Should we stop discriminating on the basis of race?

Stephen Asma explores the question at Quillette.

On July 3, the Trump administration rescinded the Obama approach to race-based college admissions. This returns the U.S. to the philosophy of George W. Bush’s White House, which argued that race should not be a significant factor. The Trump initiative may have no immediate impact since the Supreme Court upheld race-based admissions policies in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin in 2016. But an impact is surely coming. Consider that Justice Scalia died before he could vote against affirmative action in the Fisher case. Now Justice Kennedy is retiring and Trump’s Supreme Court will certainly tilt against the policy with dissenters like Justices Roberts, Thomas, and Alito. Previously, Justice Thomas asserted that, “a State’s use of race in higher education admissions decisions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause.” And Justice Roberts is on record as saying that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

...The end of affirmative action is a horrifying prospect for many liberals, but it may better reflect the actual views of Americans. A 2013 Gallup poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe college applicants should be admitted solely based on merit. A majority of whites and Latinos think race should not be a factor in admissions, and blacks are more evenly split, with a significant 44 percent saying admission should be based strictly on merit.

...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.

The aftermath of the civil rights era saw huge U.S. immigration spikes for Asian and Latin American populations. In the 1960s most immigrants came from Europe, so the color question remained acute. But, starting in the 1970s, there has been a huge influx of color. 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.

If diversity really is the goal when college campuses are being composed, then we’ll need a huge influx of under-represented conservative and libertarian students and faculty. Perhaps the one place where liberals are unlikely to win the diversity argument, broadly understood, is on college campuses where political correctness and ‘safe-space’ culture has narrowed the diversity of political viewpoints.

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.”

... 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.

We need to face reality. College admission and employment generally is a competitive zero-sum game. Affirmative action started as a well-intentioned way to redress inequalities, but it has become an ethical and practical quagmire. It is now effectively pitting races against each other, and rigging the results so that individual merit differences are discounted. Liberals are afraid that eliminating affirmative action is the same as turning away from those who are less fortunate, whereas conservatives and libertarians think that, when the State gets out of the way, individuals and families make themselves more prosperous. If the State must be involved in the redistribution of social outcomes through college admissions, then it should stick to a problem it can actually solve—namely, improving access for poor people of every race.

Read more here.

Shutting down debate on college campuses.

Bookworm has a video featuring John Stossel holding a bake sale, charging Asians $1.50, whites $1.00, and Blacks and Hispanics $.50. The focus was race-based Affirmative Action. Read more and watch the video here.

Mismatch

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal writes about the affirmative action controversy stirred up last week by Harry Reid and the New York Daily News. He writes,...

h Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA, elaborated yesterday in an essay published by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy:

Scholars began empirically studying the mismatch issue in the 1990s, but in the past five years the field has matured. There are now dozens of careful, peer-reviewed studies that find strong evidence of mismatch. None of the authors of these studies claim that mismatch is a universal or inevitable consequence of affirmative action. But in my view, only demagogues (of which there is, unfortunately, no shortage) or people who haven’t read the relevant literature can still claim that mismatch is not a genuine problem.

Sander identifies three kinds of mismatch. “Learning mismatch” is the one to which Justice Scalia alluded: “Sally learns less than she would at a less competitive school, because the pace is too fast or her professors are pitching their material at a level that’s not ideal for her.” Sander continues:

A second form of mismatch — “competition” mismatch — occurs when students abandon particular fields, or college itself, because of the practical and psychological effects of competing with better-prepared students. . . .

The third type of mismatch — “social mismatch” — is in some ways the most intriguing.

Several studies have now found that college students are much more likely to form friendships with students who have similar levels of academic preparation or performance at college. The phenomenon operates even within racial groups, but when a college’s preferences are highly correlated with race (as they are at many elite schools), social mismatch can lead to self-segregation by blacks and/or Hispanics.

...It has occurred to this columnist that the recent unrest on campuses across the country—including demands for censorship in the name of creating “safe spaces” for minorities—calls into question the educational-benefits-of-diversity premise, which has never been clearly defined.

...Chief Justice John Roberts asked Gregory Garre, the lawyer representing UT, how the university measures “whether the plan is working.” His response:

We looked . . . to student body enrollment. We do look to classroom diversity. We look at feedback from students; from faculty—after all, this is an academic judgment, as the Court said in the [2003] Fisher case, and certainly said in the Grutter and the Bakke case[s]—we look to the racial climate, including incidents.

That’s rather unclear, but it seems to suggest that “incidents” reflecting a hostile “racial climate” themselves provide justification for preferences aimed at increasing minority enrollment. On its face, that logic seems plausible. But if that is how universities decide the matter, it also creates a perverse incentive that militates in favor of more such incidents.

Demanding special privileges

What is the role of Affirmative Action in the current protests by black students at our universities? Could I.Q. be a significant factor? Michael Kennedy writes at Chicago Boyz,

Why does this movement insist that its members’ mental health is in jeopardy? The fact that someone, somewhere on a sprawling campus used the “N” word seems like an insufficient explanation. The fact that these students are competing with students who have a built-in advantage seems like a better one.

Why has “white privilege” become such a catch-phrase? It’s minority students who have the privilege of attending a college that, but for their race, they would not be admitted to. For that matter, it’s minority students who apparently have the privilege of verbally abusing white students in explicitly racial terms without, from all that appears so far, facing disciplinary consequences.

...To be sure, the typical white student had more advantages growing up than the typical black student, and these advantages in some cases are for life. But as I understand it, the “white privilege” mantra claims that the privilege adheres in “whiteness” itself, regardless of economic or family circumstances.

I feel sorry for these students because, due to white leftist orthodoxy, they have been placed in a situation where they cannot succeed. They know it and demand special privileges. All this does is to degrade the accomplishments of black students who are far enough to the right in the curve to succeed in math or engineering or medicine.

Biology can be merciless at times but it does rule.

Trump is not going anywhere

Dick Morris believes Trump will stay in the GOP race. In his latest video, Morris makes the point that the political establishment has certain consensus political assumptions that the American people do not share. For example: immigration. Nobody will say the two fundamental facts about immigration: 1. We would have a quarter to a third less crime in the United States if we didn't have illegal immigrants living here, and 2. The major cause of income inequality and low wages is the constant influx of illegal immigrants. Morris mentions three other issues: our bloated disability program, 500,000 refugees assigned to America by the U.N., and affirmative action based on race and gender.

Pitting groups against each other

Elizabeth Price Foleywrites,

Pitting groups against each other, based on their race, is a disastrous way to operate higher education (or anything else) in a pluralistic society. But this is exactly what affirmative action does.

She links to an article in the Washington Post about a lawsuit filed by Asian Americans alleging discrimination in Harvard admissions.

Who are we?

Victor Davis Hanson explains why in the America of 2014 affirmative action has come to an end.

the public, the Supreme Court, and state legislators increasingly believe that a multiracial United States is unique precisely because race and tribe — unlike most other places in the world — are incidental rather than essential to our American identities.

The advice of Martin Luther King — judge Americans only by the content of their characters — is not only the simplest but in the end the only moral standard.

Read more here.