THE ALWAYS SENSIBLE STUART TAYLOR:

Sotomayor, Gates And Race: Sotomayor and Gates share a habit of drawing dubious lessons about race from their own experiences. (Stuart Taylor, 8/01/09, National Journal)

Pushing for more integration of our elite institutions is a worthy goal. But, as studies show, the racial preferences used by selective colleges today are so great as to bring in academically ill-prepared students, clustering most blacks in the bottom 10th of their classes (in GPA) and most Hispanics in the bottom quarter.

The same is true at selective law schools, with the result that fewer than half of blacks entering law school (compared with 80 percent of whites) ever pass the bar. Our racial preference system thus annually produces many thousands of minorities without usable degrees but saddled by enormous educational debts.

Meanwhile, the best black and Hispanic students are stigmatized by erroneous but widespread suspicions that they owe their positions to preferences.

While Sotomayor has ignored the downside of racial preferences, Gates sees racism where there may well be none and waves aside the unprecedented racial progress that led last year to the election of a black president.

To be sure, Gates was right to complain that he should not have been arrested merely for mouthing off to a cop, and that mistreatment of blacks by police (not to mention overly punitive drug laws) remains a major problem.

But he was quite wrong to stereotype and smear as racist Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer -- who, as Gates himself admitted in an interview with his daughter for the Daily Beast, "obviously... didn't know it was my home" and "was terrified that I could be dangerous to him." Crowley also turns out to have an impeccable record on race.

Gates was even more wrong to suggest in subsequent interviews that America -- in which systematic oppression of blacks was once pervasive -- has not fundamentally changed, as he told The Root, of which he is editor in chief.

As Gates's Harvard colleague Orlando Patterson, also an African-American, said in 1991: "America, while still flawed in its race relations... is now the least racist white-majority society in the world; has a better record of legal protection of minorities than any other society, white or black; [and] offers more opportunities to a greater number of black persons than any other society, including all those of Africa."

Indeed, Gates himself seems to understand this in his more lucid moments. "America is the greatest nation ever founded," he told the Daily Beast.

But in much of his rhetoric, Gates has emulated the countless other academics and politicians who encourage black people to blame whites for problems that no white person alive today did much to cause or has much power to fix. As professor Amy Wax, of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, has written in a penetrating new book, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: "Although these problems can be traced to historical mistreatment [and] although discrimination still persists, [discrimination's] role in perpetuating black disadvantage is now minimal as compared with factors that lie within the control of blacks themselves.

"Behaviors such as low educational attainment, poor socialization and work habits, criminality, paternal abandonment, family disarray, and nonmarital childbearing now loom larger than overt exclusion as barriers to racial equality."