Don't Do Me Any Favors
By John McWhorter
With the U.S. Supreme Court about to decide whether racial preferences are Constitutional, TAE presents some intellectual background on this critical case.
I am an African-American linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and students often come by my office for mentoring. One such student, a Chinese American, had heard that I'd been on the radio discussing affirmative action. "How do you feel about it?" she asked. "Well," I said, "I think in universities it's obsolete." "Aren't you in favor of diversity?" washer immediate response, as it is for most students exposed to the issue largely through the college newspaper's editorial page and angry speeches by student activists.
"Diversity" only made its way into the affirmative action debate a few decades ago, and through the back door at that. It started with one man. In 1973 and again in 1974, Allan Bakke was denied admission to the University of California at Davis's medical school despite an A- grade-point average and an MCAT score within the top tenth of the nation. Given that black students were regularly admitted with GPAs in the C range and MCATs in the bottom third, Bakke charged the university with discrimination.
In the Supreme Court decision in 1978, Justice Lewis Powell concurred with four other justices that quota systems like Davis's were un-Constitutional. He submitted however that it was nonetheless appropriate for schools to base admissions decisions on a quest for a "diverse student body."
This argument seems innocent enough on its face, but universities quickly seized it as a cover for admitting black students with significantly lower qualifications than white or Asian students. Ever since, university administrators have disguised their two-tier admissions policies by hiding behind "diversity."
Lately, courts have begun calling these policies un-Constitutional distortions of the Bakke decision, with judgments entered recently against the University of Texas, the University of Georgia, and the University of Michigan Law School. I dearly hope that the Supreme Court will invalidate Powell's "diversity" opinion once and for all. Yes, I am in favor of "diversity"--among equals. The Bakke decision has taught a generation of young Americans that black students are more important for their presence in pictures in promotional brochures than for their scholastic qualifications. Ultimately, this perpetuates the very underperformance that has made the "diversity" fig leaf necessary.
White guilt is a dangerous and addictive drug. For nearly three decades the Bakke decision has supported education administrators in this habit. The ideas these people have promote dare untruthful, destructive, and antithetical to both black excellence and racial harmony. And they are racist.
The very term "diversity" is a crafty evasion. Mormons, paraplegics, and poor whites exert little pull on the heartstrings of admissions committees supposedly committed to making college campuses "look like America." In the late 1960s,college administrators assumed that the low representation of blacks on campuses was due to discrimination. The good-thinking white chancellor saw the task ahead as one of door opening, providing some remedial assistance where necessary. But efforts to bring qualified blacks to campuses ran up against the uncomfortably small number of such people in an America just past legalized segregation. For those who were admitted, professors proved unable to undo years of lacking basic learning skills.
Meanwhile, a black separatist ideology had led to the idea that scholastic achievement was a "white" endeavor rather than a human one. Black kids started teasing other black kids who liked school for "acting white." This has become a central trope of black teen culture, and it continues to decrease the numbers of black students qualified for top schools.
The simple fact is that any group's rise from the bottom is not instantaneous but gradual. The "diversity" construction is a benevolently intended back-door strategy employed by guilty whites to hurry along the utopian vision of a multihued college, even if it requires rounding some corners. What the diversity crusade has done in practice is to spark brute quota systems and a reconception of the very purpose of higher education.
Many people are under the impression that the "diversity" imperative plays out simply as a light "thumb on the scale," choosing the brown-skinned candidate in cases where his qualifications are equal to a white one's. Hence they consider opposition to such harmless racial preferences "racist." It's an easy misunderstanding to fall into, as college administrators minimize their distortions of admissions procedures in their public statements.
But it was almost impossible to maintain this illusion in places like Rutgers University in the mid '80s, where I earned my bachelor's degree. Within my first year, it was painfully clear to me that the black students were by and large a rung below the white students in general preparation and performance. Certainly there were plenty of white slackers and excellent black students. But they were exceptions rather than the rule, and the overall white-black discrepancy stood out in sharp relief. Even as a teenager with little interest in politics or admissions procedures, I spontaneously perceived after just a few semesters that black students were admitted under some sort of numbers system.
