Affirmative action: Needed but wrong

Facts and logic are guides to understanding tangible reality; but social and political realities are determined neither by facts nor by logic.

Social or cultural changes, even those widely regarded as desirable, cannot occur in short order, because they require changing hearts and minds of an effective plurality of all the diverse individuals and institutional interests of the population.

History seems to teach, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out, that progress depends on unreasonable people. The actions of those unreasonable people need to be sufficiently extreme as to draw widespread attention, and troubling enough to the powers-that-be as to bring action.

Public actions purporting then to be in accord with the demands of the annoying, unreasonable, activists are likely to be hasty and simplistic.

After a while, the social pendulum that was forced in a desirable direction by extremist activism begins to swing back, perhaps a little toward the opposite extreme, before eventually muddling or middling into a new socio-political norm.

If the Constitution of the United States describes a color-blind, racially neutral society, an important step will have been the elimination of slavery. But the progress under Reconstruction was largely temporary, and the pendulum swung backwards to Jim-Crow laws and widespread segregation.

Desegregation in the military forces began only in the middle of the 20^th century. Movement towards equal access in voting and education came only in the 1960s. Naturally, those pushed the pendulum to actions — affirmative action, followed by political correctness and DEI — that were simplistic and, in abstract logic and proper interpretation of statistical facts, clearly wrong.

So affirmative action was both socio-politically necessary and desirable while also, in logic, wrong [1].

What the half-century of affirmative action and several decades of political correctness have accomplished is not, of course, the disappearance of statistical differences; but a great proportion of hearts and minds of the present generations have become so thoroughly exposed to the mantra that racial discrimination is wrong that it now represents an effectively changed social norm. And that very significant progress will not be completely vitiated by continuing back-and-forth smaller swings of the pendulum.

So it seems an appropriate time to wrestle with the many things that are wrong with affirmative action:

A.   It was based in the first place on invalid interpretation of statistics.

B.   Its practices were never what they were claimed to be.

C.   In education it undermines the unique benefits that education can provide to society.

D.  It has been significantly counter-productive as well as beneficial.

E.   It has been blatantly unfair to several groups.

F.   It entrenches racism and mis-interpretation of social facts and statistics.

A. Invalid interpretation of statistics

The most elementary axiom of statistical analysis is that correlation does not establish causation. Yet the stated necessity for affirmative action was the existence of statistical disparities between black and other Americans, explicitly said to be owing to previous slavery and segregation.

The faulty leap of logic is to presume that the biases and related circumstances active in slave-owning and segregating times and communities remain the same (“systemic racism”) and are nowadays responsible for maintaining contemporary statistical disparities; therefore requiring mandatory contemporary compensating actions.

Slavery and segregation undoubtedly affected every facet of the lives of black Americans and have left their mark in every aspect of black communities; but those marks and influences cannot be erased or vitiated by contemporary actions. As officially enforced slavery and segregation are no longer active, further progress is inevitably slow and proceeding on many fronts, as with other once-discriminated-against groups: Catholics, Chinese, Japanese, Irish, Jews . . .

Sowell [2] has detailed painstakingly the large number of independent variables that cumulate to the experience of any given individual: Economic class, social sector, geography, first-born or later-born, parenting in general (particularly in the earliest years), family environment; and also race. But none of those other factors are always and inevitably linked to race. While many statistical differences do correlate with racial differences, race is not the only nor the prime cause of statistical differences.

B. Its practices were never what they had been claimed to be

The earliest explanation of affirmative action pictured it as giving a little nudge in favor of an individual from an underrepresented group, when two individuals had approximately the same credentials for a given position.

In later years, preferences were typically defended as being aims but not quotas.

In practice, race (and also being female) became the chief criterion irrespective of credentials or standards. McWhorter [1] offers an insider’s acknowledgment of that.

Hypocrisy and outright lying became standard in academic administration, see for example the usual disclaimer in advertisements that “We do not discriminate by race, sex, . . . etc.”. During my stint in academic administration [3], I came to know that newly appointed faculty members enjoyed substantial salary-bonuses if they were female or black or brown; and that even if a department had no vacant position, a position would be created if the right type of individual could be recruited; and the publicly claimed requirement that all positions be advertised did not apply.

C. Affirmative action in education undermines the unique benefits
that formal education could provide to society.

Not all parents are able to teach their children reading, writing, and arithmetic, so elementary schools are necessary, to provide everyone with certain basic capabilities essential for citizens in a well-functioning democracy.

Secondary schools are also needed to provide further essential basics: national history, rudimentary national geography and global geography and history, and something of sociology and psychology, and particularly some math and statistics so that future adult citizens might not be hopelessly bamboozled by advertisers, hucksters, and demagogues.

Unfortunately, since about the middle of the 20^th century, American schools have increasingly short-changed intellectual education in the service of ill- thought-out social engineering. Potential elementary-school teachers could, for example, be told that their prime aim should be to help children attain self-esteem — as though that were possible without the children achieving some actual learning, and as though learning, and overcoming difficulties, were not a good way to grow self-esteem.

