November 14, 2004
affirmative action
A discussion of affirmative action is difficult because we all mean different things by the term and we read unintended meanings into what others say. What we want is to cast a wider net and value diversity, what we get are quotas or goals based on race. Instead of getting a diversity of ideas, we match and mix colors as if we were selecting furniture for our living room. In the process, we create systems so opaque that even the best students have no idea whether or not they can get into the university of their choice. The system really is not working as intended.
I have included references on an Amazon list. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/listmania/list-browse/-/229GAJK2P0TZP/ref=cm_aya_av.lm_more/002-0679249-4192857
Affirmative action remains necessary because of how we make judgments and assess the results of our decisions. Judgments are based on experience and we habitually (and often unconsciously) employ shortcuts and rules of thumb to the decisions we make. We couldn’t live our lives without them. Imagine reassessing your preferences each time you walked into a MacDonald’s. Most of us believe our judgments are better than they actually are because of the way we remember them, attributing success to our good sense and sometimes forgetting about failure entirely. But useful shortcuts can be pernicious when working with people of different cultures or backgrounds. We don’t always favor people who are like us, but we always favor people who our preferences favor. That is just a tautology.
The affirmative action I support “casts a wider net” and works affirmatively to overcome traditional and unconscious discrimination. It is not new. Many organizations have employed geographical affirmative action for a long time. The U.S. military academies explicitly balance their classes geographically, although they don’t call it affirmative action, since cadets must come from all the states and each congressional district. The same basic logic is at work when a firm does a nationwide search for applicants. A company based in New York could find all the people it needs locally, but most firms feel they get a better mix if they go nationwide. There is no need for affirmative action to clash with merit, in fact you usually get a better mix.
Affirmative action, as most people understand it today has drifted from the model above. It was initially conceived as a way to compensate for past discrimination and applied to black and female applicants for jobs and universities. Gender affirmative action worked very well, maybe too well, to the extent that females are now a majority among undergraduates at the nations best universities. The situation with black applicants has been less successful.
Instead of casting a wider net, firms and universities established goals and defacto quotas. The University of Michigan actually had a point system, whereby an applicant got an extra 20 points for being black and only 13 points for a perfect SAT score. The Supreme Court declared this particular application unconstitutional last year, but universities clearly are still using less explicit criteria to accomplish the same objective. Does it make sense?
Goals and quotas based on race are clearly not fair. The son of a black millionaire would get preference over the son of a white unemployed high school drop under many of these schemes. The more important question might be, does it work? The jury is out on that one. Some have argued (in the books I have included on the list) that it does indeed help individual blacks and by extension the greater black community. Others say that it is harmful since it perpetuates race consciousness and often hurts even the supposed beneficiaries since they are pushed too far too fast and often fail.
I think I can add a personal insight in this regard. I am the white son of high school dropouts, who went to a city school and didn’t learn much. Fortunately for me, I got into a small state school that gave opportunity to learn, but didn’t expect much. By the time I finished my undergrad, I had caught up with my better-prepared peers and went on to a better education and a good job. I am convinced that had I been pushed into a competitive Ivy League School, I would have justifiably flushed out and maybe had no college education at all. My test scores were very good, but my study habits were abysmal and my attitude was worse.
What am I saying about affirmative action? I support the first type, but I oppose goals and timetables. We should be concerned with making the criteria transparent. Individuals and groups have the responsibility to adapt to high standards. If we based admissions on grades and SATs, we would likely to have Asians overrepresented; whites underrepresented and African Americans significantly underrepresented at elite universities. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. Virtually every student who wants to go to university in the U.S. can find a place. Maybe, like me, some will find a more appropriate places. Achievements are rarely distributed evenly over populations but over time, the distributions change, so the current situation is not forever.
The problem does not start in college and can't be solved there. We need to invest more in our schools for all pupils and we have to change the habits of students and parents who may not understand the value of education. Lest I be accused of elitism, I will again speak from my own experience. When I told my father that I was taking a test for an important position, he told me to “forget it! Those things are only for rich kids.” (In fairness to him, he did value education, but his horizon on it was limited) I didn’t take his advice. This kind of advice clearly has the capacity to become self-fulfilling. Had I chosen to embrace the excuse, it would have been true. No two people have the same chance in life. It is not fair. But we all have a choice.
