California, always an innovator in the field of racial foolishness, recently saw a bill proposed that would guarantee affirmative action benefits – notably preferential college admissions – to the descendants of Black American slaves. This is a bad idea, but is a step in the right direction (toward AA programs not existing or being based on socio-economic status), and leads neatly into a conversation about the nuttiness of the past five decades of “DEI.”
Affirmative action programs, to the extent they remain legal, presently operate in a fashion that makes no sense. WHY this is the case requires a detour down the byways of history. Obviously, when established, programs giving a hand up to minority college or job applicants were intended specifically to benefit Black Americans. Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous “Hobbled Runners” speech at Howard, which introduced the practice to a mass audience, mentioned no groups other than African Americans and described temporary preferences as compensation for the “crippling” legacy of slavery.
However, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke – a case sourced from the Golden State – the clinching reason given by the Supreme Court for allowing race to be considered in university admissions was the value of diversity. This, combined with the legal rule that under-representation of any major racial group within a firm’s workforce is prima facie grounds for lawsuit, led to a situation where the goal for most businesses and colleges became proportional representation along racial lines.
This gave a significant advantage to members of ALL minority groups that would have under-performed under pure-merit rules. In the simplest possible terms: if the mean-average SAT score is 912 for Native Americans, 1114 for whites, and 1223 for Asians, proportional representation on campus for Natives requires an admissions officer to spot a typical Native applicant 202 points vs. an average white guy and an astonishing 311 points as versus an Asian American.
The post-Bakke world order also produced some genuinely bizarre realities. Hispanic Americans are a group substantially larger than the Black community – at 19.1% of the U.S. population and 40% of the California population respectively, as vs 12% and 6% – and one roughly as advantaged by the AA test score “boost.” However, Hispanics have very arguably been less impacted by U.S. historical oppression than not only Blacks but also “poor white” groups like Appalachians and Irish immigrants – whose members made up most of the 1,297 lynchings of whites recorded between 1882-1968.
Many Latinos are recent immigrants, who arrived long after the States’ era of peak racial tension: the Hispanic population stood at 35.3 million as recently as 2000, in contrast to 65 million today. It makes little sense for most of these incomers – about half of whom identify as “white”– to qualify for affirmative action benefits. However, they almost all do. Similarly, despite ranking among the most educated and more financially successful groups in the country, West African immigrant populations like Nigerians are invariably shoe-horned into the advantaged “Black” category by lazy or cynical Registrars.
As Harvard professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates once pungently noted, up to 2/3 of all Black admissions to Harvard are/were foreign lairds of this type. Indeed, the entire question of which groups constitute “minorities” legally capable of being “under-represented” can get technical to the point of absurdity. According to David Berenstein’s excellent little book Unclassified, the current rule is that Italians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Arabs and Jews (for now) are all considered white – but Caucasian Hispanics are not. The former groups thus fall merely into the banal, general, “white(s)” category when it comes to any mandatory allocation of representation.
Confining affirmative action strictly to ADOS – the American descendants of slaves – makes more sense than allowing this bizarre pastiche of group benefits. But, it still does not make much sense. Even under any policy limiting AA benefits to legacy Black Americans, not merely my children but those of Lloyd Austin, Ben Carson, and Michelle Obama would be able to attend college on the cheap while those of a truck-stop waitress from the Inland Empire would not.
This point brings up the elephant in the room when it comes to “a hand up” policies: by far the fairest and most logical way to run any such program would be to base it on social class. This would be childishly simple – at the collegiate level, simply ignore race and apply 20 extra points to the applications of prospects from low-income families, single-mother households, or today’s equivalent of red-line district rated neighborhoods. This would certainly benefit a typical Black kid from LA or Compton over a typical white kid from Anaheim – but it would also give thousands of Assyrian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and just plain po’ Caucasian students a chance to shine.
But, there’s an awkward and darkly obvious reason no one wants to do this. Right now, the “POC” most advantaged by affirmative action are……rich. Black scores on the major aptitude tests are lower than white ones overall (our average in the Natives/Asians data set given above was 933). BUT, scores for wealthy Black people are now at least on par with those for poorer whites, far ahead of those for poor Blacks, and are the African-American results most likely to be considered by a Harvard (where the B-SAT mean is a robust 1408/1600).
This plain fact reflects a pattern that is common globally. As the great Thomas Sowell noted in his Affirmative Action around the World, diversity-forward programs almost always benefit “forward members of backward groups.” A very quiet pro-dumb-rich-kid alliance may even exist among the multi-colored national elite. Per the (relatively little) data I have seen, a surprising number of well-off Black folks defend university legacy programs as well as affirmative action, and the same is true in reverse.
White support for DEI programs, generally speaking, increases as wealth and education do.
The picture is complex and genuinely interesting. The California bill proposing “AA only for A-DOS” likely should and will not pass, but it is a valuable introduction to a national debate on affirmative action. Across the USA, it would make far more sense to base diversity-forward advantages on slave descent than on the glib justifications we have been using. However, the best approach to any such project would be what the recent Fair Admissions case suggests: base it around individual student experiences or a non-legally protected factor like class…or drop everything of this kind and let actual merit prevail.
Wilfred Reilly is a Senior Fellow for PRI and an associate professor of political science at Kentucky State University and author of numerous books, including Taboo: Ten Facts You Can’t Talk About.
