On August 3, the Supreme Court of the state of California handed down a decision that was widely welcomed by conservatives. In Coral Construction v San Francisco the court found that California’s anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209 was constitutional. Passed at the time of the general election in 1996, ballot initiative 209 amended the state constitution to include a ban on race or sex preferences in "public employment, public education, or public contracting."

The ruling sailed through with a comfortable 6-1 majority, but the lone dissent—by Hispanic justice Carlos Moreno—was unsettling. He wrote that Prop 209 was unconstitutional because it established "a steep hurdle" for non-whites seeking race preferences.

This sounded like special pleading of the most outrageous kind. Why shouldn’t non-whites face "a steep hurdle" if they want to discriminate against whites?

In fact, however, Justice Moreno’s dissent [PDF, P. 35] is a carefully reasoned argument that may actually be right—given the peculiar anti-white premises that are increasingly pervasive in American racial jurisprudence.