… is from pages 204-205 of Jason Riley’s new and splendid intellectual biography of the great Thomas Sowell, Maverick (footnote deleted; first set of brackets original to Riley):
“I’m old-fashioned enough to be against [affirmative action] simply because it is wrong,” he [Sowell] said in a 1986 letter to a Reagan administration official who had asked him for his thoughts on racial-preference policies. “Having been forced by birth to be on the receiving end of discrimination for many years, I cannot find the cleverness to justify discrimination now, either to others or to myself. And if I now reduce this issue to a pragmatic question of whose ox is gored, then what right did I have to be indignant before?”
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