Soon-to-be-Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called herself "a product of affirmative action" who was "accepted rather readily into Princeton" despite test scores that were lower than those of more privileged classmates due to "cultural biases built into testing."

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., capitalizing on the avalanche of publicity he touched off by attributing to racism his July 16 arrest at his home by a white police officer, has declared that America is "racist" and "classist" and that "there haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America…. The only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in …

From National Journal‘s July 18 issue:

Soon-to-be-Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called herself "a product of affirmative action" who was "accepted rather readily into Princeton" despite test scores that were lower than those of more privileged classmates due to "cultural biases built into testing."

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., capitalizing on the avalanche of publicity he touched off by attributing to racism his July 16 arrest at his home by a white police officer, has declared that America is "racist" and "classist" and that "there haven’t been fundamental structural changes in America…. The only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue."

What Sotomayor and Gates share is a habit of drawing dubious lessons about race from their own experiences.

Sotomayor was right to praise the kind of "affirmative action" that may have helped her get into Princeton, and her admission was resoundingly vindicated by her stellar academic performance there. But she has been quite wrong to imply that what affirmative action has become — a euphemism for giving blacks and Hispanics large preferences based solely on race over better-qualified and often less affluent whites and Asians — is necessary to open opportunities for talented minorities today.

The young Sotomayor, raised in modest circumstances in the Bronx, N.Y., had shown special promise and drive by becoming valedictorian at a competitive Catholic school. And, by her own account, her test scores were not terribly "far off the mark" set by more privileged applicants from better schools.

In short, while Princeton’s admissions office no doubt considered her ethnicity, she was an ideal candidate for the kind of class-based affirmative action that crusading liberal Justice William O. Douglas — who saw race-based preferences as unconstitutional — advocated for extraordinarily promising students of all races in his 1974 dissent in DeFunis v. Odegaard.

Continue reading the column here.