There are quite a few bitter recriminations going on about the Supreme Court’s striking down of racial quotas by institutions of higher education. It raises a host of questions:
- Do you think it is alright to discriminate against Americans of Asian descent?
- How about racial discrimination more generally?
- Whatever happened to “critical mass”? IIRC that was the basis for SCOTUS’s prior judgment. It seems to have been cast into the dustbin of history not just by conservatives but by progressives as well.
What I wish were being commented on is the light this casts on our whole educational system.
Unlike some I don’t believe that Asians are genetically superior or that blacks are genetically inferior. Similarly, I don’t think that 70% of NBA players are black because of some genetic predisposition towards basketball. I think black athletes try harder and there is cultural support for that within their communities. Contrariwise, I think there is a pathology in black communities which places barriers to academic success.
In addition I would indict our entire education from top to bottom. Our public schools have lost site of their putative mission and are primarily run for the benefit of teachers, administrators, and union organizers. I wouldn’t let institutions of higher learning off the hook, either. If they actually cared about recruiting more blacks and Hispanics, they might have created feeder systems in “disadvantaged” neighborhoods to prepare K-12 students for college. They didn’t do that. IMO they were more interested in appearing to be concerned than in actually taking action.
I think you should read more genetics and less MSM. Races, like, sexes, are real, and there are measurable differences between them, not only physically, but also behaviorally and psychologically.
The leaders and faculties of the elite schools are smart and committed to racial quotas. They will find a way to circumvent the SCOTUS ruling. Viz. the U Cal system, operating in open defiance of state law. Victims like the Asians will have to go to court over and over again.
PS. There is no correlation between spending or class size and student achievement. For example, NYC schools spend twice the national average per student with worse than average student achievement. I sure the Chicago situation is similar.
PPS. The continual dumbing down of our schools from pre-K to Ph. D., and the importation of millions upon millions of poorly educated immigrants means our current economy is unsustainable, and a collapse into Second World status is unavoidable. It is now baked into the cake. Your grandchildren will lead poorer more limited lives than you do.
Meh. Instead of calling it affirmative action it should have been called temporary racism favoring black people to try to compensate for hundreds of years of white racism against black people. It wasn’t going to last. It’s lasted 2 generations, longer than I think we should have expected but white people were always going to shut it down at some point. Also, at this point a fair number of black people dont like it since too many white people assume they have succeeded only because of affirmative action.
Is this the kind of impediment you think black communities are providing?
“Forty-five percent of Black children go to high-poverty primary and secondary schools, compared with 8% of white students.”
“https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2023/05/15/college-student-gap-between-black-white-americans-worse/70195689007/
Steve
Just a comment which I believe highlights some points.
There are many African American communities which have academic success. Like Nigerian immigrants, where a very high percentage attain collegiate degrees. There are Asian American communities like Hmong who struggle with the education system.
On a practical level, a solution created for a society that was 87% White, 11% Black (almost all descended from former slaves), 2% minorities is ill-fitted for a society that is multicultural (60% White, 20% Latino, 13% Black, 6% Asian) where 20% of African Americans are either immigrants or the child of immigrants. Side effects that were too small to address then need to be addressed now.
steve, that would fall within my criticism of public education which I think has lost its way.
No, the impediments I’m thinking about are the large percentage of out-of-wedlock births, large percentage of single parent households, peer pressure that discourages academic achievement as “acting white”, etc.
There are two separate notions of affirmative action that get confused with each other. The first is affirmative action as a tool to remedy historical racial discrimination. The notion of remedy entails the identification of a particularized violation or set of violations to which the remedy is proportionate to the particular facts. This is almost never what is at issue in college admissions.
The primary Supreme Court case dealing with affirmative action rejected the ability of college admissions to set-aside a certain number of seats for non-whites. By a 5-4 vote, the Regents of the University of California were found guilty of racial discrimination, and by means of remedy ordered to stop the quotas and admit the plaintiff into to the UC Davis medical school.
Justice Powell voted with the majority, but wrote a separate opinion in Bakke that explained his view that while the quotas violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, schools have a legitimate interest consistent with the First Amendment in procuring a diverse student body to allow for a “robust exchange of ideas.” He didn’t believe this allowed racial quotas, but some discretion for schools to obliquely choose for variety of students among many factors like sports or living abroad.
A key difference btw/ the two is that the diversity rationale primarily is intended to benefit someone besides the person being admitted to diversify the student body. Majorities benefit from the exchange of ideas with minority outsiders, or in Powell’s case outside the experience of a Virginia WASP. Also, the diversity rationale is better at promoting immigrants who are likely to have for distinct experiences or backgrounds than Americans, particularly African-Americans that come from second generation (or more) college families. Another conflict is that any system to address systemic racism would require transparency in admission decisions to make sure civil rights are not violated, but to satisfy Justice Powell’s diversity criteria, policies and data are oblique to avoid the appearance of quotas.
The left confuses the two concepts to give diversity value the heft of fighting a legacy of historic racial discrimination when that’s not the intent or design. The right thinks the diversity rationale is a sham, particularly as to ideological diversity, and insists that any remedial action be proportionate to the violation, meaning it must have an end in mind.
