Supreme
Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent
from the high court’s 6-2 decision Tuesday to uphold Michigan’s voter-approved
ban on affirmative action for public universities has been variously described
as “blistering," “scathing,” and "outraged."
It
is passionate, for sure, but it is actually logical and scholarly, and well
worth curling up with.
She
laments that the court’s role as a bulwark against suppression of the minority
has crumbled, and that her colleagues have allowed Michigan voters “to do what
our Constitution forbids.”
(Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, in his
majority opinion, noted that race considerations in college admissions are
permissible. He wrote that the case was not about how the debate over
racial preferences should be resolved, but rather who may
resolve it – in this case, the voters. This seems disingenuous; since when are
voters the final word when it comes to protecting the interest of the minority,
in this case, a racial minority?)
The
power of Sotomayor's dissent comes from her deft and persuasive distillation of
what she calls the country’s “long and lamentable” history of racial
discrimination.
If
you think that these efforts have ended with the election of a black president,
you haven’t been keeping up with the news. In many places -- Arizona, Kansas, and Ohio to name three -- outright racism has been replaced
with more subtle kinds of discrimination. The Michigan law, as Sotomayor
writes, is part of an effort to “make it more difficult for the minority, and
the minority alone, to obtain policies designed to foster racial integration.”
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