In his “Editorial Observer” column in the New York Times on March 31 that I didn’t get around to blogging until now (there were too many other items of substance to be attended to first), Adam Cohen argues, if that’s the right term, that race preferences should be upheld out of regard for “the minority applicants whose own dreams will be crushed if the court rules for Ms. Gratz and Ms. Grutter.”
Well, that’s not completely fair. Cohen does offer one additional argument: that the Center for Individual Rights is a villain.
The Center for Individual Rights presents itself as on the cutting edge of civil rights. It claims to be seeking Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a society that judges people “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” It is the university and civil rights groups, the center says in its legal brief, that are insisting “not only that `race matters,’ but also that race should matter.”
[….]
The Center for Individual Rights is not really seeking “equal treatment” at all. If it were, it would fight all the plus-factors Michigan uses
They’re desperate and will cling to any argument. They also have an emotional investment in AA, that it is righteous and the morally correct thing to do. Anyone who opposes their view is, therefore, evil and morally bankrupt.
The more interesting assumption is that whites come from privileged backgrounds.
I did not. My mother and father were both non-union factory workers. We were poor for the first 14 years of my life. My mother landed a job in a union factory and that brought us into the middle class.
The vast majority of whites are neither rich nor inheritors of wealth.
I’m not at all persuaded by arguments that use the notion of the “Iniquitous Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur”. First, no one claims that all whites are priviledged. The claim is just that such preferences as Legacy and Geography are aimed at whites, which is true.
Legacy preferences are inherently wrong, for the same reason as race preferences. I can change my test scores by working harder, but I can’t change my race and I can’t change my legacy.
Does anyone know the numbers here? How many people are brought in because of legacy considerations?
Dom: While legacy and geographic preferences may disproportionately help white applicants, they are not specifically “aimed at whites.” Would you say that athletic scholarships are “aimed at blacks” if it turned out that the majority of those went to blacks? What about legacy prefernces at historically black colleges? At any rate, in the Michigan case, the maximum is 4 points for a legacy, but the maximum for for being a member of a preferred minority group is 20 points. This is not exactly comparable. Finally, since when did applicants of Asian descent cease to be a minority? This is hardly just a “black and white” issue.
Dom – As I’ve argued here before (although not persuasively, if you still don’t agree!), race preference is analogous to legacy preference, geographical preference, athletic or musical preference, etc., ONLY if one believes pure “merit” is all that matters. All of these preferences compromise pure merit, and in that they are indeed similar. But for a large number of very good reasons, race discrimination is NOT in the same class with those other forms of discrimination. Our history, core values, statutes, and Constitutuion have rightly regarded race and religion as off limits to governmental favor or disfavor. That is not true of other personal attributes, such as birthplace, ability (athletic, musical, or intellectual), alumni status of parents, wealth, etc. We not only allow but often encourage discrimination on those, and other, bases all the time. The import of the defense of racial preferences is that racial discrimination is really no worse than preferring rural or urban students, student athletes, etc., etc. I find that argument not only unpersuasive — based as it is on a misunderstanding of the lessons of our own history — but morally obnoxious as well.
Best moment of the day on NPR: when whoever was commentating at that moment asked one of the law professors who were giving their opinions to comment on this argument. Answer: “That’s just a junk argument.” There was a whole two seconds of silence on Talk of the Nation.
A great post, as always. I had to blog about the heart-wrenching description of Cass Tech – as though giving points to black students would in any way improve the conditions of that school. A fallacious argument all around