As I've noted before, Justice Sotomayor likes to play fast and loose with statistics regarding race in the United States. In particular, she decides which groups she describes as relevant "racial minorities" based on whether it suits her political agenda.
To wit, along with African Americans she designates Latino Americans as a racial group. It's true that many Americans perceive Latinos to be a racial minority. But it's also true that historically speaking the US government classified the vast majority of Latinos as white, Latinos are a multiracial group of mostly European origin, about half of Latinos identify as white, and most importantly in terms of legal analysis, Latinos have been classified in American law as a minority ethnic group, people of "Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race" since 1978. Meanwhile, when inconvenient (which is almost always), she ignores Asian Americans, who have, with the occasional exception of South Asians, been legally treated as a racial minority since the 1850s. (The other two official minority groups, Native Americans and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, make up less than one percent of the US population.) Say what you will regarding whether Hispanics/Latinos should be considered a race or "people of color" but it's hard to see how such monikers would apply to them but not to Asian Americans.
Justice Sotomayor continues her pattern in SFSA, even though Harvard and UNC both follow US law in treating Asian American as a racial classification and Hispanic as an ethnic one that emphatically includes Hispanics who self-identify as white, including, explicitly, people whose ancestors immigrated from Spain to the US. Indeed, Sotomayor explicitly designates "Latinos" as a racial group (e.g., footnote 18, while ignoring that not all Hispanics are Latinos), and largely either ignores Asian Americans, or lumps them together as whites.
