In a 6-2 decision yesterday, the Supreme Court dealt a major blow to affirmative action, upholding Michigan’s decision to ban its use in the admissions process at state universities. Although the six supporters based their judgement on a few different opinions, all seemed to be in agreement that the voters can’t be forced into affirmative action policies against their will.
In general, the Supreme Court—including some of the liberal judges, by the way—is on the side of the angels in this case. But that’s not to say that the problems race based affirmative action programs in college admissions seek to address aren’t real. There’s a basic point that should not be forgotten in dealing with anything touching on race: The place of African Americans in the United States is a uniquely difficult and charged question. The history of slavery, segregation and entrenched racism in the United States cannot be denied and should not be minimized. The effects of this history are still very much with us today, and while the overwhelming majority of Americans repudiate racist ideologies and beliefs, the continuing presence of racist ideas, prejudices and emotions in this country is a reality that policy makers and people of good will cannot and should not ignore.
It is naive to think otherwise, and any look at how our system works and any thoughts about whether it works fairly have to include a serious and honest reflection on the fading but real potency of race.
There are still many African Americans in the United States who as young people were denied a fair chance at an education by legal racism embodied in southern Jim Crow laws. Legislatures in southern states who illegally blocked blacks from voting passed laws that required them to pay taxes for universities that they could not attend. The informal but legally tolerated northern system of housing discrimination and segregation had similar consequences by forcing African Americans to live in neighborhoods poorly served by the school system. A decent and serious society will not make educational or other important policy decisions without taking this history and this heritage into account.
However, dealing with historical injustice is a hugely difficult task and there is little sign that today’s bureaucratic diversity industry is up to the job—or really even very interested in the job.
Affirmative action programs in college admissions often have perverse results. A young woman of Korean ancestry, for example, is likely to have to do much better than her African American or Latino peers (both female and male) to get a spot at the University of California. Yet this Korean girl in no way enjoys unfair advantages in American life due to past anti-black racism. Indeed, she is a victim of racist immigration legislation; anti-Asian immigration laws placed barriers in the path of her ancestors’ immigration to the US. She perhaps would be from a much wealthier family if her great grandparents hadn’t been barred by US law from settling here.
It seems perverse and grotesque that someone who played no part in any racist history, a first generation immigrant from a hard working family, should suffer discrimination in an effort to remedy past injustices and one can hardly complain when voters tell their state governments that such policies must stop.
Historical justice is in any case an impossible thing to define—much less to administer. What does an Irish person, descended from a long line of dispossessed peasants who suffered generations of discrimination and exploitation under British law, deserve today by way of compensation? What reparations should Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, pay citizens of the Baltic republics for fifty years of brutal misrule? What should the innocent Jewish victims of Arab anti-Israel frenzy, often expropriated and driven out of their homes across the Arab world following the establishment of the State of Israel, get as compensation? How much do modern Americans owe the Cherokee—and on and on and on?
That doesn’t mean that we should ignore the past, but government policy can’t hope to perform what an insurance company promised in a recent series of commercials: to make it “as if it never even happened.” Policy has to look forward more than back, and it has to be concerned with justice in the here and now.
Ultimately, this is why status-based forms of affirmative action seem better than race based ones. President Obama’s kids don’t need any special help in getting into college, but there are many kids of all races and ethnic groups who have demonstrated unusual talent and grit by achieving in difficult circumstances. Kids who go to terrible schools, who overcome economic disadvantages, who are the first in their family to complete high school, or who grow up in neighborhoods that are socially distressed can and should be treated with the respect their achievements warrant.
The Court’s decision looked at one referendum in one state, but in thinking about the whole question of educational opportunity and justice, there are much deeper questions to consider. The rampant credentialism in American society that has led to a bloated and ineffective higher ed system is a problem. The grotesquely swollen administrative overhead and the high price of tuition may do more to keep poor and minority kids away from opportunities than any admissions policies. The disproportionate weight that we give to the prestige of colleges makes the whole college admissions process much more consequential than it really should be. The mediocrity and worse of so much American K-12 education does much more to limit the horizons of our young people than any college admissions bottleneck, and the weight of these failures falls most heavily on the poor and the marginal.
And the dysfunction of our educational system, and the burdens those failures place on society at large as well as on the poor and the underprivileged are only a part of the story. Lots of people in America today are poorly served by our key social institutions. Ultimately the best path forward involves reforming and remodeling our core institutions so that they work better and cost less.
Setting up quotas and preferences in a dysfunctional system is not the way to make progress in the United States. But as we reform our systems, we can’t do that job fairly or well without thinking carefully about how the changes we make will affect the most vulnerable and the least advantaged in our society. The Court was right to uphold the rights of Michigan voters to ban race based affirmative action in university admissions, but that does not mean that America doesn’t have a lot of unfinished business when it comes to the task of social reform.