The writer, a junior majoring in political communication, is The Hatchet’s opinions editor.

Conservative Supreme Court justices seem poised to remove yet another protection for America’s minorities.

Affirmative action proponents squeaked by last term, when the justices confronted the controversy of race in college admissions after a woman alleged that she was rejected from the University of Texas because she was white. They pushed the decision off to the lower courts.

But yesterday, the justices heard oral arguments on another affirmative action case –  Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action – and this time, it’s important that our nation’s most important judges take a strong stance in favor of affirmative action.

This term’s case centers around whether it is constitutional for a 2006 Michigan ballot amendment to ban the state giving preferential treatment in public college admissions because of race or gender.

In other words, voters in Michigan decided that race shouldn’t be an admissions factor.

But it shouldn’t be okay for those in the racial majority to decide laws that pertain to the minority. That’s what we have governments and legal systems for: to protect the rights of all Americans.

There’s legal precedent in support of affirmative action. Here’s a quick history lesson: In the Grutter v. Bollinger case from 2003, the Court ruled that race can be considered as a part of college admissions decisions.

Now, the Court didn’t require colleges to take race and ethnicity into account, but let’s be honest: Doing so is probably a good idea. After all, we’ve seen how homogeneous our classrooms can be. It’s depressing that at a school in a city where white people are merely 35 percent of the population, a meager 7.2 percent of our students are black, and 7.3 are Hispanic.

It’s important that the Court makes a clear decision now in favor of affirmative telling people who live in Michigan that they can’t just decide that affirmative action isn’t for them. They shouldn’t punt the issue back to the lower courts like last term, because it’s a foundational institution that we still need – even in 2013.

In a country where the unemployment rate for black people was nearly 6 percentage points higher than the national average in August, no politician or pundit can logically argue that we’re living under perfect equality.

And in an era where prominent leaders of the far right insist that race is  irrelevant – take for example, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, who can’t seem to understand why people would place special emphasis on hiring blacks even as he admits that his own corporation does so – we rely on the wisdom of the justices to do all within their power to preserve any vestige of a level playing field.

The scariest part is that some of the justices think like O’Reilly, too. Justice Clarence Thomas, a racial minority himself, equated affirmative action to slavery in his Fisher v. U.T. opinion.

Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, is recusing herself from the upcoming case. That means that the balance is even more skewed, increasing the likelihood that affirmative action regulations will be decimated for public colleges in several states come June.

Anyone who cares about higher education and equality should hope that’s not the case.