"We must understand the cynicism that exists in the black community," Colin Powell said. "The kind of cynicism that is created when, for example, some in our party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand black kids get an education, but you hardly hear a whimper over affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax code with preferences for special interests..."

At the convention, Powell appealed to Republicans to stop talking about affirmative action in a vacuum as the primary blemish on an otherwise meritocratic and color-blind society. And that remains the GOP's problem today. The next time you hear a Republican denouncing racial preferences at the University of Michigan, test his or her moral consistency with simple questions.

Have you denounced other identity-based preferences in college admissions? Republicans make a big deal of the fact that under Michigan's numerically based admissions system, black applicants get points just for being black. But students also get points for being from different regions of the country or even different parts of the state. In fact, applicants from Michigan's rural, overwhelmingly white Upper Peninsula get almost as large a preference as blacks--although hailing from a certain region says as little about the content of an applicant's character as does her pigmentation... And... surely parental preferences are worse. At least discrimination in favor of blacks, Hispanics, or kids from rural areas tends to benefit the less privileged--and therefore fosters upward mobility. By contrast, parental discrimination--favoring the children of alumni--generally benefits the wealthy and therefore stifles upward mobility. This kind of affirmative action more often benefits people who vote Republican--it probably got George W. Bush into Yale. Last fall, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards denounced it as "a birthright out of eighteenth-century British aristocracy." Why have I never heard a Republican politician or a conservative pundit do the same?

Do you believe in color-blindness across the board? Affirmative action opponents might distinguish racial preferences from geographic and parental ones by claiming that, given this country's terrible history, there is something especially toxic about classifying people by race. The problem with that retort is that Republicans and conservatives are perfectly willing to classify people by race when it serves policy goals they like. Many conservative commentators have endorsed some racial profiling of black motorists, given that those drivers are statistically more likely to be transporting drugs, and some racial profiling of black or Hispanic teenagers, given that those teens are more likely to be selling them. And, since September 11, 2001, numerous Republican politicians and conservative pundits have demanded the profiling of Arabs and Muslims on the grounds that they are statistically more likely to be terrorists. Whether such profiling is effective is not the point. After all, Republicans don't primarily criticize affirmative action as ineffective. They criticize it as unjust, as a violation of the sacred principle of color-blindness. Yet, in other contexts--when color-blindness would undermine their security, rather than black kids' upward mobility--Republicans all of a sudden don't deem color-blindness so sacred after all...
Peter Beinart