The Rutgers top brass had long maintained that race was used as just "one of many factors," as the Bakke decision had counseled. But a few years after I graduated, a student working in the admissions office blew the whistle, revealing that black students were regularly gathered into a special pool and admitted with grade-point averages and standardized test scores significantly lower than those of other students. Nor was Rutgers unique. Similar revelations were made on campus after campus.
Before racial preferences were banned at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid '90s, its quota system had been obvious. A white man who worked as a remedial tutor confided in me that he had worked with so many minority students hopelessly unprepared for work the college level that he had found himself questioning the wisdom of racial preference policies despite his leftist politics. I have heard similar testimonials from professors across the country.
In America in Black and White, Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom note that black Berkeley students who enrolled in 1988 had an average SAT score below 1,000; the white average was over 1,300. The highest quarter of black SAT scores in this class clustered at the bottom quarter of the entire student body. Comparable gaps in SAT scores exist between black and white entrants at Princeton (150 points), Stanford (171), Dartmouth (218), and Rice (271).
Graduation rates reflect these gulfs in preparation. The Thernstroms document that of the black students admitted to Berkeley in 1988, 41 percent did not graduate, compared to only 16 percent of whites. At 28 top universities, William Bowen and Derek Bok, authors of The Shape of the River, show, black students in the class of 1989 were about three times more likely to drop out than white students.
Some suppose that bending admissions rules for "diversity" fosters interracial fellowship on campuses. I myself tried to hold to this idea for years. But college campuses, in all of their "diversity," are now among the most racially balkanized settings in America.
Separate black fraternities and sororities thrive. Universities often host separate black graduation ceremonies. Classes in African American Studies often foster hatred of The White Man. At Stanford, where I earned my doctorate, I was a teaching assistant in a predominantly black class on Black English. The class discussion devolved so often into visceral dismissals of whites that one white student complained to the professor that he felt any opinions he ventured beyond genuflections to black victimhood were unwelcome. He was right.
There is a general atmosphere on campuses in which black students are tacitly taught that black "authenticity" means hunkering down behind a barricade glaring hatefully at the white "hegemony." Black students typically cluster in their own section of the dining hall, throw their own parties, live in separate dorms, and are generally ushered into a separatist ideology most did not subscribe to before they came to college.
In John Bunzel's Race Relations on Campus, black Stanford students in the early 1990s report being expected to "talk black, dress black, think black, and certainly date black." During my graduate years there, black students disinclined to toe this line frequently ended up in heated debates with other black students who questioned their "blackness."
A black acquaintance once told me that any occasional racist experiences she had during her college years were dwarfed by the overriding hostility from black students scornful of her white friendships and activities. Tragically, many blacks now leave college less interested in interracial outreach than when they were freshmen.
Many of those so furiously committed to "diversity" are not interested in a colorblind America. Their goal is to keep the fires of reflexive black alienation burning. In her book Why Are All the Blacks Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? black psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum cheers that this is due to black students' "anger and resentment" at the "systemic exclusion of black people from full participation in U.S. society." That claim is a bit tricky to accommodate with a black Secretary of State and national security adviser in Washington. But it's an effective way of building the separatist movement that Tatum and others prefer to interracial harmony.
Promoters of "diversity" prattle endlessly that "exposure" to other groups is a crucial component of a college education in a multiethnicAmerica. Given that the origin of "diversity," the Bakke case, concerned medical school, it's not clear how being black would improve the discussions about surgical incisions and metabolic pathways.
On campuses where black students are let in under the bar, there reigns a deathless lie: that most black students come from disadvantaged circumstances. According to this view, even an average performance by a minority student is a miracle.
Yet at selective colleges, black students from inner-city schools are vanishingly rare. (In the late 1960s some universities experimented briefly with actually admitting such students. But even the administrators had to concede that these students lacked the necessary preparation for top universities, with social tumult and resentment being the main result.) In the last class admitted to Berkeley under the racial preference regime, more than 65 percent came from households earning at least $40,000 a year, while the parents of about 40 percent earned at least $60,000 a year. Of the black students admitted in 1989 to 28 selective universities surveyed by Bowen and Bok, only 14 percent came from homes earning $22,000 a year or less.
