In his response to my post last week on affirmative action, Florindo Volpacchio emphasizes that the goal of affirmative action is “to recognize the social pathology of discrimination and inequality that privileged race and sexual identity to begin with.” It is certainly important to remember this history and its effects on present conditions, and Volpacchio rightly points out past injustices, including slavery and segregation. Yet those injustices are also clearly in the past. There are no longer any legally enforced forms of segregation and discrimination against Blacks, and the United States can be proud of the progress that has been made. But while Volpacchio seeks to judge affirmative action based on its symbolic intent, its practical effects cannot be ignored, especially as they perpetuate the type of discrimination based on race that they are meant to oppose. Since the history of racial injustice involved the categorization and differential treatment of people based on their race, the resistance to this history must reject such differential treatment and affirm the principle of equality before the law. Yet affirmative action re-establishes racial discrimination as a valid policy for college admissions and hiring. Though this policy favors Blacks today, this can only be done at the cost of disfavoring others, to the point where it disfavors Asian Americans in comparison to both Blacks and Whites. As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated through his careful and extensive research, the track record of worldwide attempts to engineer equality through a set of reverse discriminatory practices is in fact dismal, leading consistently to a skewing of benefits to the wealthier members of the groups they are meant to assist as well as to growing identity-based polarization and even civil war.[1]
But rather than looking into such research on the practical effects of such policies, Volpacchio prefers moral grandstanding. He complains that the point of the cases before the Supreme Court concerning racial preferences in college admissions is to assert “the self-claimed rights and self-interests of individuals against the social pathology.” The implication is that these rights and interests of individuals are based on self-interest rather than a moral affirmation of principle. Yet racism is precisely an attack against the rights and interests of individuals, and the proper response would be to protect those rights. Racist biases are an example of treating people not as individuals but based on their belonging to a group. If one is to oppose racism, then it would make sense to insist that people be treated as individuals.
In a twist on this strategy of entrenching rather than opposing biases based on group affiliation, the sociologist Jennifer Lee has argued that affirmative action should be maintained as a remedy for a demonstrated bias that schoolteachers have toward Asian American students, in which teachers rate them as more gifted than they actually are as measured by standardized tests.[2] Lee uses these examples of positive bias as an argument for why racial preferences that explicitly disadvantage Asian Americans are in fact a justified measure for leveling the playing field, since Asian Americans make up 6 percent of the population but constitute over 27 percent of Harvard’s latest incoming freshman class and would constitute an even higher proportion without current policies designed to limit their numbers.
Such biases concerning Asian Americans function like all biases, as ways in which we generalize from our perception of trends in order to quickly judge individual cases. The remedy for such biases would not be to create preferences in the other direction but to treat each individual case on its own merits. That is, we need to work to train educators to recognize their biases so that they can judge each individual fairly, in the same way that Jennifer L. Eberhardt recommends that we train our law enforcement officers to avoid bias in their policing.[3] While biases will always exist in our judgments, and we should seek to work against such biases in our decision-making, proponents of affirmative action seem to regard the presence of both positive and negative biases as a social pathology that must be corrected through discriminatory policies. Yet such attempts to socially engineer compensating preferences for all our biases is a fool’s errand, sure to affect decision-making in ways that punish the innocent without aiding the victims, leading to a continuation of the biases they are meant to control. The unfairness of higher admissions standards for Asian Americans than for other groups seems to be obvious. They are clearly uninvolved in any injustices against other minorities in America’s past, and in fact their parents or grandparents may even have been victims of prior discrimination as well. Like everyone who wants to be treated fairly and free of bias, they should be treated as individuals rather than be penalized for being part of a group.
Should any situation in which a disproportionate share of an ethnic group is admitted to colleges or is part of a profession become a reason to set up barriers for them? In fact, there is no support for the idea that disproportionate representation in a profession or in college admissions would be prima facie a sign of racism. In the absence of discrimination, a variety of reasons, including interests, skills, family history, and customs, lead to disparities between ethnic groups in their representation in all areas of life, from recreational activities to educational achievement to professions. When Volpacchio indicates that “[a] community achieves liberal values and harmony through the recognition of the historicity of difference, not through its benign neglect,” his point seems to be that we should recognize the history of racism. Yet this history consists precisely in the attempt to constrain people’s decisions based on their racial group, when in fact groups originate, cohere, and transform based on unpredictable individual decisions. “Benign neglect” of these dynamics would allow individuals to make such decisions, realizing that such freedom will always result in patterns that do not match proportional representation by ethnic group. To recognize the historicity of difference would be to accept such transformations of groups based on individual decisions and to resist the temptation to categorize, penalize, or favor people based on their perceived belonging to a group.
The underlying problem seems to be that Volpacchio treats racism “like some pathogen hiding in the nervous system of the social body that finally bursts forth from a social trauma.” By treating racism as a kind of continually lurking virus, the case for affirmative action seems to be based less on empirical evidence about its effects or rational arguments about its moral meaning than on a sense of moral outrage at our racist past and a pessimism about our ability to overcome racism once its legal sanctioning has been eliminated. The moral outrage, while in some sense laudable, is also cheap, as it establishes in affirmative action a policy that is much more easily implemented than the kinds of efforts that would be necessary to address the problems of an underclass that are not confined to one particular race. Moreover, the counterproductive nature of the policy in its real-world effects provides a perennial justification for its continuation as a means of stamping out the racism that it is itself creating. At the same time, the pessimism is in fact unwarranted, as we have made clear and significant progress in our attitudes from a situation in which it could be generally accepted that Blacks would be forced to ride at the back of the bus or use the colored bathrooms to a new environment in which there is a pervasive fear of being labeled a racist.[4]
1. Thomas Sowell, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (New York: William Morrow, 1990).
2. Jennifer Lee, “Asian American Students Face Bias in More Than One Way,” New York Times, November 4, 2022.
3. Jennifer L. Eberhardt, Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do (New York: Penguin, 2020 [Viking, 2019]).
4. On the role of such fear of being labeled a racist in the development of “woke” racism, see John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021).
I see it as sophistry to claim that to oppose racism is to treat people as individuals rather than groups when individuals have already been pre-assorted by American history into social groups correlating with differential outcomes for historically concrete reasons. To oppose racism is surely not to validate that history as our starting point and then to act as if it were absent in judging ‘individuals’ solely on their own academically relevant information, whatever that might be, whether crew participation ($2k plus per year for club sports with much higher acceptance rates and much lower competition), volunteer trips to Africa ($$), SAT scores (highly correlated with parental income), or the prestige of one’s secondary school (the most prestigious and best at the admissions games being expensive northeastern prep schools such as Exeter, Dalton, Northfield Mt. Hermon, Hotchkiss, Andover).