Clarence Thomas: Racial Preferences Such As Affirmative Action Are Unconstitutional
And he’s right, too:
WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday that African-Americans are better served by colorblind programs than affirmative action.
Thomas, addressing leaders of historically black colleges, said affirmative action “has become this mantra and there almost has become this secular religiosity about it. I think it almost trumps thinking.”
A longtime opponent of race-based preferences in hiring and school admissions, Thomas said, “Just from a constitutional standpoint, I think we’re going to run into problems if we say the Constitution says we can consider race sometimes.”
Thomas, 60, has voted on the court to outlaw the use of race in college admissions and in determining which public schools students will attend. He wrote with evident resentment in his autobiography “My Grandfather’s Son” that he felt he was allowed to attend Yale Law School in the 1970s because of his race and took a tough course load to prove he was as able as his white classmates.
“My suggestion would be to stop the buzz words and to focus more on the practical effect of what we’re doing,” he said Tuesday.
It’s hard to argue with that logic, isn’t it?
I mean, what do you say? That affirmative action is necessary for minorities to succeed? If you believe that, don’t you also then believe that minorities are incapable of creating their own success without special treatment?
It’s insulting, I should think, this notion that minorities are incapable of success unless we grant them government-mandated special treatment. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations, as President Bush once put it. Liberals don’t expect that minorities can succeed on their own, so they demand special treatment for them.
