âItâs time for enlightened America to hit reset on affirmative action once and for all,â writes Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter in The American Interest. By affirmative action, of course, he means the racial quotas and preferences that most selective colleges’ and universities’ admissions departments employ.
âThe reason America can never truly come together in understanding racial preferences is not benighted racism rearing its ugly head as always,â he goes on, âItâs because the rationales simply no longer make any damned sense.â Forty years ago, they were arguably needed to reverse anti-black discrimination. Today, beneficiaries tend to come from upscale households or from among new immigrant families never subject to discrimination here.
The weakness of the case in favor of racial quotas and preferencesâwhich are, literally, racial discrimination, otherwise banned by the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Actâis illustrated by a Washington Post column by the thoughtful liberal Charles Lane, subtitled âWhy restart the war?â
Lane doesnât bother to defend this form of racial discrimination as a good thing. He just says that President Trump doesnât oppose it and that most of his voters donât particularly care about it. On this issue, unlike many others, heâs ready to accept Trumpâs and his followersâ priorities.
His equally thoughtful colleague Megan McArdle, assuming that ending quotas would reduce black and Hispanic numbers at selective schools, adds a curious defense of the status quo: âElite institutions that systematically and markedly differ from the general population create a gaping social wound that never heals.â Really?
Our four most recent presidents, like eight of their predecessors, earned degrees at Harvard or Yale (both for former President George W. Bush). Our history has been far less blighted than Asiaâs or Europeâs by resentment at or persecution of what Yale Law professor Amy Chua calls âmarket-dominated minorities.â Americans donât much mind when people of various ethnicity earn success by merit, whether in business, in the National Basketball Association, or in Nobel Prizes.
But the increasingly glaring contrast between elite institutional practice and constitutional principle is driving the case against racial quotas and preferences. âGovernmental use of race must have a logical end point,â Justice Sandra OâConnor wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, allowing racial preferences at Michigan Law School. âWe expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.â
That was in 2003. Ten years left to go.
Except it may come sooner. Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s Education and Justice Department withdrew six possibly illegal guidance letters issued to colleges and universities by their Obama administration predecessors, each one encouraging racial discrimination in admissions.
Harvard, meanwhile, faces a lawsuit from Asian plaintiffs who charge the elite school with racial discrimination against Asians, similar to its discrimination against Jews from the 1920s to the 1950s, designed to prevent the overrepresentation that their academic achievement might justify. Discovery in the case has revealed that Harvard lowballs “personality” ratings of Asian applicants who have high test scores, grades, and extracurriculars. In other words, not the kind we want in our country club.
For me, the clinching argument against racial discrimination in admissions is not how it hurts Asians or, to a much lesser extent, whites, but how it hurts the intended beneficiaries. As Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor showed in their 2012 book Mismatch, and as subsequent research has confirmed, black and Hispanic students who are less well prepared than their schoolmates tend to struggle with instruction pitched to others more advanced. They are thus more likely to shun science and tech courses and to drop out without degrees, weighed down in many cases by debts they cannot pay.
The case for racial quotas and preferences rests heavily on the notion of âdisparate impact,â enunciated by the Supreme Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971). The justices, familiar then with how Southern segregationists dissembled and disguised racial discrimination in those days, ruled that differences between whitesâ and blacksâ performance on seemingly race-neutral tests is evidence of illicit discrimination.
Similarly, as McArdle notes, segregation imposed by state law and sanctioned violence was still familiar when the Supreme Court allowed racially discriminatory admissions for âdiversity,â in Regents v. Bakke (1978). That was forty years ago.
The fact is that a society as diverse and dynamic as America always has been will have disparate impact of all kinds, sometimes the result of racial, ethnic or religious discrimination, more often the result of diverse interests, traditions, goals and skills. Trying to get the racial and ethnic balance in every occupational and educational group reflective of the total population is a foolâs errand.
Racial quotas and preferences have fostered a culture of dishonesty in higher education. Time to junk them, and just be fair.