But white guilt finds ways to turn even firmly middle-class blacks into victims. In a tortured 1998 essay professor Ronald Dworkin argued that even middle-class black students should be admitted under the bar--because they embody a lesson for whites that the stereotypes of "poor blacks" are inappropriate. Would Dworkin care to have his own children admitted under a quota system in order to serve as museum exhibits for gentiles? And precisely what traits do middle-class black students display that are so unique and unexpected that white students must be exposed to them?
Even if significant numbers of black students at top schools did come from ghetto neighborhoods, just how would "learning about" their cultural traits be vital to white students' educational experience? In African-American Studies courses on those very same campuses, blacks are taught to decry stereotyping of poor blacks. Wouldn't a four year tutorial in the vibrancy of ghetto life reinforce those very stereotypes?
Every college administrator knows that "diversity" is code for "at least 5 percent black faces with a goodly sprinkling of Latinos." They also know that this is only achievable through quota systems euphemized by artful terminology, chronic doubletalk, and outright lies. Nor do any of them miss the fact, as black students dutifully erupt in furious protest every second spring over manufactured instances of "racism," that in practice campus "diversity" means that black students are carefully taught that they are eternal victims in their own country.
But the most tragic result of racial preferences is their effect on their supposed beneficiaries. Extended disenfranchisement often leaves a group ill-equipped to compete at the highest level, even when the doors to success are wide open. These realities are not pretty. But what they mean is that a crucial component in a group's rise to the top is learning tricks to a new trade, as disadvantaged groups in America have done for centuries. There comes a point, during any previously reviled group's climb to the top, where that group can reach the same level as the ruling group only if the safety net is withdrawn. Sometimes a group must refashion its entire self concept in order to move ahead.
Lowered standards are directly antithetical to these endeavors. A person can only hit the highest note when he has the incentive to do so: This is a fundamental tenet of economics and psychology alike. Black Americans are not exempt from this fact of the human condition.
My opposition to racial preferences is based on a purely logical conviction: They dumb black people down. The injustices that blacks have suffered in America in the past are obvious. But the fact remains: Students growing up in a system whose message is "You only have to do pretty well to get into a top school" will rarely drive themselves to the top. Enshrining "diversity" over true excellence condemns black students to mediocrity. This is the inevitable result of denying them, and their parents, high school teachers, and guidance counselors, the one thing that elicits the best in anyone--the path of individual perseverance. That's not "politics"; it's common sense.
The claim that racial preferences are necessary to compensate for past horrors creates "tit for tat" applications of racial preferences that certainly won't solve this country's racial dilemma. It may make whites feel better, but it won't give black students the tools they need to truly excel. You can only learn to ride a bicycle by mastering the subtle muscular demands on your own. As long as the training wheels are on, you're not truly riding a bike. Birds learn to fly by being nudged out of the nest. People gain fluent command of a foreign language by living for an extended period in a setting where it is impossible to use their native language for any length of time. Black students will achieve their highest potential in school only by being required to do so.
Short of tough demands, top-rate black students will continue to constitute only a tiny coterie--with children of recent Caribbean and African immigrants heavily overrepresented. Asian students never had any illusion that there was a way to the top other than through hard work, which is why they have succeeded in such large numbers. A culture in which black students are denied the stimulus of high demands is, quite simply, a racist one. What are we to make of university administrators' apparent conviction that black people are the only ones in American history who cannot triumph over historical obstacles?
The truth is, after California voters eliminated racial preferences at state colleges in 1996, black admissions fell at only two campuses--UCLA and Berkeley. They rose at several of the other University of California campuses. This is evidence that blacks will eventually work their way up the status ladder. Already, black admission rates at Berkeley have risen every year since the initial drop when admissions first were made colorblind.
