The Wendi Thomas column in today’s Commercial Appeal deserves a fisking. Thomas, who previously admitted to her own racist attitudes, is upset with the recent Supreme Court ruling against racial discrimination.

Thomas says the court with this ruling has taken “a good-sized step” toward her 2004 prediction that it would, with President Bush’s guidance, force the columnist to work “on a plantation somewhere, picking cotton.”

She writes that the ruling “restricts how race can be used to manage diversity,” with “manage[d] diversity” being her favored euphemism for racial discrimination. She bristles, in fact, at Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion that “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” calling this rationale “simple-minded in its simplicity.”

Thomas says she doubts the court’s professed belief in the importance of racial diversity, and chalks up the decision to the power of a special interest:

This, of course, is a nod to those few but vocal white people who have convinced themselves that whenever their individual wishes must bend (not bow) in the interest of an integrated society, they are the victims of cruel discrimination.

Thomas doesn’t betray much awareness of the majority’s actual arguments, though, so where she writes that she’s “waded through as much of the 185-page ruling as [she] could without vomiting in disgust,” we can assume that’s code for “not at all.”

Indeed, while the columnist Thomas is found here to be a deeply paranoid, scarcely informed alarmist, Thomas the Supreme Court Justice offers a well-reasoned and convincing concurring opinion that counters most of her objections.

Wendi writes that if the court were interested in diversity, “it would allow local governments some leeway in determining how best to desegregate schools,” or in other words, discriminate on the basis of race.

As Justice Thomas points out, however, neither of the two school boards in the case “asserts that its race-based actions were taken to remedy prior discrimination.”

Seattle provides three forward-looking — as opposed to remedial — justifications for its race-based assignment plan… and at oral argument, counsel for Louisville disavowed any claim that Louisville’s argument “depend[ed] in any way on the prior de jure segregation.”

But Wendi Thomas continues in her ignorance, claiming the court “conveniently dismisses four centuries of government-sanctioned discrimination.” Where those four centuries of government sanctions begin and end, though, I’m not sure. This week we celebrate the 231st birthday of the Declaration of Independence, and our Constitution wasn’t ratified until 1788. Accordingly, our national government falls short of the columnist’s time frame by roughly 180 years.

Instead, the majority offered the blather that the Constitution is colorblind, the very suggestion of which is patently offensive. Colorblindness is to be in denial of our differences, willfully ignorant of what makes us unique. If you insist you don’t see my color, it’s easy to dismiss any concerns I have about race relations.

To be colorblind means to lack racial prejudice, a concept Thomas fails to grasp in more than one sense. And if the columnist’s uniqueness depends entirely on the color of her skin, that’s news to Martin Luther King and those who revere his legacy.

Finally, after all this harping, Wendi declares that the court’s decision “doesn’t mean much.”

And that’s precisely where I wished she would have reached that conclusion about 400 words earlier.