New Haven firefighters

The justices who evaluated Ricci are not "raceless," yet no one suggests their whiteness influences their views on racial inequality. Sotomayor, though, is branded a "racist" because she voted to uphold a lower court decision based on well-established legal theory.

The Supreme Court has reversed the Second Circuit ruling in Ricci vs. DeStefano, the case in which white firefighters have argued that they had been discriminated against when a promotional exam on which no African-American firefighters scored highly enough to be promoted was discarded.