Is Discrimination Discrimination?

There was a time, in the early dawn of blog history, when I found myself spending so much time responding to the argument that racial preferences were O.K. because other kinds of preferences (legacies, athletes, tobacco farmers, etc.) were O.K. that I coined a term to refer to that argument: Invidious Ubiquitous Non-Sequitur, or IUNS. I even applied that as a tag to many of those posts (see the tags in the column to the right).

For example, in one of the first of these posts, nearly five years ago, I quoted from a book review in the New York Times —

Supporters of affirmative action cogently point out that … “affirmative action” for athletes (as well as for alumni children) has never, at least until now, elicited cries of foul on the ground that it violates meritocratic principles. Somehow that kind of indignation seems to arise only in response to the putative advantages of minority candidates

— and commented:

or some reason, every time this point is made — and it is made in virtually every defense of racial preferences — it is always made with a sort of breathless sense of discovery, as though the author had just come up with an unanswerable “gotcha!” that will drive the final nail into the coffin of racist or redneck or Republican (but, from a liberal point of view, I repeat myself) objections to affirmative action.

I referred to this view as “The Fallacy of Fungible Discriminations”:

This is the argument that all discrimination is alike; if you can discriminate for one reason, you can discriminate for any reason. Thus if it’s acceptable to give preferences based on athletic or musical ability or the alumni status of parents, it’s also legitimate to give preferences based on race or religion. Preferences, in short, are preferences; if one is O.K., all are O.K.

I repeat all this here because, alas, the IUNS continue to come as fast and furious now as they did five years ago. Here’s a perfectly good example from the student paper at Middlebury College today:

So why affirmative action? Let us take this term to mean specifically preferential treatment in admissions for non-whites. In the firstplace, there are non-racial categories who receive preferential treatment in Middlebury admissions without having a snappy name for it: males, international students, talented athletes, women interested in math and physics, people from certain states and a number of other groups. This is all in the interest of diversity; the debate only arises, as it often does in America, when the preference is racial.

Well, yes. Complaints of discrimination based on race or ethnicity arise only where the discrimination is based on race or ethnicity.

Those who favor race preferences should also support amending the Constitution and civil rights laws to get rid of those pesky requirements for “equal protection” and prohibitions against discriminating against “any person” on the basis of race, etc.