In any case, it's not as if students who don't make it into Berkeley or UCLA are doomed to lives of destitution. Over the past few years many black students who would have been accepted at Berkeley under its previous quota system are now attending UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, and other solid schools where they are much more likely to thrive and succeed. On these campuses black students learn through everyday, concrete successes that they are as qualified as their classmates, rather than having to assert it on the basis of empty, tribalist rhetoric. Armed with this true confidence, black students will be less likely to retreat to their own sides of the cafeteria to compensate for private feelings of inferiority.
As for the claim that sorting out black students meritocratically is somehow unjust, remember that the majority of the students at these second-rank schools are white and Asian. The demise of racial preferences in the UC system has simply brought black students to the places that their current levels of skill, initiative, and preparation allow--as has long been the lot of white college applicants.
There is also the oft-heard claim that blacks must be admitted to top schools despite inadequate qualifications, because the prestige of these schools, and the resulting social connections, are crucial to success after graduation. But as James Fallows has noted, the top universities are sparse among the résumés of members of Congress, Nobel laureates, industrial leaders, even U.S. Presidents.
Among black Americans specifically, the Thernstroms report that of today's African-American congressmen, army officers, recent Ph.D. earners, and top business leaders, none but a sliver attended elite colleges. Thus "diversity" serves no better to foster black excellence beyond college than within it.
On today's college campuses, all students are indoctrinated with the piety that racism is at the root of any and all racial discrepancies, with the inevitable result that furiously self-righteous people are constantly clamoring for increased black presence by any means available. No one could be appointed a university president today without supporting racial preferences in one guise or another. And while the diversity argument hasn't done much for black students, it has been very useful to white administrators.
University of Michigan president Lee Bollinger became a media darling by criticizing the court decision against the use of race preferences at his university's law school. It's telling that Bollinger was selected as president of Columbia University shortly after his defense of preferences, while his law school dean Jeffrey Lehman, equally vehement in defending Michigan's quotas in recent months, has just been picked to head Cornell University.
"Aren't you in favor of diversity?" is code for "Don't you like black people?" And nothing chills white Americans more than the notion that they might be considered racist. So admitting black people under the bar becomes imperative. Meanwhile many blacks cheer, under the misimpression that racism is the only possible cause of unequal performance.
But the unequal performance of black students doesn't evaporate once they hit college. Racial preferences do not, as so often thought, "correct" a "raw deal" that black students have been saddled with. Instead, racial preferences merely sanction and perpetuate the separation of blacks from high academic performance.
It is high time we relegated preference by skin color to the dustbin of history.
--John McWhorter has previously written for TAE on competition and race, and on slavery reparations. This piece is adapted from his new book Authentically Black (Gotham Books).
Racial Groupthink is Un-American
By Jim Sleeper
"Don’t you believe in diversity?” a mystified student at Harvard’s Kennedy School asked me. I was criticizing the latest round of color-coded college training. My interlocutor was Asian, but his diction and dress suggested he’d spent his life in the United States.
I answered his question with a request: “In the spirit of ‘diversity,’ tell me three things you’d like me to assume about you, given that I know only that you’re ‘Asian.’” (I finger-signed “quote” marks around that last word.) “Let’s say I’m an admissions officer, a professor, or a journalist who’ll report our conversation to the world. What should I say about you? ”The Asian student’s only response was a smile.
Most students to whom I pose this question can’t answer it—because they don’t really value (or want others to value) their racial markings more than their basic American freedom to recast themselves in ways that may leave ethnic labels behind. In America, no one else can decide your ethnicity, wrote historian Robert Wiebe. Only you can do that, often only after long introspection, even if all your grandparents came from the same region. Growing up here changes what you know and feel about yourself and your ancestors.
Try telling Ward Connerly, the black leader of campaigns against racial preferences, what he is. A black student tried to do so last year after a Kennedy School debate between Connerly and law professor Christopher Edley, a defender of affirmative action. Since Connerly had noted that two of his grandparents had been part Irish, the black student told him, to appreciative laughter, “No one would ever say, ‘I went to hear a debate between Chris Edley and that Irish guy.”
