Who Says Justice Thomas Benefited From Affirmative Action?

In his memoir, “A Personal Odyssey,” the black economist Thomas Sowell explains one of the byproducts of racial preferences in academia.

“One of the ironies that I experienced in my own career was that I received more automatic respect when I first began teaching in 1962, as an inexperienced young man with no Ph.D. and few publications, than later on in the 1970s, after accumulating a more substantial record,” he writes. “What happened in between was ‘affirmative action’ hiring of minority faculty.”

To illustrate the point, Mr. Sowell recounts a student approaching him after class at UCLA, where he taught economics in the 1970s. The student was having trouble understanding something in the textbook, and Mr. Sowell explained to him what it meant. “Are you sure?” the student said.

“Yes, I’m sure,” Mr. Sowell replied. “I wrote the textbook.” The student then noticed the professor’s name on the cover and was “obviously embarrassed,” Mr. Sowell writes. “It was a sign of the times, one of the fruits of ‘affirmative action.’ ”

The political left’s reaction to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in last week’s Supreme Court ruling that bars the use of racial preferences in college admissions is more evidence that affirmative action stigmatizes black achievement. Justice Thomas has been labeled a hypocrite for opposing racial preferences because he supposedly benefited from them as a college student, yet no one has produced any evidence that race played a role in his admission to Holy Cross College or Yale Law School.

According to press accounts, Justice Thomas was recruited to Holy Cross by a dean, Father John Brooks, who wanted to increase the number of black students on campus, but the justice has long denied this claim. He started college at Immaculate Conception, a seminary in Missouri, but left after a year and returned home to Savannah, Ga. In his memoir, he says he applied to Holy Cross at the urging of a nun who had taught him in high school. “I ranked near the top of my class at Immaculate Conception, so Holy Cross had quickly accepted my application,” he writes. “The only problem was money, but the director of financial aid told me that something could be worked out.”

It’s true that some black students who had been contacted by Brooks were admitted to Holy Cross the same year that Justice Thomas transferred there, but the justice has rejected the suggestion that he was one of Brooks’s recruits. “A nun suggested Holy Cross. That’s how I wound up there,” Justice Thomas told a reporter in 2007. “Your industry”—the media—“has suggested that we were all recruited. That’s a lie. Really, it’s a lie. I don’t mean a mistake. It’s a lie.”

Nor is there any evidence that Justice Thomas was admitted to Yale Law School under its affirmative-action program rather than through the regular admissions process. He graduated from Holy Cross ninth in his class (of more than 500 students). According to the New York Times, eight Holy Cross graduates were admitted to Yale Law between 1968 and 1978, the decade that included Justice Thomas’s law school career. Why assume that he got in only because of his race? Why question the justice’s credentials but not Bill Clinton’s or Hillary Rodham’s , two of his fellow Yale Law students? The reason is affirmative action, which has made people suspicious of black academic and professional success.

Chief Justice John Roberts’s

There’s also the question of how much affirmative action has contributed to the academic achievement gap in K-12 education. How many black students didn’t try as hard as they could have because they knew they would be held to a lower standard than their white and Asian peers? How many teachers didn’t push their black students as hard for the same reason?

Justice Thomas’s concurrence includes several references to the writings of Mr. Sowell, a leading critic of affirmative action for more than 50 years. After the Supreme Court upheld race-conscious admissions in a 2003 ruling, Mr. Sowell lamented that he probably wouldn’t live to see the day when the court finally issued “a clear-cut statement that racial quotas and preferences were illegal.” He was wrong, thankfully. The decision was handed down on June 29, the day before Mr. Sowell celebrated his 93rd birthday.