The same mistaken view has brought increasingly fewer demands and lower standards in secondary schools, so that international comparisons increasingly show American students to be a far behind and below students of the same age in every other developed country, as well as in many less-developed ones.

The corruption of formal education began before affirmative action, but the latter co-conspires in putting priority on social engineering over intellectual and academic standards.

In academe, affirmative action brought bureaucracies staffed by ill-credentialed ideologues instituting ill-thought-out, inappropriate practices and administrative bloat. Consulting companies flourished by providing pertinent services, which included playing table- or board- games that were supposed to exemplify and instill habits of sensitive cooperation. Workshops, seminars, and retreats, sometimes with attendance mandated for some faculty or staff, featured such banalities and absurdities as assertions that racism bespeaks power and therefore black people could not be racists because they had no power. Search committees were required to include at least one minority or female member; if a particular department had no such faculty member, then one would simply be added from a different discipline [4].

The Supreme Court may not have seen or described their judgment [5] in the same way or on the same grounds, but that they took a different view about military academies fits with my criticism of subordinating intellectual standards to social engineering: social engineering has always been a clear and prime purpose of the military academies, preparing a select, elite group for a particular social task. Racial diversity is therefore a perfectly appropriate aim, comparable in importance with purely intellectual criteria.

D. It has been significantly counter-productive as well as beneficial

The very slow rate of change in statistical disparities was not acknowledged to be inevitable, even as all deep-rooted cultural changes inevitably are. Instead, formal and mandated initiatives increased in intensity, bringing political correctness and the ideology of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”.

As I noted above — again in agreement with McWhorter [1], whereas statistical disparities have not disappeared (as indeed they never will or could [2]), the public emphasis on affirmative action has produced some desirable general cultural change, of hearts and minds, so that it seems reasonable to argue that now may be the time to drop mandates.

Moreover, the experience of half a century demonstrates that, while affirmative action may have produced a desirable general cultural change, it has also been counter-productive in at least two distinct ways.

One, as a number of observers have pointed out, is that present practices have encouraged members of under-represented groups, foremost black children, to believe that society inescapably discriminates against them and that they are in fact entitled to special treatment because they are in need of special treatment, as though they lack the individual ability to succeed.

Affirmative action has also been counter-productive by bringing a backlash among all the groups who have not benefited from it. Caucasians may well take umbrage at assertions that America is systemically racist, since that labels them all indiscriminately as racists. Formerly middle-class Appalachian and Rust-Belt people who have been severely damaged by globalism, without any national initiatives being made to help them specifically, may well wonder why society regards some other groups as more worthy of appropriate help [6].

E. It has been blatantly unfair to several groups, entrenches racism,
and continues mis-interpretation of social facts and statistics

As just noted, every social group that has not benefited from affirmative action can only see the focus on preferences for brown and black racial groups as unwarranted and unfair.

In education, Asian-Americans and Asian immigrants have been demonstrably discriminated against in a major way. Their access to the most elite institutions has been very significantly and directly decreased by the admission of black and brown people with far worse intellectual credentials.

The criterion of race brings such absurdities as regarding highly sophisticated black children from wealthy families as equally needing special treatment as children from poverty- and crime-stricken urban areas. Black people from other parts of the world receive the same preferential treatment even as nothing in their backgrounds may have been harm from slavery or segregation.

F. It entrenches racism and mis-interpretation of social facts and statistics

Progress toward a genuinely race-neutral, color-blind society can only be hindered by the continuing emphasis on gathering and making public statistics based on racial categories.

Race is a biological category, with such criteria as skin color, hair texture, and such physiological characteristics as blood pressure, frequency of sickle-cell anemia, or response to some medications.

Classifying by race for any non-biological reason presupposes, clearly implies, that biological race is significantly linked with social and political matters. That is the very definition of racist thinking.

As Chief Justice Roberts remarked long ago, the way to stop discriminating by race is to stop discriminating by race. The collection and publication of social statistics categorized by race should come to an end [7]. That would also end the absurdity of the category of “Hispanic”, whose only effective definition in practice is that one can choose it — or not — on the basis of any of a variety of national or ancestral or linguistic criteria.

***************************************************************************

[1]  As I was drafting this post, I was delighted to see John McWhorter reach the same conclusion: John McWhorter, “My experience of racial preferences in academia”, New York Times, Opinion, 4 July 2023

[2]  Thomas Sowell, Discrimination and Disparities, Basic Books, 2019 (rev. ed.)

[3]  Dean of Arts & Sciences (1978-86), Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech)

[4]  My first-hand personal experience with a V-P for Diversity Cornel Morton

[5]  Supreme Court, October 2022 term; judgment released 29 June 2023

[6]  Some pundits have seen such resentments as contributing significantly to the election and continuing support of Donald Trump

[7]  “Actually, Let’s not disaggregate more educational data by race”; https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2023/04/actually-lets-not-disaggregate-more-educational-data-by-race/