  When Eastland and Bennett alluded to those who favored using race to get to a point where race doesn’t count, they had in mind specifically the Supreme Court’s Justice Blackmun who, in the famous 1978 Bakke case (discussed below), put his own view in just those simple terms. For Blackmun, the legitimacy of racial preferences was to be measured by how fast using them moves us toward a society where race doesn’t matter (a view developed in subtle detail by the philosopher Richard Wasserstrom in Wasserstrom 1976). While the critics of preferences claimed to find the very idea of using race to end racism illogical and incoherent, they also fell back on principle to block Blackmun’s instrumental defense should it actually prove both reasonable and plausible. “The moral issue comes in classic form,” wrote Carl Cohen. “Terribly important objectives…appear to require impermissible means.”  Cohen asked, “might we not wink at the Constitution this once” and allow preferences to do their good work (Cohen 1995, 20)?  Neither he nor other critics thought so.  Principle must hold firm. “[I]n the distribution of benefits under the laws all racial classifications are invidious” (Cohen 1995, 52).