This subject is much bigger than I can handle on these pages. I look forward to your comments.
Good piece Jack.
Look I’m a 52 year old pudgy, pastey, balding, white guy. I don’t care if you’re green, blue or purple, a man or a woman. If you are qualified to get the position, you should get it, and get a salary commensurate with your skills.
That being said, if you work with the public, in the service industry, you have to speak English.
Please.
After many frequent discussions with friends, family, and co-workers, I’ve found that arguments about Affirmative Action tend to boil down to a difference in the definition of “equality”. In my social circles, there are two camps on the subject.
The first camp believes in what I call “equality of the individual”. This means that, all other things (education, skill level, etc.) being equal, two people of different races should have the same opportunities. In short, their opportunities should be “color blind”.
The second camp believes in what I call “equality of the race”. This means that, for example, the AVERAGE black person should have the same opportunities as the AVERAGE white person. My friends refer to this as “average-man” equality.
Both of these are noble goals in theory, but they tend to conflict with one another in practice.
For example, if black billionaires and white billionaires are treated equal, does it matter that there are dramatically fewer black billionaires than white billionaires? “Color-blind” people would say no, while “average-man” advocates would say yes.
Likewise, the “color-blind” tend to be opposed to Affirmative Action, or anything that takes race into account at all. This is not because their bigots; it’s simply because they view equality differently. Like Rocky above, they believe that opportunity should be based on skills and effort, and not on race.
Unfortunately, once a racial divide exists, any attempt to regain “average-man” equality requires violating “color-blind” equality. Is it worth it? Which is “more right”? I wish I knew.
Posted by: Rob Cottrell at November 14, 2004 01:07 PMRob
Thanks for your comment. I agree with your assessment.
My belief is if you protect individual rights, group rights follow if the groups are valid. If you protect group rights, individual rights are compromised. (See the sati story below.)
Advocating group rights is sometimes expedient in the short term, but it is always dangerous. Societies with strong intergenerational group identities end up fractured and often bloody. Golden ages of radically different groups living in daily proximity turn out to be a lot less golden with a closer look. Either they are of short duration, or a dominant group “tolerates” the others and makes the rules. Ironically, the longest-lived examples of apparent group harmony have been in empires where a foreign group keeps the order among local groups. They do this by establishing and enforcing basic law, but then the collapse of the empire brings an orgy of communal violence.
I good illustration of group versus individual rights is about “sati”, the practice in India of burning the widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. The British banned the practice in 1829. In an early example of political correctness, some people complained to the local British authority that he was being culturally insensitive. The official agreed that he would respect the local custom of sati, but the local people also had to respect his custom of hanging anyone involved.
The United States has been phenomenally successful in breaking down group identities. Ethnic identities centuries old succumbed to intermarriage and plain neglect in the U.S. because the authorities steadfastly refused to support them in a legal sense. It is a mistake to abandon this practice, by returning to medieval concepts of group identity. We should address the problem in other ways.
Another unintended consequence of affirmative action is that black sudents and graduates of elite insitutions often contend with the assumption by their peers that they only got in because of race. I went to a private day school then a boarding school and then an Ivy League university. When I show up for interviews I can sometimes see the surprise in recruiters faces. I also remember when I was applying to college not applying to Harvard or Yale because I thought I would get in and my friends would hate me. I was a good student but not exceptional; not the head of student council or an athlete or debate champ. I think I am the only person I knew who got into all five of the schools where I applied. Sometimes I think I would have been a more successful student if my parents were footing the bill in college. Or if I had had to wait tables to support myself. Any discussion of this system has to take into account the financial resources allocated as well. I’ve read some people trying to hash out the difference between equal opportunity and equal outcomes but I’m not sure what clarity that brings to the argument.
Posted by: Bettina at November 14, 2004 03:25 PMJack,
I, too, tend to support individual rights over group rights. However, group rights advocates do have one very valid point, which I will attempt to illustrate.
