Writing for The American Prospect, Aaron Marr Page counsels conservatives to “tone down the outrage over affirmative action.” After all, observes Page, “the use of racial preferences has been legally sanctioned by the Supreme Court since the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke decision upheld ‘the attainment of a diverse student body’ as a compelling state interest. The schools are not breaking the law as it exists today […].”
What Mr. Page misses, of course, is that this same type of precedent-based argument was made by proponents of Jim Crow laws, who were fond of citing Plessy v. Ferguson as justification for sanctioning and enforcing segregation.
Here’s Justice John Harlan, the lone Supreme Court Justice dissenting in the Plessy decision:
Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law…In my opinion, the judgment this day rendered will, in time, prove to be quite as pernicious as the decision made by this tribunal in the Dred Scott case…The present decision, it may well be apprehended, will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficient purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent amendments of the Constitution.
Today, it’s those very conservatives Mr. Page wishes would “tone down their outrage” who are calling for color-blind legislation. Liberals like Mr. Page argue that “until we know better why blacks and other minorities arrive at admissions-office doors with less impressive quantitative assessment scores, and until we have fully quieted concerns about bias in standardized testing, it would be supremely irresponsible for the court to terminate all racial preferences in higher education” — a noble-sounding argument, but one that conveniently ignores how a culture embracing racial preference and entitlement may in fact be the primary cause of the very disparities Mr. Page persists in highlighting.
No, I’ll continue to express my outrage, Mr. Page, thank you very much…
Jeff, you are so full of elitist bullshit on this issue it is not even funny. If you examine the test scores of black children who come from the educated meritocracy (many of whom were the beneficiaries of Affirmative Action), you’ll find that they score quite well, often on par with their white counterparts in the meritocracy. In other words, by giving blacks a better opportunity to join the meritocracy, their children will also benefit from this.
The GI Bill of Rights after WW II did essentially the same thing for men like my father. My father grew up in the slums of Chicago during the Depression, but because of his service in WW II and the GI Bill, he was able to attend college and elevate himself above the social class into which he’d been born. Without the GI Bill, he would have been a factory worker like his father, and the odds are that I would have ended up the same. Many families now in the middle and upper classes benefitted from this social legislation.
Many black children still attend horrible public schools, and their poor scores in standardized testing are a result of this. Come to Philly and I will show you the disparity in test scores between the suburban meritocratic kids (who attend excellent public schools) and the inner city kids who attend some of the worst public schools in the nation. Is it their fault they attend these shitty schools, Jeff?
Is it right to fuck these kids and deny them opportunity because their parents aren’t educated and wealthy? Do you honestly think the playing field is level? The difference today is that many members of the meritocracy have forgotten that they are only one or two generations removed from the same shitty poverty as these kids living in the inner city. Many in the meritocracy don’t even care to keep open the avenues to success that they or their progenitors used.
My father became educated and elevated himself socially and economically, but he never forgot that he came from a hellhole slum, and he made sure his children didn’t forget it either.
The primary cause of the disparities is the same as when my father was a kid. Except the kids in the slums today aren’t poor Irish, Polish, Italian, and German immigrants; they’re black and hispanic. It wasn’t just because of “grit” and “hard work” that we Micks, Polacks, Wops, and Krauts are doing so well today; it was also because of social legislation that provided our fathers and grandfathers the opportunity to better themselves. These black and hispanic kids deserve the same chance.
Our nation can spend hundreds of billions for weapons systems we don’t need, and we are unwilling to invest in ALL our childrens’ future? Calling some of them dumb and unworthy niggers and slamming the doors to opportunity in their faces won’t do this nation any fucking good.
It is not your rejection of left-leaning social policy that bothers me. It the sneering contempt with which you hold the other side, as if people on the Left are these massively wealthy and powerful men and women who are out to fuck over you and your ilk in the ‘burbs. Other than a few comfortably tenured professors in academia, most people on the Left (what few remain) are working class or poor. I would rather be a successful white guy fighting for the rights of the poor and disadvantaged than to be a contemptuous, sneering, irony-laden apologist for the SUV-driving, gated community-living, educated meritocrats–people, I might remind you, who are my peers. The status quo has enough champions, so I choose to fight for the other side, those dumbass niggers, spics, enviro-hippies, peace wimps, pro-labor activists, and other losers you love to deride. I admit I sneer at the Right, but its members have all the power and wealth, so it is not like they are innocent lambs.
What can I say, DT? I disagree with you, and I do so based not on sneering elitism, but rather an awful lot of thought and study. I’ll see if I can dig up the requisite info from the Thernstrom’s <i>America in Black and White</i> after lunch, but in the meantime, just a few quick comments:
First, I don’t know how you can read this post and see derision—I thought I was quite un-sneering, in fact—but if it makes you feel better to characterize my beliefs as derisive and pandering to the status quo, fine.
