In Grutter v. Bolinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Conner infamously predicted that 25 years would be long enough.
The Court takes the Law School at its word that it would like nothing better than to find a race-neutral admissions formula and will terminate its use of racial preferences as soon as practicable. The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.
That was 2003. John McWhorter argues that we’re ahead of schedule, at least when it comes to race and gender.
Affirmative action — broadly speaking, policies that seek, affirmatively, to achieve racial and gender balance in areas such as hiring, contracting and university admissions — has been controversial since it was instituted in the 1960s. It’s frequently thought to have originated, in a formal sense, with President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 and has proliferated throughout American institutions over time. It was controversial at the time of that 2009 debate and it still is, such that in its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will be considering challenges to affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
Ironically, the current iteration of the challenge is about discrimination against Asians, racism which another Timesian approves as Asians who have worked so very hard to succeed should take a bullet for the good of the community team. But I digress.
As McWhorter, now the father to a daughter who will be applying to Harvard in eight years, sees it, there is a strong black middle class of highly educated people for whom the rationale for affirmative action no longer applies.
But things changed: The Black middle class grew considerably, and affirmative action is among the reasons. I think a mature America is now in a position to extend the moral sophistication of affirmative action to disadvantaged people of all races or ethnicities, especially since, as a whole, Black America would still benefit substantially.
It’s not that there aren’t disadvantaged people out there. It’s just that they don’t neatly align with race and gender anymore.
I don’t want an admissions officer to consider the obstacles my children have faced, because in 2022, as opposed to in 1972, they really face no more or less than their white peers do.
Did we do it? Did we overcome racial burdens and achieve equal opportunity?
It’s not that I’m opposed utterly to affirmative action in the university context, admitting some students under different grade and test score standards than other students. I just think affirmative action should address economic disadvantage, not race or gender.
As the liberal ideal of equal opportunity has been damned as racist, replaced by the progressive ideal of equity where the outcomes must conform to demographic percentages since there can be no acceptable explanation for disparate outcomes other than racism, is there any end to affirmative action based on race or gender? Should a black child of a well-educated, middle class family still be given preference over a white child from an economically disadvantaged family? Or an Asian (which, I note in passing, includes a broad array of people who might not necessarily see themselves as a continental cohort, but very separate ethnicities) child who has worked their butt off, Tiger Mom or not, and yet is told to forego the fruits of their labor for somebody else’s flavor of the common good?
There are ripostes to this, of course. Some would say that we need to maintain racial preferences in admissions until we’ve eliminated inequalities between Black, Latino, Native American and white America — no differences in wealth, educational opportunities, health outcomes or access to the ballot.
But McWhorter notes, we’ve been at this a long time already, and still it hasn’t achieved the precise parity predicted.
In individual cases, certainly, some students of color will receive, and capitalize on, opportunities that they otherwise may not have had. But the persistence of the wealth gap, after generations of affirmative action, suggests that somewhere along the way, we’ve missed the mark, policy-wise.
There was once a time when the dream was for a colorblind society, a nation where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” It’s not just quaint today, but condemned as white supremacy. Are we moving forward? Is there ever an end, since it’s impossible to make the history of slavery and Jim Crow disappear? Is affirmative action, at least in its current conception, helping, harming, the goal of equality? Is, as some argue, this nation the most racist it’s ever been, or are we reaching the point where opportunity is there for those who choose to avail themselves of it?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply.
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The notion of racial preferences as a temporary stopgap was also part of the Croson case. What has become evident since is that special race-based rights, once created, never reach the point where they have fulfilled their function. Eventually, the analysis will have to come to the conclusion that, as a mechanism that never solves the perceived problem of inequity, racial preferences are unjustifiable and inappropriate measures. That is, over the decades we are proving that they don’t work, and therefore, are not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.
Racial discrimination has always been a bad idea and it still is.
