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Only de jure, as you say. It was devised not to protect Whites or Asians but to advance blacks, women and so on, so there's a logical consistency there. Intention and use were aligned. The court would not just be implementing what the words say, they're changing the fundamental meaning of the law even as everyone pretends it stays the same. I guess if we looked around we could find some case where whites were protected by the law (was there some case in Hawaii) but by and large that's not the function or goal.
This is on a different level to ruling that fish are bees or whatever for the purposes of some biodiversity preservation law, even though that's a huge change of factual content (and logically bizarre). They really need commitment from the other branches of govt to make such a meaningful change and get it to stick.
There's no change in saying those laws protecting everyone. The Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts would never have been passed if they were written to protect "only the blacks", and the Supreme Court has consistently held that they do, in fact, protect everyone. That is what the words said, that is what was intended. A claim that "No individual, on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, disability, religion, age, sexual orientation, or status as a parent, shall be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination in, a Federally conducted education or training program or activity" means "Well actually it's OK to discriminate as long as it's against people of the majority race, the less-fair sex, the lighter color, domestic origin, able-bodied, Christians, or heterosexuals" is at least as crazy as "a bee is a fish".
But the outcome is massive and blatantly obvious affirmative action that favours non-whites and harms whites. Corporate America somehow managed to hire 94% nonwhite in 2021! You see all these HR people openly admitting what that they've been doing it and nobody seems to leap on this illegality. Because it's not de facto illegal.
The Soviet Constitution might promise you all these beautiful rights. They may be written in black and white. It might even be legally binding, it might technically be the supreme law of the land. But Stalin can wipe his ass with it every day of the week and your peers will laugh (quietly inside their heads) if you want to use it to defend yourself against the NKVD. Ultimately, the people who commissioned and made it wanted to make it look good to foreigners, not for it to actually act as a constitution. It had little or no relevance to the administration of the USSR.
Even if the law as written protects whites, there's a partiality in people's heads where they know what is or isn't typically a hate crime, what equal opportunities mean, what sexual harassment is, where the standards of proof should be. Law is implemented by men, not words on paper and what's inside their minds takes on paramount importance. It is possible to change people's minds and reeducate them but it takes time and unity from above. Judges are not out of sync with the legislators, they're not just suddenly deciding to interpret against the text, they run in the same circles and execute the meaning of the law as they understand it, not the letter of the law. If their interpretation was actually against what the legislators (as a collective) wanted, the legislators would change it.
The legislators can only change the law de jure. Changing the law de facto can only be done by the executive and to a smaller extent the judiciary. The court is NOT saying "if legislators want to set out a law to ban this stuff, we have your backs". The court is saying "legislators have ALREADY set out a law to ban this stuff". The court merely lacks the power to enforce its decisions against the obstinacy of the executive.
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