Whether due to ignorance or for partisan gain, media outlets will herald the Supreme Court decision in the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases as “abolishing affirmative action.” Far from it. These cases concern only racial preferences in college admissions—a very small part of the whole system of racial preferences commonly called “affirmative action.”

The term “affirmative action” was first used in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Also known as the Wagner Act, this forbade employers from discriminating against union members or workers trying to form unions. The enforcement agency, the National Labor Relations Board, could compel employers who violated the act to reinstate fired employees, provide back pay, or “take such affirmative action… as will effectuate the policies of this Act.”

In the context of race, President John F. Kennedy introduced the phrase in his 1961 executive order prohibiting racial discrimination by government contractors. Nobody knew exactly what the requirement entailed, but it was commonly understood as going beyond mere refusal to hire on the basis of race, and to specifically let minority workers know they were welcome—recruiting at historically-black colleges, advertising in black newspapers, posting nondiscrimination notices, and generally recruiting by means other than the “old (white) boys network.” These methods, often called “soft” affirmative action, were quite uncontroversial and many high-profile contractors adopted such progressive policies in the 1960s.

Lyndon Johnson introduced “hard” affirmative action in the late 1960s. His initial target was the “lily-white” construction trade unions in certain American cities where jobs were handed down by overt nepotism. Originally called “the Philadelphia Plan,” it required contractors to draw up “manning tables” with “goals and timetables” for reaching minority employment goals—racial quotas in all but name. The proposal ignited a firestorm of protest among powerful labor unions and their congressional allies, so Johnson’s Labor Department shelved it. But Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, revived it, protected it against congressional attack, and extended it to all government contractors in 1970. Since then, it’s become part of American corporate culture so much that in 1981 big businessmen convinced Ronald Reagan, who had campaigned as a foe of the new affirmative action and could’ve ended it by his own executive order, to leave it alone.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 provided another avenue for affirmative action. The term appears nowhere in the statute—indeed, several sections of the act intended to prohibit racial preferences. But its enforcement agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, interpreted the statute’s simple “no discrimination” language in innovative ways. It held that union seniority systems, for example, could not perpetuate “the present effects of past discrimination,” effectively turning it into an ex-post facto law. More importantly, it devised the “disparate impact” definition of discrimination: Hiring and promotion qualifications, even if race-neutral and not intended to discriminate, were presumed illegal if they produced unequal racial outcomes. Employers could only use such qualifications if they could prove they were a matter of “business necessity.” Proving the necessity of standards was costly and time-consuming, so most employers simply came up with the requisite numbers. A less-efficient workforce, they concluded, was less of a burden than trying to defend hiring by merit. The Supreme Court furthered this in the 1978 case United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, in which they held that corporate affirmative action programs did not violate the nondiscrimination mandate of the Civil Rights Act. When the Supreme Court began to rethink the disparate impact standard in 1989, Congress explicitly wrote it into law in the Civil Rights Act of 1991.

Racial preference programs proliferated in the 1970s. Higher education admissions preferences were upheld under the “diverse student body” rationale in the 1978 case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Flat-out racial quotas were unacceptable, but colleges could take race into account as one factor among many in a “holistic” admissions review. Discriminate, the Court said, but don’t be too overt about it. Use “winks and nods,” as the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put it. The Court largely reaffirmed Bakke in the 2003 University of Michigan cases—the cases that it just repudiated.

But the Court will not likely touch affirmative action under the contracting program and Civil Rights Act that emerged in the 1960s. A majority, for example, is unlikely to hold that the disparate impact standard violates the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor will it consider other areas where social engineering to achieve proportionate racial outcomes has taken hold. In the 1970s, the federal government and the states adopted “set-aside” programs, where a certain amount of government spending must go to minority groups (which have expanded to include women, homosexuals, and others today). The disparate impact definition of discrimination has been extended to housing discrimination cases. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been turned from protecting the right to vote to maximizing the number of minority elected officials—a “racial group entitlement to offices,” as the late Justice Antonin Scalia put it. The Court reaffirmed this “max-blacks” requirement in the Alabama voting rights case two weeks ago.

This term’s higher-education cases are merely the tip of the iceberg. The preferential admission policies only matter at a small number of elite, selective colleges—most colleges admit anyone who can pay, or cause to be paid, tuition. And since racial proportionalism (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) has been a part of higher educational culture even longer than it’s been part of corporate culture, administrators will find substitutes for “diversity”—“proxies” for race, as they are called, or more winks and nods.