The Port Huron (Mich.) Times Herald , apparently unaware that the Supreme Court has ruled out compensation for past general discrimination as a justification for racial preferences, editorially urges the Court to preserve preferences at the University of Michigan on those grounds.
Viewed in the past decades, giving racial minorities preference in university admission, jobs and government contracts seems unfair. For much of America’s 226-year history, though, discrimination against nonwhites was the rule. That legacy is too long to believe its impact could be corrected in a few decades.
Somewhat arbitrarily picking 1969 (when Nixon proposed the “Philadelphia Plan,” beginning our national experiment with hiring, etc., by race) as the beginning of offical race preferences, we have only another 192 years to go. But even then the accounts would not be equal, since whites did not have to endure slavery here.
Balancing the historical books is a difficult proposition.
