CORRECTION from “It’s” to “Its” in Title
How do you know which one to use when?
When is it it’s?
When it is it is.
When is it its?
When it’s not it is.
CORRECTION II: Just to make the point: “Its” changed to “It’s Its”
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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED]
A remarkable essay by Raina Kelley, “Don’t Call It Affirmative Action,” appeared online in Newsweek yesterday. She must be some sort of columnist there, but I can’t say for sure because when I clicked on the sidebar item for the author’s biography the screen that appeared was blank.
My first thought is that I,and other readers, would have learned more if the article were blank and the biography filled in. “But I gotta tell you,” as Ms. Kelley would say, that’s not right. The article does reveal what Newsweek editors think is worth saying about affirmative action.
“As a child,” Ms. Kelley begins,
I was always fascinated by the tortures inflicted in Greek mythology — Sisyphus forced to roll a boulder up a hill every day, only to have it roll back down every evening. Prometheus enduring the eating of his liver by an eagle every day. They’re just so exquisitely punitive. But I gotta tell you, writing a defense of affirmative action would have been a perfect addition to Hades’ arsenal.
And “I gotta tell you” that reading her defense qualifies as an even more perfect addition.
Let’s look in some detail at Ms. Kelley’s Hades Defense of Affirmative Action.
• “One of the problems, I think, is branding.”
“Sadly,” she writes, “the phrase ‘affirmative action’ has become code for choosing unqualified minority candidates instead of qualified white people.”
This may well be true for some people, but it is not for me, and it is not for the most trenchant criticism of affirmative action. The point is not that most beneficiaries of affirmative action are not qualified; it is that that because of their race or ethnicity they are admitted or hired or promoted even though they are less qualified than one or more of their rejected competitors who received no preferential treatment based on race or ethnicity.
Nor is it true that those most disadvantaged by affirmative action are “white people.” If Ms. Kelley were aware of the data from post-Prop. 209 California and from a number of recent studies, she would know, as I pointed out here discussing some of those studies, that
Asians benefit much more than whites when racial preference policies are eliminated. In fact, the proportion of whites admitted often decreases when race preferences are curtailed.
• She claims to believe that universities have a right to discriminate.
“Stanford,” she writes,
has every right to compose a student body based on the qualifications it thinks will maintain its status as an elite university. If one of those qualifications is a diversity of background, so be it.
Really? So, if Elite U., believing that “diversity” — especially engineered, race-based “diversity” requiring preferential treatment based on race and ethnicity — produces distracting conflicts and resentments, decided “to compose a student body” emphasizing high grades and test scores and cultural homogeneity (based loosely on the Japanese model), Ms. Kelley would simply respond by saying “so be it”? “I gotta tell you,” I don’t think so.
• She believes affirmative action “works on behalf of all people.”
Literally. That is, not that the entire society benefits from giving racial and ethnic preferences to members of certain preferred groups, but that members of all groups individually benefit from preferential treatment.
A survey done last year by Quinnipiac University found that more than 70 percent of voters think diversity is not a good enough reason to give minorities preferential treatment. And that’s despite the fact that the number of people who fall under the protection of such programs has continued to grow — women, Hispanics, gay men and lesbians, the disabled, even white men have all been the beneficiaries of more inclusive hiring practices.
• She does not believe that affirmative action involves giving preferential treatment to minorities.
As long as people remain convinced that affirmative action is about giving minorities preferential treatment, they will also remain ignorant of the fact that affirmative action works on behalf of all people.
• She doesn’t understand that affirmative became “controversial” when, and because, it abandoned colorblindness for racial preferences.
Affirmative action wasn’t supposed to be controversial. In 1961 when President Kennedy issued an executive order mandating that beneficiaries of federal monies “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” it was a bold call to arms for the American government to walk the walk of desegregation
As long as affirmative action meant taking steps to ensure that everyone was treated “without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin,” it wasn’t controversial. It became controversial — and worse, positively offensive to many — when it abandoned the principle of colorblindness in favor of color conscious racial preferences.
• She, like many others, misunderstands President Johnson’s Howard University speech.
It wasn’t until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 that Lyndon Johnson expanded the mission of affirmative action: “You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: ‘now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.’ You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair…This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.”
