"Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, odious to our way of life and specifically proscribed under the Fourteenth Amendment."
So spoke the attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in a 1949 case. You may have heard of him. His name was Thurgood Marshall.
According to this source, he'd made a similar argument two years earlier in a case against the University of Oklahoma Law School that refused to admit blacks. In that case, he said, "classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society."
It seems the times have changed.