Discriminations

The Washington Post reports this morning:

The nation's most elite colleges and universities are bolstering their black student populations by enrolling large numbers of immigrants from Africa, the West Indies and Latin America, according to a study published recently in the American Journal of Education.
Immigrants, who make up 13 percent of the nation's college-age black population, account for more than a quarter of black students at Ivy League and other selective universities, according to the study, produced by Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania.

.... The more elite the school, the more black immigrants are enrolled.
....
Black American scholars such as Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier, two Harvard University professors, have said that white educators are skirting long-held missions to resolve historic wrongs against native black Americans by enrolling immigrants who look like them.

Wait a minute. Now I’m confused. Have Gates and Guinier finally rejected the “look like” test for preferential treatment? Have they, finally realizing that those “historic wrongs” consisted precisely of distributing burdens and benefits based on color, renounced racial preference and embraced the old civil rights standard of colorblind equal treatment?

If they reject color — the “look like” test — as a basis for preferential treatment, what test do they propose? If color is no longer an acceptable proxy for having suffered “historic wrongs” that preferential admissions are somehow supposed to redress, what is? Should actual harm have to be proven, and if so, how much, how recent? Should Southern blacks receive preferences over Northern blacks on the theory that they’ve suffered more discrimination?

It seems to me that it’s very difficult to defend a regime of racial preference while rejecting color as the basis of determining whom to prefer.