The New York Times recently reported on Barack Obama’s long-standing support for affirmative action that gives preferential treatment to members of disadvantaged minorities. While still a student at Harvard Law School , Obama readily admitted that “I undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action,” but the deeper question is how he could justify that advantage. Apologists for preferences explain these policies as a remedy for long family histories of discrimination, but Obama’s background features no such legacy of oppression.

His mother was white and his father’s family, in Kenya , had never been enslaved or subjected to American “Jim Crow” laws or segregation. Both parents earned graduate degrees, so his only basis for preferential treatment would have been skin color, not family disadvantage. That’s typical of affirmative action, which treats people differently based on pigmentation alone, not their origins or experiences.