Hardly any term has polarized America as much as “Affirmative Action” for decades.

Behind this are measures against discrimination against minorities in the workplace and in the education system - but above all the dispute revolves around the self-image of many Americans.

After all, many like to imagine their society as a kind of meritocracy: as a system in which power and success are based on performance.

Anyone and everyone can "make it" - but the reality is different for many people.

The question of whether equality of opportunity prevails in the United States - and what means are permissible to create it - has repeatedly occupied the courts.

“Affirmative Action” is the generic term for a variety of strategies to mitigate inequality.

"Affirmative Action" in today's sense goes back to a formulation by the then President John F. Kennedy, who demanded in the early 1960s that employers and educational institutions must take "positive action" against discrimination.

This objective found its way into several laws, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It was primarily about removing the existing barriers for minorities and then also for women.

A special focus in the following decades was on the award of public contracts - and on the unions, which in many places, for example, discriminated against African-American workers.

grant programs and recruitment campaigns

For the past several decades, Chief Justices have clearly limited affirmative action.

Since 2003, numerical quotas for so-called "races" have expressly no longer been permitted, but targets in the broadest sense are.

A university can thus set general goals to better reflect the composition of its region, not to disadvantage women or to encourage more students from low-income families to study.

Scholarship programs or recruitment campaigns can be set up for this purpose.

The social background and the "race" of applicants may also be included in application interviews, just not in the sense of fixed quotas.

The interviews are generally designed to consider factors such as personality or extracurricular involvement alongside the standardized test scores.

Many public colleges, such as in Texas or California, want to solve the problem of discrimination by promising a place for the top 10 percent of graduates from all high schools.

This ensures that young people from underfunded schools in structurally disadvantaged areas also have a chance.

However, the Republicans now want to use the majority of conservative judges on the Supreme Court to declare any "affirmative action" as such inadmissible.

The chief justices will rule on two cases involving the Harvard University and North Carolina University admissions programs.

Both lawsuits come from a lobby group called Students for Fair Admissions.

Her accusation against Harvard is that, measured by their performance, too few Asian-American applicants are enrolled and that the university is thus discriminating against this group.

The elite university countered that the lawsuit was based on incorrect statistics and that its admission criteria were within previous case law.

In North Carolina, plaintiffs allege that admissions committees discriminate against whites by giving preference to black, Hispanic, and indigenous applicants.

Both universities won cases in federal courts, but now the conservative majority on the Supreme Court could reverse these decisions.

Lawrence S. Bacow, President of Harvard, defended to The New York Times the fact that when filling the limited number of places on the course, criteria other than just academic ones had to be used.

The Supreme Court case jeopardizes forty years of jurisprudence that gave colleges and universities the freedom and flexibility to create diverse campus communities.