Connerly replied, firmly but equably, “I insist on my moral right and duty, even amid racism, to live outside any box some people want to put me in.” He drew sustained applause, even from those who’d laughed at him and now realized they couldn’t deny his American freedom of self-definition without diminishing something in themselves. It was a powerful, if not revolutionary, moment.
These campus epiphanies reflect an almost chemical demographic and cultural mixing. Many Americans are generations removed from any irrevocable ethnicity. Passing through intermarriages, cross-racial friendships, religious conversions, and other mixings, many of us dream in idioms unimaginable to our forebears.
Students like those who challenged Connerly and me may experiment with racial identities in college. Struggling for self-definition on a campus that is their first home away from home, some will resort to ethnic flag waving to defend themselves against true intellectual and cultural diversity. Some will meet teachers and demagogues eager to rally them, and administrators eager to placate them. But the only ones still waving their flags of racial and ethnic differences a few years out of college will be the ones who have gone to work in the national “race industry” of diversity consultants, affirmative action officers, bureaucratic color-coders, foundation officers, and ethnocentric activists. That’s an industry that depends on inflating bad racial news and discounting the good. Some ethnic flag wavers are fighting real racism.
Too many are hiding from the large challenge and scary freedom of nurturing a broad American civic identity. What Connerly and I both told our Harvard audiences was that you can’t fight injustice by corralling people into racial groupthink. Ethnic identities needn’t disappear, but they shouldn’t serve as organizing principles of campus or public life. If official color-coding replaces individual responsibility, the result will be warring camps “of color.” This country will rise or fall on our capacity to prove that there are richer, deeper ways than racial ones for Americans to distinguish themselves.
Adapted from the new edition of Jim Sleeper’s book Liberal Racism.
The Polite Bigotry of Pity
By Deroy Murdock
By giving every black-, brown-, and redskinned applicant 20 points just for having the right complexion, the University of Michigan offers a pristine example of what President Bush has called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” The admissions officers do not practice the nasty, snarling bigotry born of hatred, but the polite, smiling bigotry born of pity.
An X in the box signifying that an applicant is black, Hispanic, or American Indian affords a dramatic boost over someone with white or yellow flesh. Alerting Ann Arbor to a perfect SAT score, by comparison, earns an applicant only 12 points.
This is academic racial profiling. And if—as civil rights activists scream until they swoon—it is wrong for cops to assume a black man is a criminal, why is it right for the University of Michigan to assume he needs special help simply for applying while black? How dare Michigan’s administrators automatically
conclude that minority applicants are disadvantaged and downtrodden?
Admissions officers should evaluate applicants as individuals, not as ethnic inputs. But they crudely regard whites as, ipso facto, privileged. Some whites have, indeed, spent their formative years floating in yacht basins. Others who have excelled, however, hail from chicken farms, trailer parks, and modest ranch homes. White and yellow students struggle with personal hardships, too.
And minority applicants can be honor students, varsity athletes, and student body presidents. The tough love of high expectations offers minority students more promise than does the bigotry of low expectations. Yes, it will be hard to change attitudes within the lamentably numerous minority communities where merit and achievement have surrendered to grievance and slipping standards. But it’s not impossible.
As Chicago’s Marva Collins Preparatory School demonstrates, kids who study Dostoevsky, Milton, and Shakespeare can go from the ghetto to greatness. As Manhattan philanthropist Dan Rose’s Harlem Educational Activities Fund proves, fatherless seventh graders on federally subsidized lunches can be tutored and mentored all the way to national chess championships and colleges like Syracuse, Columbia, and Yale.
We must keep lifting the bar for minority students. Rather than patronize them, our political leaders should inspire these children to dream, strive, and succeed. To demand less of them than of their white counterparts is racism, no matter how elegantly decorated.
New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service.
The Supreme Court’s Previous Dodge
By Kenneth Lee
In Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, four members of the U.S. Supreme Court held that colleges that receive federal funds could not consider race in admissions decisions. Four of their brethren argued that racial preferences could be used broadly, to remedy “societal discrimination.”