AA was an idealistic stop-gap measure, back when the working ideology was that the only thing holding minorities back from career success was their inability to compete on a level playing field with white applicants to elite colleges. Now women are in the majority on campus and elite universities are desperately trying to bulk up their minority numbers to meet, if not surpass, demographics.
And yet, as you note, there’s no end in sight and the pervasive narrative is that it’s worse than ever, as we’re told by very successful, well educated black people. Isn’t Elie Mystal a double Harvard? A lot of white folks would like to suffer his credentials.
Also, I suspect a lot of people want to join in here, but lack the guts of being condemned for saying something that might be construed as too risque. Chickenshits.
What’s too risque? That AA is at a minimum long-in-the-tooth? That it was doomed from the get-go? That it did and does more harm than good? That promoting otherwise unqualified individuals merely because of their race might lead to others assuming persons of said race are not as qualified in general?
I’m not willing to bring up the bell curve, but others might, and that would probably start a fight if people cared enough. Intelligence and race is a minefield where few dare go. It’s too uncomfortable. The only way to bring it up would be to declare that it’s not a comfortable topic to discuss, or something like that.
Or is it risque to say that AA was completely justified and necessary considering the systemic and long-term racism suffered by minorities? That we should expand AA and seriously discuss reparations on top of that?
I don’t think your suspicions are justified. People are more than willing to spew crap here and we’ve been abandoned to whatever impulses that drive the few that leave comments here to do so. Maybe my imagination is lacking and you were thinking something even more risque. I wouldn’t know.
I don’t find the original promise of affirmative action too viable, but I wasn’t around for the start of it – highly likely things were different then. Now, the grime’s entrenched in the system, and it does real damage to force these kinds of policy decision. What I’ve heard called the “soft bigotry of low expectations” does real damage to the folks it affirms; it teaches them to slide by with half the effort, because the company / college has to take a certain number of applicants, and the hat only has so many names.
I can’t judge about college; the only university I ever went to or have experience with is UTC, which I suspect is a three-ring circus even without race politics coming into play. I don’t think removing affirmative action is going to undermine the intersectionality movement, or the folks wholly and completely committed to it. But I think it would be a first good, grounding step in making legal precedent against the assumption of systemic racism that girds our universities completely, which is a process we as a nation are going to have to start someone. That snake’s already halfway inside its own mouth.
Perhaps semantics, but if the focus is on socioeconomic and similar factors, I see this as affirmative action just not racial or gender. As McWhorter adverts to minorities will still benefit; but the impact will be fairer. It’s just harder to do. So the expiration date is not of affirmative action per se, but of blind race or gender-based affirmative action, instead of a more complex implementation.
About the Voting Right Act, Chief Justice Roberts said “The way to stop discriminating by race is to stop discriminating by race.” They gutted the act, and, the next week, the state legislatures restarted the process of discriminating by race.
The accomplishments of affirmative action may be equally fragile.
“…and, the next week, the state legislatures restarted the process of discriminating by race.”
Imagine if you had tried to make this point with a specific fact or example rather than this broad, vague, baseless, ideologically corrupt claim. And yet here we are, Biden president, black people voting in unprecedented numbers and you still believing in this woke fairytale and expecting others here to just buy this simplistic crap as if its reality.
You’re free to live in whatever fantasy world you choose, but don’t expect anyone who doesn’t sshare your delusions to find you anything other than a nutjob. One of the worst problems of living in an ideological echo chamber is that you come to uncritically believe whatever horseshit the group tells you as it rubs your tummy and tells you what a good little soldier you are for obeying the orthodoxy.
This is wrong. Chief Justice Roberts said this in the PICS v. Seattle School District No. 1 case, which was about the Equal Protection Clause, not the VRA. Nothing to do with voting, but with desegregation/integration/racial balancing in schools
Roberts was right, and if the “accomplishments” of racial discrimination are thwarted, that will be a good thing. The ghost of MLK agrees:
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”