It’s a tough topic. From the economic POV there is a long history of compensation when someone has inappropriately benefitted from harming someone. That means that the party which caused harm suffers economically when or while paying back the party that was harmed. In this case it seems like we uniquely want to say that yes, we harmed black people for a couple hundred of years but let’s just say we are all equal now and forget about it.
It’s more complicated because it was one group harming another group. Once we say oops, we are all equal individuals say, mostly correctly, “I didn’t harm that group so why should I suffer. It was my parents, or someone else’s relatives.” So there is no way to compensate the group harmed.
I just don’t see any way to compensate, reasonably, for the harm done, especially as when you do the numbers you see that huge majority of blacks went to non-selective schools and we are talking about a tiny group of whites who were harmed.
“The notion of remedy entails the identification of a particularized violation or set of violations to which the remedy is proportionate to the particular facts. This is almost never what is at issue in college admissions.”
Why is that? We do have the precedent of paying the Japanese for internments. On an international level the Germans paid Jewish families. It probably is the norm through history that when a minority group is granted equality past transgressions are ignored since the majority won’t want to compensate.
“peer pressure that discourages academic achievement as “acting whiteâ€, etc.”
But in this case we are talking about kids who want to go to college, ie act white.
Steve
Forgot to add this from the DOE.
“In 2018, the college enrollment rate was higher for 18- to 24-year-olds who were Asian (59 percent) than for 18- to 24-year- olds who were White (42 percent), Black (37 percent), and Hispanic (36 percent). The overall college enrollment rate has increased since 2000.”
So it turns out almost the same percentage of black kids as white kids want to go to college. They note that they have disproportionately gone to poor K-12 schools which makes it harder to get accepted to better schools. Your answer is too bad, some of your cousins think learning is white and your parents arent married.
Steve
steve: So there is no way to compensate the group harmed.
The institutions that caused the harm are also responsible. When the United States paid compensation for internment of Japanese Americans, all taxpayers had to shoulder the burden—including Japanese Americans. That leaves aside the wisdom of trying to compensate for past discrimination.
Medically related but not sure how something like this can be blamed upon not wanting to act white.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/health/bon-secours-mercy-health-profit-poor-neighborhood.html
Steve
@steve, most of the black students benefitting from admission preferences these days are here on student visas. I don’t think you can stat your way out of this because colleges are hiding what they are doing. Here is an article (“Are we in the Minority”) from the Harvard Crimson about the descents of slaves at Harvard:
“Brown recalls an unfamiliarity within Black spaces during her early days at Harvard. She grew up in Springfield, Ill., a city with a large Generational African American population. But when she arrived at Harvard, she encountered fewer GAA students than she had expected. Occasionally, she felt isolated and misunderstood.”
“Toward the end of last semester, in a GroupMe for Black students at Harvard, students started a conversation about social hierarchy within the Black community. Some expressed concerns that GAA students were perceived to occupy the lowest rung, spurring a number of Black ethnic organizations to hold discussions about inclusivity within their own clubs. Students also expressed concerns about the relative scarcity of GAA students on campus.”
“The demographics seem to have shifted from what they were decades ago. Professor Cornel R. West ’74 says that, when he was the co-president of the Black Students Association in the early 1970s, “about 95 percent of the Black folk in the association were Black people from the United States who had been enslaved in Jim and Jane Crow.—
“Within Black communities at Harvard, there’s an overarching belief that GAA representation is disproportionately low, that “we’re in the minority,†as O’Sullivan explains. Every Black student I interviewed — GAA or not — expressed this as common knowledge.”
As a first-year, I once heard from a teaching fellow of the Introduction to African American Studies course that GAA students make up 10 percent of Harvard’s Black population. For the Class of 2022, that would mean roughly 17 students.
Brown used to joke “that there were only a few of us on campus.â€
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2020/10/15/gaasa-scrut/
PD- I have already said it was time for AA to end, partly because of what you cite. The question is was AA ever the right thing to do? I think it was a flawed remedy but probably the best we could do.
The group most likely to go on to college is Nigerians, ahead of Chinese and Koreans. In general African immigrants are more likely to go than Asian immigrants. Lots of possible reasons for this but among them we should consider that immigrants as a group are coming on a voluntary basis and human capital is being maintained. There is a fair amount of literature suggesting that it takes a very long time to regain that capital once lost.
Steve
Contrary to impression conveyed in comments above, that affirmative action has (unexpectedly) disproportionately benefited African and Caribbean immigrants has been apparent for more than 40 years. I’ve been commenting on it here for 25 years. It’s not a secret.
IMO the solution is not more affirmative action but openness in admissions policies. I think that any college that receives a penny of federal grants should be required to make their admissions policies public.
Even 50 years ago there were many alternatives that would have worked better than affirmative action. Preferences (not just financial aid) for low income applicants, for example. Geographic preferences. Down to the zip code if necessary.
Think maybe we know that now, but not sure we didn’t then. What we had was a history of racial preferences going back hundreds of years. It was just easier to think that the logical way to address it was to have reverse racial preferences for a while. It’s also not beyond the pale to think that if it was based on income there would have been schools that chose mostly poor white kids. Still, wish some schools had tried it so we could see how well it worked.
Actually, wife reminds me that we also have had a long history of preferences based upon sex. Still do in some areas.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/14/us/southern-baptist-convention-annual-meeting/index.html#:~:text=The%20annual%20meeting%20of%20the,to%20its%20having%20women%20pastors.
Steve