Unmaking Affirmative Action

By Stephen T. Asma. He is a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. Excerpts:

"This goal of increasing diversity was articulated in Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s Grutter v Bollinger (2003) endorsement of the Court’s earlier claim that student body diversity is a compelling state interest and justifies the use of race in university admissions. The moral reasoning is that greater campus diversity breaks stereotypes and xenophobia, and students will therefore emerge from these experiences with greater tolerance and less prejudice.

However, ‘diversity’ is a long way from the original purpose of affirmative action. President Lyndon Johnson’s policy (Executive Order 11246) started as a legitimate leg-up for black Americans—a boost for opportunity in employment. But the more recent logic of the courts, as well as the public imagination, contends that affirmative action will help white people think better thoughts about people of color. Integrated diversity creates contact, the thinking goes, and contact reduces prejudice. This moral argument appears to underpin the Supreme Court’s logic in the Grutter v. Bollinger case, where Justice O’Connor argued that race preference policies would be a necessary evil for only another 10 years (25 years from the original opinion). After that, presumably, we’ll be past racial discrimination."

"Prejudice is not as uniform as it used to be, and now we have micro-prejudices that cannot be legislated away; Puerto Rican Americans stereotype Mexican Americans, who stereotype African Americans, who stereotype Korean Americans, who stereotype Japanese Americans, who stereotype Chinese Americans, who stereotype Pakistani Americans, who stereotype Indian Americans, and so on. Trying to mitigate this inevitable mess of tribalism with a preferential and zero-sum admissions policy seems like a fool’s errand."

"In 1960, only 9 percent of immigrants were Latin American and 5 percent were Asian. Compare that with 2011 immigration, when 52 percent were Latin American and 28 percent Asian. The color question has changed in America and this has implications for the logic of affirmative action."

"For the Left, it would have been better to keep the argument focused on reparation for descendants of slaves, because that smaller net captures the correct demographic group. But this argument is problematic for other reasons, namely the historical distance between today’s African American students and slavery.

Switching away from race and toward an economic criterion for preferential treatment results in two improvements; poor kids get into elite schools and poor minorities are captured within the general economic criterion. However, as legal scholar Ronald Dworkin has argued, in consideration of the Texas case, it is not enough to get black students on campus in Texas—a task easily accomplished by an existing law that takes the top 10 percent of Texas high school students and therefore draws smart, poor, black students from geographically black high schools. Judge Alito suggested, while hearing the case, that this 10 percent rule sufficiently ensures the sought-after student diversity. But supporters of affirmative action, like Dworkin, argued that this would not be the right sort of diversity, because it would feed white stereotypes that blacks are poor. Supporters of affirmative action in Texas argued that the university should be encouraged to cherry-pick black students from middle- and upper-class backgrounds in order to break campus stereotypes.

This is a strange and dubious argument against an economic criterion. Using an economic criterion only creates the stereotyping problems that Dworkin described (i.e., most of the black kids on campus will be poor) if you think middle-class blacks are not competitive with middle-class whites. Some data (from a 2011 Pew Research report) seem to suggest a competitive wealth gap between whites and African-Americans who have similar middle-class educational backgrounds, but what is needed is data of the reverse relation. Do African-American students of middle class income brackets fail to qualify (via exams and other objective measures) for quality schools? If so, this would constitute a strange and mysterious failure, since there’s no firm evidence of genetic causes for such a disparity, and middle-class status usually means that the ‘nurturing’ or cultural ingredients for educational success have been provided (e.g., intact nuclear families that push education). If, on the other hand, middle-class families that prize education produce competitive students no matter what their racial status, then the only ethical problem left in college admissions is helping economically disadvantaged students of every race.

Perhaps what Justice O’Connor should have argued was not that “diversity” policies need 25 more years of legal protection (her actual argument), but that slavery reparation needs 25 more years of legal protection."

"When Asians score their way into all the slots at the good schools, will whites argue that they were discriminated against? Actually, Asian scholastic excellence is already so powerful that Asians have to be discriminated against to keep them from overpopulating competitive programs. William M. Chace, in his 2011 “Affirmative Inaction” essay in the American Scholar, tells of a Princeton study that analyzed the records of more than 100,000 applicants to three highly selective private universities. “They found that being an African-American candidate was worth, on average, an additional 230 SAT points on the 1600-point scale and that being Hispanic was worth an additional 185 points, but that being an Asian-American candidate warranted the loss, on average, of 50 SAT points.”"

"Liberals might object that Chinese people never had the hard times that blacks had in America, so they don’t deserve any special treatment. The descendants of the Chinese indentured laborers who built the transcontinental railroads would probably beg to differ, as would the descendants of the Los Angeles Chinese massacre and mass lynching of 1871. Moreover, what do we make of the Naturalization Act of 1870, that extended citizenship rights to African-Americans but denied them to Chinese on the grounds that they could never be assimilated and integrated into American society? Almost a century of anti-Chinese policies followed, punishing them and subjecting them to Jim Crow-like conditions. Also, a new study shows that income inequality for Asians has now surpassed the ratio for African-Americans, so the myth of Asian economic advantage is exposed.

The tangled criteria of (a) reparation for past injuries and (b) ‘breaking stereotypes’ (through increased diversity) is a very sticky wicket, because it radically opens the floodgates of equally reasonable complaints."

"‘breaking stereotypes’ is an over-inclusive criterion, and fails the strict scrutiny expectation that a law or policy be ‘narrowly tailored’ to achieve its goal or interest. Here we see the problem with basing today’s preferential treatment on histories of injury and victimization. Too many groups have been victims for the State to undo the damages. The medicine becomes worse than the disease it is intended to treat."

" a recent study looks at why Asian kids from poor families score better than rich white kids, and concludes that Asian family culture makes the difference. It’s not some genetic or innate cognitive advantage, but the family insistence that achievement comes from extreme effort—a longstanding emphasis in Confucian cultures. Of course, this is unlikely to be the only cause of academic excellence, but it can’t be ignored or trivialized either."