Justice Lewis Powell held the decisive ninth vote. Indecisive and conflicted, Justice Powell opted for a politically palatable but practically unfeasible approach. Offering a paean to the virtues of diversity in higher education, he said that universities could consider race as one of many factors, like geographic or intellectual diversity. In short, Powell attempted to have it both ways by allowing schools to select by race but without the taint of racial quotas. His opinion, however, was based on the naive assumption that universities would consider race merely as a tie-breaker.
In reality, race plays an enormous role—as indicated by stark statistics on disparate admission rates. Race is not like any other “diversity” factor. When Berkeley’s Boalt Law School had only one incoming black student a few years ago, it made national headlines. Would there have been similar media coverage if the incoming class had included only one student raised on a farm in the heartland? Or if the freshmen class at the University of Michigan had no Orthodox Jews? Or only two students who could play the cello?
The fact that Justice Powell’s broad conception of diversity has become a code word for race is nowhere more apparent than at Harvard Law School. As made famous in movies like The Paper Chase, each first-year class at the law school is divided into several sections, with students in each section taking classes together with the same professors. In the spirit of diversity, Harvard uses computer algorithms to ensure that each of these class sections represents a cross section of the entire school. But Harvard’s registrar does not consider any of the diversity factors mentioned in Bakke—such as the student’s geographic origin, academic major, or socioeconomic background. Race, and to a lesser extent gender, are the only factors that constitute “diversity” at Harvard.
If diversity promotes “speculation, experiment, and creation” in the classroom as Justice Powell suggested in his opinion, then Harvard Law School should take factors like religion and family origin into account as much as race. An evangelical Christian student may have a unique viewpoint on First Amendment jurisprudence concerning the separation of church and state. A student from rural Kansas will likely have had different experiences than an affluent San Francisco native.
The Supreme Court can no longer hide behind the wishful thinking of Bakke. Too much empirical evidence has been amassed over the past quarter century demonstrating that “diversity” as practiced at universities means only race. At least five members of the current Supreme Court have expressed distaste for race-conscious policies. It remains to be seen whether they, unlike Justice Powell, will finally outlaw “benign” discrimination by skin color.
Kenneth Lee, a lawyer in New York, has written often for The American Enterprise.
Give the Decision Back to Congress
By Lino Graglia
Whether racial preferences are Constitutional is a difficult question. It is not, however, difficult to say whether such preferences are illegal under existing legislative statutes. They are.
Under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act—our most important civil rights statute—no institution receiving federal funds may discriminate by race under any circumstances. Congress understood the Brown v. Board of Education school segregation decision to prohibit all official race discrimination. In its 1964 Act it adopted and extended that principle across American society.
The University of Michigan race preferences now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court should therefore be declared unlawful under the Civil Rights Act, thereby avoiding the need to consider the sticky Constitutional question. The practical effect of such a decision would be to return the question of preferences to the political process.
This solution would be faithful to the clear terms and purpose of the 1964 Act. It was in fact the solution favored by four of the nine justices when the Supreme Court\ decided the landmark Bakke case in 1978. In addition to being the solution most faithful to existing law, overturning preferences as incompatible with the Civil Rights Act would serve the cause of representative self-government, by returning the issue to Congress. It is far more appropriate in a democracy that this issue be decided by elected legislators than by unaccountable judges.
If Congress has changed its mind since it passed the Civil Rights Act, it can repeal Title VI, or amend it to allow racial preferences. This would require Congress to specify the nature, extent, justification, and duration of permissible selection by skin color. That would bring the use of preferences and quotas fully into the open, unlike now where they are applied most often in secret.
Upholding racial preferences would require the Supreme Court to qualify and weaken—if not completely overrule—the Brown v. Board of Education principle of non-discrimination. A serious loss to American law.
If Congress is willing to take responsibility for permitting some racial discrimination for what it considers a good cause, that would legitimately remove the issue from the courts. There would be no clear Constitutional justification for judges to overturn such a decision. Of course that decision would be made through the ordinary political process, and people dissatisfied with it would be free to use the democratic process to change it. American citizens could craft a final conclusion to this exhausting wrangle, something the courts have been unable to do.
Lino Graglia is a professor at the University of Texas School of Law.
