Our faithful reader Gary Larson

Our faithful reader Gary Larson points out that this morning’s Star Tribune carries a distillation of academia’s higher wisdom on the desirability of racial discrimination. University of Michigan president Mary Coleman explains why the university essentially places black applicants in a category separate from white applicants for admissions purposes: “The color of your skin determines so many important things about your life experience — where you live, where you go to work and with whom you work. Race still matters in our society. The ideal of colorblindness does not mean we can or should be blind to that reality.”
The Star Tribune places this quote under the heading “Color matters” and provides this context: “University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman, commenting on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to consider whether or not race-conscious admissions policies at Michigan and other schools are constitutional.”
For your information, if I remember correctly, the “colors” that “matter” for admissions purposes (in the preferential sense) at the University of Michigan are “African-American” and “Hispanic”–and the latter is of course not a color at all, but rather a matter of “self-identification.”