Who Benefits From AA?

The Chicago Sun Times had an article two days ago asking “who really benefits from colleges’ affirmative action.” You may want to read it because all I’m going to do here is respond serially to some quotes from and assertions in it.

Here we go:

Thirty-nine years ago, in a landmark speech at Howard University, President Lyndon B. Johnson called on the nation to achieve not just legal equality for all races in America, but “true equality.”

Though Johnson never spoke the words “affirmative action” — the phrase had not yet been coined — he was signing on to the spirit of the idea. He called on Americans to make a special effort to counter the “devastating heritage of long years of slavery” and “a century of oppression, hatred and injustice.”

So, the true “spirit” of affirmative action was not to promote “just legal equality” but “true equality”? Forget the just legal equality. I wonder what the reporter (Tom McNamee) thinks “true equality” is, and what he thinks LBJ thought it was. He clearly doesn’t think it means an absence of discrimination; that presumably would be “just” legal equality. (O.K., so I didn’t forget it.) Does it mean proportional racial representation everywhere? Discriminating minds want to know. Also, if McNamee agrees with LBJ that the justification for AA is to compensate for slavery and discrimination, does he then agree that the Supremes have knocked those props out from under it by ruling those motives cannot justify racial preferences?

After a brief discussion of the recently acknowledged but long-known fact that a substantial number of the racially preferred on college campuses are either foreign, the children of foreigners, or of mixed racial background, McNamee quotes Jesse Jackson:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said, “Universities have to give weight to the African-American experience because that is for whom affirmative action was aimed in the first place. That intent must be honored.”

Since affirmative action was never debated and passed as legislation, exactly whose intent must be honored? On the other hand, Congress did debate and pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required, as clearly as words can, that individuals be treated without regard to their race. Why not honor that intent for a change?

This curious makeup of the black student population at top universities has been discussed quietly on campuses for years, but became public only earlier this year when Harvard law professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. raised the issue bluntly at a reunion of Harvard University’s black alumni.

Before then, academics tended to skirt the issue, in part because there is no agreement on the proper goals of affirmative action and in part because criticism might be misconstrued as an attack on immigrants.

Many of those academics and their preferentialist allies, however, are not reluctant to imply that criticism of racial preferences is racist.

Jonica Witherspoon, 22, who graduated from Northwestern this past spring, said that, given her test scores, she probably wouldn’t have made the cut to attend Northwestern if she were not African American. But, she said, she never resented students from places like Jamaica or Nigeria who may have taken a spot that would have gone to somebody from, say, Chicago’s West Side.

But would she have resented it if her own spot had instead been given to someone from Jamaica or Nigeria? Or to someone from a rich white suburb like Winnetka or Skokie? Would it have made any difference to her if the Winnetkan/Skokieian/Jamaican/Nigerian had lower grades and test scores than she had?

Jessica Baker, 20, a junior majoring in communications at Northwestern, said the rich ethnic mix among black students — with all their differing points of view — gives her a sense of greater intellectual freedom. When she makes a point in a classroom discussion, she said, she doesn’t worry as much that it might be taken by non-black students as “the black ideal or the black statement.”

But to the degree that Jessica does not in fact represent a black point of view, what “diversity” does she provide to other Northwestern students? But if the point of preferences is not to provide “diversity” but rather to demonstrate the true diversity among blacks (this was one of the justifications for Michigan’s insistence on a “critical mass” of black students), then aren’t the elite schools being implicitly discriminatory by aiming at black admissions of only 10% – 15%? Certainly black diversity could be better demonstrated by much larger numbers of blacks. (Michigan also never explained why only blacks and Hispanics, and not, say, Native Americans deserved to be present in critical mass numbers.)

“Like their wealthier white counterparts, many first- and second-generation immigrants of color test well because they retain a national identity free of America’s racial caste system and enjoy material and cultural advantages, including professional or well-educated parents,” Harvard law professor Lani Guinier recently wrote in the Boston Globe.

Duh. That’s what happens when you award preferences based on race and not on class, parental education, etc.

“Class is a big explanatory factor in this,” said Martha Biondi, associate professor of African American Studies & History at Northwestern. “This does reveal the gap between the haves and the have nots.”

Biondi is studying arguments made by protesters in the late 1960s and early 1970s who demanded more black students on campus.

“What struck me is that the students’ emphasis was not on actual diversity, but to give opportunities to those students who had been denied opportunity,” Biondi said. “That was their goal — to bring in students who systematically and for generations had been locked out. It wasn’t necessarily about past discrimination, but present discrimination. . . .

At least Ms. Biondi recognizes that “diversity” had nothing to do with the demand for preferences, but she can’t seem to make up her mind whether preferences are to make up for past discrimination (“systematically and for generations locked out”) or, as she claims amazingly enough in the same sentence, for present discrimination. Since “present discrimination” has been illegal since 1964, across the board race preferences would seem to be a poorly tailored remedy for it.

How’s this for a deal: what if we got rid of racial preferences and instead made “present discrimination” a criminal offense?