Equal Opportunity and “The Race of Life”

A fair race was what Lyndon Johnson pleaded for in his 1965 commencement address at Howard University that ushered in the era of affirmation action.

You do not take a person, who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up the starting line of a race and then say “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.

Fifteen years later, Bakke, Weber, and the politics of affirmative action h...