Personally, I fight for what I believe in—not for some abstract idea of who I believe the underdog to be. That you believe these groups you cite are so ineffectual without your assistance is part of the problem, as I see it.
Incidentally, I’m the first in my family to go to college. I also happen to be quite poor.
I found Page’s comments remarkably similar to the arguments against our response to Afghanistan. FIRST we need to understand “root causes.” Then we need to address those root causes. Only after those first two events (and who is to judge that they’ve been properly conducted, one wonders?) might so momentous an act as tackling affirmative action (or using force) be appropriate.
Might the very act of delay (in the case of al-Qaeda and Afghanistan) or Affirmative Action itself be part of the problem? Well, we’ll need another study to look into that.
Anything else is simplisme.
A) “I disagree with you, and I do so based not on sneering elitism, but rather an awful lot of thought and study.”
Thought and study, right, ok…so you’ve formed an abstract idea of things. You didn’t cite any real-world, reality-based experience, like teaching in inner city schools, or working for the Peace Corps, or serving in the military, or any other kind of active service to others from which you’ve based your idealism. Bravo, Jeff. I, on the other hand, have done a few of those things, so it’s not an abstract for me, it’s all reality for me. The abstract I leave to the babbling academics and pundits who are usually full of shit and only see the world through what they’ve read or seen on the boob tube. They have their charts and graphs and data, but reducing everything to numbers through scientific management de-humanizes what are real, human issues that require more than studies and books to solve them.
B) “That you believe these groups you cite are so ineffectual without your assistance is part of the problem, as I see it.”
I have no idea what you mean by this statement. Are you suggesting that noblesse oblige is bullshit, that we who believe in it think we do it because we are morally superior, and that the subjects of our aid are morons, retards, and idiots who cannot survive without us? Sorry, but that is your cynicism speaking, and has no bearing on who I am. I do it because I came from the same neighborhood as these people. What I didn’t state above was that my father died when I was ten and that I became a member of the underclass for a few years, and now it is my turn to give back to what I consider to be my people.
C) “I also happen to be quite poor.”
Give me a break. I am sure you live in a comfortable home and have plenty to eat. You have a job too, right? Is your income below the poverty level? Do you have health insurance?
No, I don’t have health insurance. I have a job, but I’m quite sure I’ve earned it.
Your arguments are so silly, Thomas, that they don’t even warrant a detailed response. They have nothing to do with either the efficacy of, or the justification for, race-based Affirmative Action. They’re just bluster—made up of ham-fisted “champion of the people” rhetoric. In fact, they seem offered solely as a way to pat yourself on the back for what you perceive to be your heroic role in the defense of the helpless. Lots of sanctimony, little substance.
Do you honestly believe that because you claim to have mingled with the downtrodden, your experiences somehow get to trump years of sociological research (research, incidentally, takes place in the “real” world, too; it just gets published in books)? Who’s being idealistic, I ask you? Do you even know what “abstract” means?
If you have something of substance to say about race-based Affirmative Action, fine. Otherwise save your breath. You’re going to need it for leaping tall buildings in a single bound.
Sociological research by whom? Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom? Their research was funded by right-wing think tanks to come to the conclusions that the think tanks (and the Thernstroms) wanted.
“American in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible” has a few good points surrounded by pseudo-intellectual, right wing polemics and deliberately racist data manipulation. I could spend hours providing facts and counter-arguments that their data is skewed and sometimes deliberately false. And not just false by what they cited in their arguments, but more so by what they deliberately left out.
The Thernstrom’s made their conclusions LONG before they researched and wrote the book. They were once liberals (so they claim) who turned into nasty, right-wing ideologues of the worst sort. They both have long and distinguished carrers as intellectual apologists for right-wing racism disguised as “science.”
Let me point out that Abigail Thernstrom has been employed by right wing think tanks and other organizations specifically trying to destroy the Voter’s Rights Acts, public education, and de-segragation policy, so excuse me again if I am skeptical of her book or views. And Stephan is a right-wing prick who turned violently racist and anti-liberal when, while teaching at Harvard, he was once was accused of racial insensitivity. Now he champions the anti-AA ideology because a) he really hates the uppity blacks who had the audacity to question his racial views, and b) he considers AA to be a “cancer eating away at the sacred body of meritocracy.” We’re not talking balanced academics here; they are propogandists and racists at best and worst.
Is that the sociological research you mean, Jeff? Manipulated data, deliberately divisive and racist lies, and 700 pages of the worst excuse for acedemic research I have read in years?
