Colleges are giving fewer and fewer spots to “the traditional African-American” students with two black parents, whose ancestors endured discrimination, while giving more spots to black immigrants, Brown told Business Insider.

Black immigrants, who started coming to the U.S. in larger numbers after the 1970s, tend to have higher incomes than non-immigrant blacks, which leads to stronger college applications.  Now there are a disproportionately high number of black immigrants at elite colleges….

Brown says colleges should make a special effort to include “traditional African Americans” as well as immigrants.

“Traditional African-Americans …  clearly have a far greater claim to being members of a group that has suffered from the history of discrimination based on race and ethnicity….”

Prof. Brown, despite his Yale Law School education, appears to be unaware that the Supreme Court has ruled out compensation for past discrimination as a justification for the current racial discrimination on which affirmative action relies.

The risk of promoting group rights over individual rights is that you might find yourself, like Prof. Brown and “traditional African Americans,” in the wrong group.

ADDENDUM

Prof. Brown is not the first supporter of affirmative action to notice that it all too often benefits the wrong blacks, something I discussed nearly a decade ago in Preferentialists: Hoisted On Their Own Pétard!

Another possibility: Maybe the approvers take him at his word that he knew nothing about the nefarious activities of the “two rogue agents in Cincinnati,” the refusals to re-enforce or rescue his agents in Benghazi, or the decision to blame that attack on an unwatched YouTube video, and thus they assume that he is not responsible for his other policies that are taking us in the wrong direction.

As a criminal defense lawyer might say (and might yet say in the current scandals), SODDIT: Some other dudes did it.

UPDATE

Jonah Goldberg makes a similar point in Obama’s Idiot Defense.

Franc, vice president of government studies at the Heritage Foundation, points out that

the new revelations indicate that IRS officials targeted tea-party and other conservative outfits solely because they fit the profile of being “political action type organizations involved in limiting/expanding Government” or “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.” Golly!

The identity politics practiced by these agencies challenges the very essence of our Founding. The understanding of liberty that prevailed at the Constitutional Convention began with an acceptance of the “inalienable rights” we possess as individuals. These rights inhere in us as human beings and predate the creation of any government. Our liberty is not apportioned to us according to the whims of government officials. Government, rather, exists to defend the liberties we already possess.

The nature of that liberty, moreover, presumes that we are free to plot our life’s trajectory, define our dreams as we choose, and act accordingly. We are not bound by predestination as defined by our race, gender, family lineage, occupation, wealth or poverty, world view, or any other criterion deemed important by the government.

“The Obama administration’s pervasive adherence to group over individual identity,” Franc concludes, “creates a slippery slope that hastens other abuses of government.”

The Obama administration did not create that slippery slope — that was done by a generation of liberals who came to venerate group identity over individual rights — but it has added considerable grease.