Back then, with the paint over the “Whites Only” signs still fresh, it made sense that a simple law, no matter how historic, would not be enough to end Jim Crow….
The fact that Kelley’s error in linking LBJ’s speech to support for racial preference is quite common does not make it less an error. As I argued here:
Today we are accustomed to dealing with two very different standards to evaluate discrimination: an “intent” test, which requires finding a discriminatory intent in order to determine that a particular policy is discriminatory, and a “results” test, which does not require a finding of intent to determine that some “disparity” or “underrepresentation” is discriminatory. But that distinction had not emerged in 1965 when Johnson made his speech, and when he called for “equality as a fact and equality as a result” he did not mean proportional representation or an absolute equality of goods, money, assets, jobs, whatever that people mean today by “equality of results.”
What Johnson meant by “equality,” it is quite clear, is non-discriminatory equality of opportunity. The evidence? For starters, the very next sentence in Johnson’s speech, after the oft-quoted passage quoted above, states:
For the task is to give 20 million Negroes the same chance as every other American to learn and grow, to work and share in society, to develop their abilities — physical, mental and spiritual, and to pursue their individual happiness. [Emphasis added]
True, Johnson then says in the next sentence that “equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough,” but in the remainder of the speech he does not really specify what more is needed, other than various forms of assistance there is no reason to assume would be conditioned on skin color as opposed to need.
Next, three months after his Howard speech, Johnson signed Executive Order 11246 which required “affirmative action” of government contractors. But note how “affirmative action” was defined:
The contractor will not discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, creed, color, or national origin. The contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin. [Emphasis added]
• She describes affirmative action as pro-active prevention of, or perhaps restitution for, discrimination that might occur in the future.
Affirmative action is not about giving African-Americans now the 40 acres and a mule their enslaved ancestors never got. It is about creating opportunities for the minority that the majority might be tempted to keep for itself.
It might; it might not. Whatever. And it provides premature restitution to individuals who have not yet suffered any injury, paid for by other individuals who have not been found to have done them any wrong.
• She believes racial discrimination (in the form of racial preference) must continue because racial discrimination still exists.
And while there has been a vast improvement in race relations since 1964, I don’t think anyone believes all our problems surrounding discrimination and bias have been solved. Hundreds of people have climbed to the top of Mt. Everest, but that doesn’t make it accessible.
• She believes that “diversity” begets “accessibility.”
Your guess about what this means is as good as mine, but here is what Kelley says:
Accessibility in the workplace, in schools, and everywhere else comes out of diversity. Having a diverse workforce or student body does have benefits.
Maybe it does; maybe it doesn’t. But it clearly has costs, which Kelley does not mention.
• She is convinced that “diversity” (which “is just a syonym for melting pot”) will dispel prejudicial stereotypes.
It’s hard to think black people are inferior if they’re sitting next to you in freshman English or in a conference room.
Again, maybe; maybe not. If Princeton Prof. Thomas Espenshade (who favors affirmative action) is right in his finding that
[c]ompared to white applicants at selective private colleges and universities, black applicants receive an admission boost that is equivalent to 310 SAT points, measured on an all-other-things-equal basis[,]
then after sitting next to minority students in a freshman English class white and Asian students might come out of that class with prejudices they lacked when entering, or if they entered with those prejudices they might well find them confirmed and not dispelled.
• She believes that opposition to affirmative action can be reduced or eliminated by changing its name.
But rather than patiently explaining that the aim of affirmative action is not to toss white men out on the street or proving that I deserve all the opportunities I’ve been given, I propose changing the name to “employment equity,” the phrase they use in Canada. Or at least some kind of wording that says: “This isn’t about demonizing white men, stealing their jobs, and giving them to knuckleheads. This is about fairness.”
If I were polite, I would refrain from saying that the level of argument in this essay does little to suggest that Ms. Kelley deserves the opportunity she’s been given to write essays in Newsweek.
Kelley and others can attempt to dress up racial preference with fancy clothes like “equity” and “fairness” all they want to, but “I gotta tell you”: racial preference by any other name is still racial preference.
UPDATE
In a comment on Ms. Kelley’s article (Page 3 of the comments, 19 Feb. at 8:29 AM), Roger Clegg makes similar criticisms, except both better and succincter (sic).