I may not know what “abstract” means, big guy, but I still have the ability to read filth like the Thernstrom’s book and call it filth.
Oh, yeah. I forgot. Funded by “right-wing” think tanks. Bet there were even some “corporations” involved. Yup, must be insidious racist propoganda, then. Two formerly liberal scholars dedicating several years of their life to write a 700 page “nigger” joke. Yeah, that’s likely.
Or maybe—<i>just maybe</i>—<i>you’d</i> decided what “filth” it was (it being “deliberately divisive” and filled with “racist lies”) before you looked at it.
Nah. You’re right. Probably the seven hundred page nigger joke by a couple of Harvard racists is more likely…
Yawn.
No, I was given the book as a gift and had no idea who they were or what were their politics.
I’ll be honest, Jeff: most of what the Left passes off as “sociology” is pretty wacky too. My critical axe is double-sided, and I don’t mind drawing blood from the Left either.
What the Bolsheviks taught all intellectuals (right and left) was the brash and deliberate manipulation of “facts,” and the even finer art of agitation-propoganda. Sometimes I think we forget we do it any more, but we do.
I think, however, that the Right has been better at it for the last 20 years. The Right is winning the intellectual debates these days. Take that to heart, Jeff.
:=P
Well, the war on drugs ain’t goin’ too well for the right, nor is the abortion thing (thank goodness on both counts). I’m hoping they lose out on the whole stem cell / cloning business, as well.
But on Affirmative Action—and just about any argument in favor of manufactured proportionalism and government mandates over such —I’m going against social progressives.
Don’t know if I ever pointed you toward the race piece I wrote here, but <a href=”http://www.creatical.com/weblog/archives/00000088.shtml”>
here it is.</a>
Government mandated racial preferences are nothing like the GI Bill. With the lattter, GI’s were given money to go to any college that they could qualify for. With the former, certain groups are given a preference over other groups in admission to a college. The biggest problem with racial preferences is that they are harmful to the recipients because AA systematically mismatches students with schools. If a college normally accepts only the top 1% of applicants, allowing people who are in the top 5% to enter is not doing them a favor because they will be entering a school that is geared towards the top 1%. This results in higher drop out rates and switching to academically easier study programs. Sadly, I rarely see AA opponents make this argument, but it is the strongest one in my opinion.
I agree, Ross. The risk an institution takes admitting high-risk or underqualified students is minimal: if the student makes good, the school is applauded for its benevolence and progressivism; if s/he falls by the wayside, so be it—no one can blame the school for not giving the student an opportunity. The drop-out rates for minority students mismatched with the academic rigor a particular school is enormous; this is because academic deficiences are real things, and can’t be overcome, in most cases, by the wishful thinking of social progressives.
Another point worth mentioning is that Bakke is nothing like the ironclad precedent that the TAP piece makes it out to be. The Court was split 4 to 4 to 1 and there were a ton of different written opinions. Liberals have tried to hang their hat on the 1 opinion written by Justice Powell (I think) that said that diversity could be a sufficient justification. However, his opinion didn’t command a majority and isn’t binding on the lower courts.
Affirmative action? You mean like how a semi-literate guy like George W. can get in Yale just because his folks are rich and his dad went there (daddy probably only got in because he was a legacy). Let’s tax the heck out of inheirtance and really level the playing field.
With regard to private universities, legacy admissions are a different thing entirely. I’m not thrilled with them, though, to be honest with you.
From what I’ve read, legacy admissions show the same problems that AA admissions do. I.e., higher dropout rates, etc. They should be dumped as a practical matter for the benefit of all, but I don’t think it’s a constitutional issue.
It would seem that, at some point, you have issues of discrimination FOR a group (affirmative action, legacy admissions) and discrimination AGAINST a group (no blacks allowed, e.g.).
The intention of the laws, initially, was to ban the latter. The former, it seems to me, is difficult to legislate (i.e., require) in any form, since it fundamentally affects the issue of free association. At some level, I should be able to choose whom I interact with.
Of course, the same applies to discrimination AGAINST, but we, as a society, seem to have generally concluded that discrimination against is a bad thing (whether it’s been stamped out or not is a separate issue).
So, then, the question becomes, is there a Constitutionally valid approach that can compel folks to discriminate FOR folks.
Note that legacy admissions are not a matter of legality, i.e., there are no laws that can compel a university to admit alumni kids. That is one thing that separates the legacy issue from affirmative action. (I would venture that any university could CHOOSE to admit a higher proportion of a minority. Single-sex schools, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities do, iirc.)
<i>Let’s tax the heck out of inheirtance and really level the playing field. </i>
Let’s work all our lives and then see all of it magically vanish into the ether when we die! Isn’t that great?