Part of this hesitance is, no doubt, a product of judicial compromise. But for ordinary Americans, the linkage between race-conscious college admissions and the larger project of social justice is at risk of being lost amid the minutiae.

In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the landmark 1978 case on affirmative action, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. ruled that quotas were unconstitutional in any context but permitted colleges to consider race as one factor in admissions — provided that they embraced the policies for educational benefits and not as a remedy for past societal discrimination. While his distinction was understandable, it contributed to an unfortunate uncoupling of affirmative action from its social context. There is a moral and constitutional difference between policies that take into account the realities of America’s troubled racial history, and pernicious forms of discrimination, like the Jim Crow laws.

The enduring effects of nearly four centuries of racial subjugation and subordination — much of it state-sanctioned — have not vanished even though the United States has a black president. We may hope that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s prediction in 2003 that affirmative action would not be necessary in 25 years is true, but the time frame may sadly be too brief, given our fraught history.

In many school districts, racial segregation is as bad as it was before Brown. About 40 percent of black and Hispanic children attend K-12 schools where 10 percent or fewer of their classmates are white. Residential racial segregation remains deeply entrenched. Proposition 209, a voter-sanctioned ban on affirmative action at California’s public universities, led to a sharp decrease in representation of black students at the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses. While 43 percent of whites have a college degree, 27 and 19 percent of blacks and Hispanics, respectively, hold one.

Despite those disparities, Fisher can be read as setting a high bar for consideration of race in admissions: universities must demonstrate that race or ethnicity has not been the defining feature in an admissions decision; that the use of race is necessary to achieve the educational benefits of diversity; and that there is no “available, workable” race-neutral alternative to achieve such benefits. It will not be impossible for universities, public and private, to meet these requirements, but it may well prove difficult, time-consuming and costly. Lower courts will have to see whether the University of Texas meets the test. The flagship Austin campus admits three-quarters of its students under a program that guarantees admission to the top students in every high school in the state. The rest are admitted under “holistic” criteria — of which race is but one.