Left-wing Nation columnist Elie Mystal notices (when you cut through his left-wing rhetoric) that liberal support for racial preferences in college admissions isn’t that strong among people who think it might harm them, rather than some downscale red-hatted white folks they don’t know:

The policy has long been made vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents, whose commitment to integration and equality turns cold the moment their little cherubs fail to get into their first choice of college or university. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that they care about systemic racism and injustice, just tell them that their privately tutored kid didn’t get into whatever “elite” school they were hoping for. If you want to make an immigrant family adopt a Klansman’s view of the intelligence, culture, and work ethic of Black folks, tell them that their kid’s standardized test scores are not enough to guarantee entry into ivy-draped halls of power.

Why yes, as Conquest’s First Law predicts, people are not so big on violating rights when it’s their own family’s rights being violated. This is human nature. It should surprise nobody. Mystal is so close to getting the problem with racial preferences when he goes on an extended rant about how they hang an unjustified, unspoken (or loudly spoken) asterisk not only on everyone who benefits from them, but on everyone who could have benefitted from them even if they didn’t need the “help”:

Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I’ve had white folks whom I could standardize-test into a goddamn coma tell me that I got into school only because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy—whose parents’ name was on one of the buildings on campus—who asked me how it felt to know I got “extra help” to get in. . . .

[Justice Clarence] Thomas considers himself a victim of affirmative action. In his autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, Thomas says his degree from Yale Law School (Thomas graduated in 1974) was never taken seriously because of affirmative action. He recounts, painfully, how white employers didn’t believe that he could be as smart as his grades indicated, because they believed that he was only there as an affirmative action admit.

Frankly, I know the feeling. I think that any successful Black person in this country, especially one who went to a traditionally elite university, knows the feeling. I’m a well-respected legal columnist and best-selling author, and I can’t go a week without some simpleton who paid eight bucks for Twitter suggesting that I didn’t “earn” my place at Harvard Law School, an institution I graduated from 20 freaking years ago. It’s maddening—both in the sense that it makes me violently angry and that it interrupts the normal functioning of my brain. If you haven’t walked a mile in my shoes, or Thomas’s shoes, or the shoes of any other Black person who had the temerity to be excellent while Black, you really don’t know what it’s like to have white people who have the intellectual firepower of a wet cigarette question your credentials.

You might think Mystal would take the next step and acknowledge that all of this is toxic and we should just walk away from it and let the whole world see what black Americans can do on their own merits, but the pull of ideology is too strong — even for a man to face the reality of his own life experience.