Affirmative action has been around for almost a half-century, so it would be a heck of a thing if it hadn’t done anyone any good. Of course there are some success stories, and a few of them are stories of brilliant success by people lucky enough to be as gifted as Justice Sotomayor (and, for that matter, Justice Clarence Thomas), but for everyone admitted to Princeton or Yale because they’re the right color, there’s someone rejected for being the wrong one, and the question before the court was whether the people in the latter group were being denied the equal protection of the laws.
