Justice Sotomayor and the Affirmative Action Bitter-Enders Have Lost Bigtime

Photo Credit: American Thinker

The American public has woken up to the folly of trying to end racial discrimination by practicing it, dooming affirmative action to a slow death, and the racialist left is not taking the news very well. That is the only conclusion to draw from the extraordinary dissenting opinion yesterday by Justice Sonia Sotomayor in Schuette v BAMN, the case in which the Court upheld Michigan’s law outlawing racial preferences in state-funded higher education. Sotomayor took the unusual step of reading the dissent aloud from the bench, indicating her vehemence.

Justice Sotomayor’s dissent was actually longer than all the other opinions in the case combined, so that reading took a while. But she was faced with a difficult task in explaining why refusing to treat races differently is actually racial discrimination, so of course she need a lot of verbiage, background, and pretzel twisting.

Four aspects of her argument stand out:

She attempted to re-brand “affirmative action” as “race-sensitive admissions.”

“Although the term “affirmative action” is commonly used to describe colleges’ and universities’ use of race in crafting admissions policies, Instead use the term “race-sensitive admissions policies.” Some comprehend the term “affirmative action” as connoting intentional preferential treatment based on race alone—for example, the use of a quota system, whereby a certain proportion of seats in an institution’s incoming class must be set aside for racial minorities; the use of a “points” system, whereby an institution accords a fixed numerical advantage toan applicant because of her race; or the admission of otherwise unqualified students to an institution solely on account of their race. None of this is an accurate description of the practices that public universities are permitted to adopt after this Court’s decision in Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U. S. 306 (2003).” (fn. 2)