There Isn't One "Minority Mind" That's Different From One Giant "White Person Mind"
Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, writes about the Supreme Court decision in late April that voters could require colorblind admissions to their state's public universities without running afoul of the Constitution. She takes apart the Supremes' previous justification for admissions preferences under the "diversity" rationale, and there's a big oops within them:

The Supreme Court's previous justification for admissions preferences under the "diversity" rationale is that they benefit mostly the white majority, whose members would otherwise allegedly be clueless about how to talk to a black person. In fact, if preferences were designed primarily to benefit minorities, they would be unconstitutional under Supreme Court jurisprudence, as Justice Scalia pointed out in his concurring opinion in Schuette. Proposal 2 banned gender preferences as well, thus undercutting the conceit that it constituted an attack by the majority on the political participation rights of minorities--since females are the majority.

Most of the justices ignored these complications. But Justice Kennedy, writing the controlling plurality opinion (joined by Justices Roberts and Alito), noticed something in the political-process doctrine that is even more lethal to the Court's preference jurisprudence. By requiring courts to determine whether a policy is a "racial issue," the doctrine makes courts stereotype minorities, Kennedy wrote. The "racial issue" test presumes that all minorities share the same interests and same points of view, he said. But "it cannot be entertained as a serious proposition that all individuals of the same race think alike."

Uh-oh. There goes the diversity rationale down the drain.

She continues:

According to the Supreme Court, the only reason why schools should be allowed to discriminate against more academically qualified applicants in favor of less qualified black and Hispanic applicants is that those "underrepresented" minorities will bring otherwise missing perspectives to the classroom and cafeteria. But if each individual is in fact sui generis, then there is no reason to believe that selection by skin color will lead to a non-random introduction of additional viewpoints. The next case to challenge racial preferences should quote Kennedy's words back to him as the death knell for the "diversity" conceit.

And of course, some minorities are not included in this "diversity" preferencing:

Sotomayor's Manichean worldview (and the political-process doctrine itself) collapses at the mention of one word, found nowhere (as Ilya Somin also observes) in any of Schuette's five opinions: Asians. The application of the political-process doctrine to Proposal 2 assumes that racial preferences benefit "minorities" and are therefore opposed by "the majority." But admissions preferences do the most damage not to the white majority, but to Asians, who are disproportionately excluded when merit-based admissions are compromised. A recent effort by California's Latino Caucus to reinstate racial preferences at the University of California was foiled only by last-minute Asian organizing. Is one minority now oppressing other minorities? Sotomayor would be hard-pressed to explain this complication in her template of minority-majority polarization.

Asians are the most significant absence in Sotomayor's dissent, but the concept of effort is a close runner-up. Sotomayor implies that blacks and Hispanics can do nothing to qualify themselves for the University of Michigan; racial preferences are their only hope for admission in the face of "the majority's" intransigence. After Proposal 2, she writes, a "black Michigander . . . cannot lobby the board [of regents] in favor of a policy that might give his children a chance that he never had and that they might never have absent that policy." Actually, a black Michigander can best enhance his children's chance of admissions by drilling into them the value of learning and the importance of doing homework and paying attention in class--lessons that Asian parents inculcate in their children without surcease.