not b/c his life was hard, but b/c he clearly did not handle it well. is it just me or does it seem like he’s blaming everyone and everything else for all his problems?

For Sotomayor and Thomas, Paths Diverge at Race

Ms. Sotomayor and Mr. Thomas missed each other at Yale by only a few years, but they might as well have studied at entirely different institutions.

Given her standout record at Princeton, said James A. Thomas, a former dean of admissions, Ms. Sotomayor’s background had little role in her acceptance to the school. Again, she immersed herself in Puerto Rican issues, winning a spot on the law review with an article about Puerto Rico’s rights to resources in its seabed, leading the minority students’ association and urging the administration to hire a tenured Hispanic faculty member. (A quarter-century later, she is still pressing the school on the issue.)

Mr. Thomas, though, felt out of place from the moment he arrived and only became more disaffected. He had listed his race on his application and later felt haunted by the decision.

“I was among the elite, and I knew that no amount of striving could make me one of them,” he wrote. He ran into financial troubles and applied for scholarship money from a wealthy Yale family, a process he found humiliating. Friends recall that he insisted on dressing like a field hand, in overalls and a hat.

Shared Rejection

Mr. Thomas and Ms. Sotomayor did have one experience in common: law firm interviewers asked them if they really deserved their slots at Yale, implying that they might not have been accepted if they were white.

Ms. Sotomayor fought back so intensely — against a Washington firm, now merged with another — that she surprised even some of the school’s Hispanics. She filed a complaint with a faculty-student panel, which rejected the firm’s initial letter of apology and asked for a stronger one. Minority and women’s groups covered campus with fliers supporting her. Ms. Sotomayor eventually dropped her complaint, but the firm had already suffered a blow to its reputation.

Mr. Thomas was more private about the experience — even some friends do not recall it — but he took it hard. With rejection letters piling up, he feared he would not be able to support his wife and young son.

The problem, Mr. Thomas concluded, was affirmative action. Whites would not hire him, he concluded, because no one believed he had attended Yale on his own merits. He felt acute betrayal: his education was supposed to put him on equal footing, but he was not offered the jobs that his white classmates were getting. He saved the pile of rejection letters, he said in a speech years later.

“It was futile for me to suppose that I could escape the stigmatizing effects of racial preference,” he wrote in his autobiography.

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