Imagine a community where most of the lower class, poor, and uneducated are black, while most of the middle-to-upper class, wealthy, and educated are white. Likewise, most violent crime takes place among the poor — and therefore black — population. (This shouldn’t be hard — there are far too many communities like this.) Even if the individual rights are respected (the hardworking black engineer gets the same pay as the hardworking white engineer), unconscious racism still occurs. Since most of the poor and uneducated are black, when you see a black man, you tend to assume (either consciously or subconsciously) that he is poor and uneducated. The hardworking black engineer is “guilty by association” due to his race. Since the individual is judged by the group he belongs to, individual rights alone cannot protect him.
This is where things get really difficult to fix. You don’t want to ignore the problem, but if you apply Affirmative Action-type programs, you lose individual rights, and further define and divide the groups.
Perhaps the best we can really hope for is for the greatest fear of the old Southern slaveholders to come true — amalgomation. Once we’re all intermarried, interbred, and interrelated, skin color won’t be any more important than hair color or eye color.
Posted by: Rob Cottrell at November 14, 2004 03:46 PMI think it’s a B.S. Issue. All affirmative action does is replace a barely qualified person of the majority with a barely qualified person of the minority.
The hidden converse of the argument against affirmative action is that somehow, people deserve those jobs less if they’re minorities, and deserve them more if they’re WASP. Truth is, society’s always produced situations where the law has had to step in to ensure fairness. Why fairness in hiring practices shouldn’t be brought into the system is beyond me.
I mean, why is it reverse discrimination to give Blacks proportionate representation in the workforce? Why is having their fair share of jobs that bad of an idea? The thing is that most people resisting this are resisting this because they just don’t want to be troubled.
How many conservatives realize that words and phrases like reverse discrimination come out of white supremacist circles? How many people understand that the Republican responses to racial issues have their historical basis less in altruism for the black community, and more in a strategy to steal the south from a Democratic party that had alienated the region’s whites with civil rights legislation?
Besides, any black person asked about how they got their job, if they got it properly, can always say, they got it because they were qualified for it.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at November 14, 2004 04:31 PMRob
That is why I support the casting a wider net version of affirmative action. We don’t do nothing, but we also don’t make group membership the dominant aspect of the decision.
Besides affirmative action does little or nothing to help the poor guy on the crime filled streets. His problem is not really competition for jobs; it is disorder. He often does not even get to the stage where he can compete for good jobs or a place at the university. The best things the authorities can do for him is establish reasonable expectations and do a better job of fighting crime, so that our guy or his family are less likely to be victims of violence.
Bettina
You make some good points. If I was czar of the world, I would make college education inexpensive, but never free. People don’t value what they get too easily. This is especially true with education; you have to believe you earned it in order to want more and it is, in fact, something nobody CAN give you.
One point tangential to what you said. There should be a place for “good students” in excellent colleges. Some of the most successful people I know where “only” good students in HS. They bloomed in college or professions. In fact, there almost seems to be a negative correlation between a perfect HS record and success in later life. My own prejudice is that getting a perfect HS GPA requires significant ass kissing that selects out some of the most independent thinkers.
It is a bit of a shame that we fix so much of a person’s future before they are 18. I believe in a different approach for college admissions. The university should establish minimum criteria (SAT, grades etc) that students need to succeed and then hold a lottery for the open positions. That could ensure more real diversify (of ideas as well as race), it would be transparent and much cheaper.
Stephen
The problem comes with moving not one candidate but several. If you have 100 applicants in rank order for ten jobs and you move a minority applicant from number 11 to number ten, you displace one person. If you move an applicant from number 25 to number 10, you still displace only one applicant, but 15 people seem to be displaced and are aggrieved.
I don’t call it reverse discrimination, just discrimination. It may be justified in some cases, but it is always dangerous.
As for qualification, that is an interesting and misused term. I was a swimmer in HS. I swam the 100 freestyle and was qualified to do so (i.e. I could swim 100 yards). But despite my aspirations and hard work, I couldn’t make the Olympic team just because I wasn’t as fast as some others. I could finish the distance and it was only a couple seconds difference. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 and maybe a little more – that was the only difference. Despite my obvious qualifications, they wouldn’t even let me try out.
