing with voting and immigration, a consistent theme has emerged from the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence: a determination to ignore, rationalize, or misrepresent the explicit animus of government officials—and the president in particular—toward the groups that have been targeted.
This trend began in the first Trump administration, and has grown only more apparent as Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States have become more brazen. The Court’s approach echoes one of the most notorious decisions in American history: the 1944 ruling in Korematsu v. United States , which upheld the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in the middle of World War II. With apologies to Fred Korematsu, a brave and honorable man who resisted internment , we could call the Roberts Court’s “See no evil” approach to overt bigotry the Neo-Korematsu Doctrine.
Writing on behalf of the majority in Korematsu , Justice Hugo Black—a former Klansman—rebuked his colleagues for suggesting that racism or bigotry was behind the internment of Japanese Americans. “To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue,” Black wrote . “Pressing public necessity may sometimes justify the existence of such restrictions; racial antagonism never can.”
Black had disavowed the Ku Klux Klan years before he wrote those words, but time has not redeemed them. In his dissent, Justice Frank Murphy accurately described the government’s policy as having fallen “into the ugly abyss of racism.”
Korematsu was never technically overturned, though Korematsu’s conviction for violating the military order creating the camps eventually was, after new information showed the government had withheld exculpatory evidence—namely that the U.S. government and its law-enforcement and intelligence agencies had no evidence that Japanese Americans were a threat. In 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts repudiated Korematsu , describing the decision as “gravely wrong the day it was decided” and “overruled in the court of history,” adding that it “has no place in law under the Constitution.”
Those words appear in Roberts’s majority opinion in Trump v. Hawaii , the case challenging the Trump “travel ban” targeting mostly Muslim countries. Despite what Roberts wrote, he upheld Trump’s ban, out of deference to the president’s powers over immigration and national security. This, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted in her dissent, actually replicated the logic of Korematsu : the idea that the government is owed deference even when it engages in obvious racial bigotry. The Neo-Korematsu Doctrine holds that if any other motive can be found—say, national security—then it’s not racism, and, as Black suggested, it’s actually a little rude to suggest otherwise.
“The text says nothing about religion,” Roberts wrote about Trump’s order, waving away the president’s expressions of anti-Muslim animus. (This was true of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order as well. It never named Japanese Americans, but it didn’t have to: General John DeWitt had already recommended removing “ Japanese and other subversive persons ,” an d began doing so as soon as the order was issued .) “The issue before us is not whether to denounce the statements,” Roberts argued. “It is instead the significance of those statements in reviewing a Presidential directive, neutral on its face, addressing a matter within the core of executive responsibility.” In response, Sotomayor noted that Trump himself had (positively) compared his Muslim ban to Japanese internment, saying that Roosevelt “did the same thing.”
One might argue that the justices have a difficult job—shutting out the political noise in order to properly interpret the law and the Constitution—and that job remains the same even if the president himself is erratic. But when the president is using his official powers to act on his personal hatred toward particular groups of people, that erratic nature becomes legally relevant.
“A president who acts on unconstitutional animus to effectuate policy through the presidency is not executing institutional power. Rather, he is laundering personal animus through the institution of the presidency,” writes Daphna Renan , a professor at Harvard Law. In such circumstances, “Roberts has it backwards: The question is not the ‘authority of the presidency itself,’ but the potentially unconstitutional conduct of ‘a particular president.’”
In Trump v. Hawaii , Roberts at least had the integrity to refer to Trump’s explicit statements about Muslims, even while arguing that the president had statutory authority to ban travelers from particular countries. In more recent cases, the right-wing justices have stopped doing that, and in fact begun arguing that such evidence would be unfair to consider—except in cases involving groups they sympathize with.
In Louisiana v. Callais , the majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, asserted that the drawing of a second Black congressional district out of six, in a state where about one-third of the population is Black, was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” If Republicans wanted to pack Black voters into a single district, however, that was permissible, because they had a partisan interest in doing so. In other words, Black voters can be disenfranchised because they vote for Democrats—in the same way that Japanese Americans in…
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