Brief Reflections on Affirmative Action

Housekeeping: This week on Moment of Zen, Dan Romero and I chatted about affirmative action.

On Upstream, I chatted with Balaji Srinivasan about Russia, China, and the Fiat Crisis.

And on Media Empires, I chatted with David Perrell about building a course business.

And we just released a new show, In The Arena, and released an episode with Emil Michael about the Uber saga and an episode with Austen Allred about Lambda/Bloom’s journey

Also, I’ll be stopping by Miami, NYC, and Boston over the next ten days as a FYI.

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There have been some good write ups this week around what the Affirmative Action ruling means in practice. Some people say we will merely find new terms to achieve the same ends, say, going from “diversity” to “adversity”

Noah Smith wrote about how this change is unlikely to change the demographics, but it might change our concept of identity and make us more individually oriented.

Richard Hanania wrote about how this is a big change not just for college campuses but for affirmative-action-esque policies at companies more broadly.

In this piece we’ll unpack the case against affirmative action on behalf of the people it’s trying to support. Consider this piece as more “food for thought” than any specific declaration. Here’s the argument:

When you lower the standards to bring in more X, the argument goes, you end up with X being the low performers in the group. Thomas Sowell points out that Harvard implementing affirmative action actually destroys the prospects of college students at all qualification levels. Harvard gets the X that would have gone to Brown. Brown gets the X that would have gone to Berkeley. Berkeley gets the X that would have gone to UC Davis. UC Davis gets the X that would have gone to Foothill, etc.

So you create mismatch throughout the stack. At each level, X is then routinely in the bottom quartile of performers, more likely to get demoralized, more likely to drop out, etc.

This is why X aren’t graduating at the same rates or with the same results post-college. Well, to the extent they were artificially elevated, of course they're not performing at the same level as people who were better students than they were. But now what? You can see why the anger level has risen so much. The affirmative action beneficiaries feel screwed, they're not succeeding at the same rates. The other students see what's happening and get cynical. Making things worse, the other students then start to assume that all members of group X who got in are less capable. Arguably the biggest victims of all are the fully qualified members of group X who never needed the "help" and who now have the stigma when they shouldn’t. This dynamic is why tempers are so hot on college campuses, I think.

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How did we get here? There was a moment in the 60s in this country where we were wrestling between the colorblind vision and the color conscious vision. And colorblindness was written right into the laws. The way JFK and Lyndon Johnson talked about affirmative action was explicitly colorblind. The way Martin Luther King & Bayard Rustin (even Frederick Douglas) talked about race—they had a big picture humanist vision of the world, a single human race. They would have been shocked at today's identity politics, shocked to see colorblindness abandoned at the height of its success.

Some people say that the colorblind vision, the content of their character, isn’t strong enough to dismantle racism. Colorblindness is a noble dream, the logic goes, but we need the “race conscious” vision until we can get there. But history doesn’t bear that out. It’s the colorblind principle after all that was the one that activists and writers used to defeat slavery, and lynching and Jim Crow—so how could it be insufficiently powerful to deal with the less drastic examples of racism that we have today?

In this view, King’s dream of a colorblind America—where the content of our character matters more than the color of our skin—is hampered by the focus on checking privilege and stoking grievance. 

King was apparently intrigued by some socialist ideas and was sympathetic to affirmative action, so I don’t want to make too much of King here.

But with regard to the role that racial identity should play in politics, King was unequivocal: First and foremost we are human beings, not members of races. The verbal tic of modern racial-justice activists—“As a black man . . .”—would sound foreign on his lips. Even when fighting explicitly racist policies, he deployed universal principles rather than a tribal grievance narrative.

Colorblind to be clear doesn’t mean blindness to racism. You can still see and address racism on an individual and institutional level. But it means striving to see beyond race, for race to be aspirationally as significant as someone’s hair color.  It means solving black poverty at the level of poverty, not just black poverty. If you do solve poverty, you’ll end up solving black poverty in the process, and you won’t alienate people while you do it. If affirmative action was income-based, it would be much more palatable.

Other people say that people use colorblindness as an excuse to be racist. Some people do that, sure. However, the fact that there are some cynical people that use an ideal doesn't undermine the ideal itself. I'm not sure you can find any principle that hasn't been used cynically by someone somewhere. If that were a valid objection to the principle, then all principles would be wrong.

If MLK were alive today, he might be called all kinds of bad names by activists (let alone racists). Race consciousness has won out decisively, and colorblindness is seen as a symbol for being an Uncle Tom. But who do white rich people support? Race consciousness, largely. How many CEOs in America are willing to publicly criticize race consciousness? Barely any. So which group is really performing for white people? 

Zooming out, while it’s unclear what this ruling will change in practice, it’s definitely in-line with MLK’s famous exhortation to judge people not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character—a noble and beautiful idea (even if incomplete as it relates to MLK’s views). 

Oh, and this shouldn’t matter (and they may loathe the implication of even mentioning it), but I picked up these ideas from black intellectuals—John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, Thomas Chatterton Williams, among others. I mention these names not a disclaimer but as a recommendation to check out their work.