Adam Liptak has an article in the New York Times Week in Review that quotes a number of academics saying, in effect, that diversity, as it is used as a justification for racial preference, is a slippery and amorphous concept.
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People who support affirmative action tend to put a lot of weight on the Bakke decision and Powell’s ‘diversity’ rationale. This made sense as a matter of legal strategy, of course, but not as a long-term moral argument. I agree with the anti-AA crowd that ‘diversity’ is a rather evanescent concept and ought not to be a sufficiently compelling interest to justify racial discrimination. The debate over Bakke, though, has crowded out most discussion of the more-persuasive argument for AA: the need to rectify a serious historical wrong. It was little more than a generation ago that the professional workplace and higher education were opened up to blacks. Educational opportunity remains limited by poverty and dysfunctional school systems. Can anyone deny that the reason black Americans are less well-off, in general, than white Americans is because our nation mistreated their recent ancestors? And if not, why isn’t it ‘compelling’ to try to return blacks to approximately the state they’d have been in if America hadn’t enslaved their ancestors?
To be clear, I’m NOT arguing that the nation owes the blacks of today something purely because we harmed their ancestors. We can no more inherit entitlements in this country than we can inherit guilt. I’m suggesting that by systematically mistreating blacks up until a generation ago, we forced TODAY’S black Americans to go through life with serious disadvantages.
Now perhaps we should target the disadvantage directly (say, by favoring students from poorer families), rather than by using the proxy of race. Obviously many blacks have climbed into the middle classes, and I don’t think those students deserve an extra edge over similar (or poorer) white students. But given that the original disadvantage was imposed pretty strictly on the basis of race, why can’t the solution be?
I have genuinely mixed feelings on the AA question, so a thoughtful response might convince me I’m wrong.
Christopher – Very compelling comment. Although I consider myself part of the “anti-AA crowd,” I won’t try to persuade you that you’re wrong. In part that’s because, by seriously entertaining the notion of targeting the disadvantage that resulted from race discrimination rather than race itself, you’re not wholeheartedly defending AA here.
So let me start with where I agree. If I’m right that treating every individual “without regard” to race, creed, color is at the core of the the “American Creed,” then the nation broke its promise to blacks over a couple of centuries, starting with slavery and going through segregation and post-seg discrimination. Although I think life is unfair (as has been said) and that it would be a mistake for a society constantly to be fine-tuning the level of the playing field to make up for past wrongs, I think America’s wrong to blacks was enormous, was unique, and deserves special efforts to correct.
So, I agree that all should agree there is a debt. But reasonable people can disagree about the nature, content, and timing of a repayment schedule. I think it’s worth noting that, on a moral as opposed to legal or economic plane, there is a strong argument deriving from the Puritan idea of social sin and salvation and expressed eloquently through Lincoln, that in large meaasure the bloodletting of the Civil War was in expatiation of our sins, or at least the sin of slavery.
Moving on, the problem with a race-based remedy — even for a race-based harm — is that, in my opinion, racial discrimination is wrong even as a cure. But aside from my opinion, it is a fact (for better or worse) that race preferences strike very large numbers of people, even many blacks, as unfair. They breed resentment. They subsidize and reward underperformance. (See the article in the Wash Post opinion section today by John McWhorter that I’ll be blogging later.) Perhaps worst of all, they go a long way toward undermining the argument that the original discrimination was wrong in the first place. After all, if racial discrimination is acceptable, or even admirable, in some circumstances, then we have to argue about each circumstance. The best evidence for this corrosively damaging effect is the ubiquitous non sequitur that I keep denouncing, which holds that discrimination on the basis of race is really no different from other, everyday kinds of discrimination, and thus if the latter are O.K. so is the former. Similarly, since preferentialists justify racial double standards for admission both to college and to professional school, why not for grades as well?
But let’s say that a majority disagrees with my argument and wants to continue providing a race-based remedy. It still doesn’t follow that preferential admissions, hiring, etc. necessarily should follow. They do little to help the poorest, most disadvantaged, most in need of help. As McWhorter points out, only a quarter of black families are below the poverty line, but preferences heavily benefit those not in poverty.
Other possibilities, off the top of my head: cash payments, tax rebates, educational vouchers, or ? to blacks who have lived in this country x number of years and whose income is below y. Or, since so much of the concern here is symbolic, why not award, say, 100 “privilege ticktets” to blacks that they could spend on such things as automatically going to the front of ticket lines, being allowed to register for classes first and thus get their first choices, avoid 8:00s etc., being seated in crowded restaurants without reservations, etc. None of these sorts of solutions require double standards; all would have clear end dates.
Well, this will have to do for now.