Anybody see the 60 minutes thing on the “top 10” rule in Texas?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/15/60minutes/main649704.shtml
I actually think this is great, but maybe it should be reduced to “top 5”, just so the universities aren’t overwhelmed by demand.
Julia
Posted by: Julia at November 14, 2004 05:08 PMAnother thing, the people I knew in college that weren’t taking it seriously, and getting drunk all the time, and losing their scholarships were all white fraternity boys who came from good schools, good families, and had good grades in high school.
Julia
Posted by: Julia at November 14, 2004 05:13 PM
“Since most of the poor and uneducated are black, when you see a black man, you tend to assume (either consciously or subconsciously) that he is poor and uneducated.”
Excuse me Rob, I think that statement is a load of crap. Since Martin Luther King Jr asked us to “Judge by the character of one’s soul”.
I don’t see a black man or a white man, I see a man.
You treat people as you want to be treated.
Rocky
I sure agree that it is the way we should be. It is the way most of us try to be and probably even the way most of us think we are. But we have our unconscious frames. Take a look at the “Decision Traps” book I put in the Amazon link. I read that book a dozen years ago and since have observed its accuracy in my own decisions and those of others. It is this human fallibility that makes me ambivalent enough to give my qualified support to the non-goal, non-quota version of affirmative action.
Julia
Re the frat boys. Sometimes you can’t learn until you are ready. Many students would benefit from a year or two off before they go to college. It seems more often the case for young men. I am encouraging my 17-year-old son to consider the USMC before going to college. We should try to get out of the mindset that all students should start college immediately after HS.
Posted by: jack at November 14, 2004 07:16 PMJack, for me the decision making process is easy. I make them. Too many management people in this country are afraid to make decisions because they are afraid to make mistakes.
I have worked for large corporations that lose money tripping over dollars to pick up nickels.
As a child I was allowed to make mistakes, and you know what, I learned.
All you can do in life is review the information you have and make a decision based on it.
I have seen people in their race for the top ignore the hard lessons that are learned at the bottom.
Hey, you’ve got a 50-50 chance in life.
If you refuse to make the hard decisions, your odds go down greatly, because you may have missed the opportunity to make a mistake you might have learned from.
Jack,
to give you some background.
The business I have been in for the last 15 years afforded me the opportunity to see many of these CEOs in action. I have been part of (as a technician) many of the conferences that companies send their management to, so that they can learn from folks like the author of the book that you linked.
As a consequence I have heard for free the lectures that Corporate America pays millions of dollars to hear.
All of this is only common sense. There is no magic pill, or holy grail to the information that they give out. We just don’t want to think that hard.
The problem with American business, is that every one is so busy covering their butts, or trying to skip steps on up the ladder, that there is no compassion for the highly qualified, but minority hiree.
That, combined with the unholy fear that this minority guy may take my job someday has put Corporate America where it is today.
We have laws against discrimination. Affirmative Action is obsolete.
Rocky
I agree that most of what we hear in the lectures is common sense and that sometimes we should just have the courage to do something. Often a “wrong” decision is better than no decision.
What impressed me about that book and the subsequent things I have read along those lines was not the actual decision making, but the importance of framing and understanding our own biases and limitations when makign decisions. One learning experience I took from the book (although I don’t recall if the book actually advocated it) was to write down my predictions for important things I was working on and then put my writing aside until after the event. I was surprised that not only were my predictions not as good as I honestly recalled, but that my mind had rearranged facts to include evidence not available at the time. It made me more humble in my assessment of others and myself.
It is ironic that I find myself defending affirmative action, at least in this limited extent. I think that the nature of decision-making above compels us to consider people outside our usual circles. It all depends on how much we do that, however. Affirmative action as practiced at many universities and firms is racist and contrary to the best American traditions, in my opinion. I support a weakened form of the disease, kind of like a vaccination against a greater evil.
Jack, so what you are saying is that all things being equal, they are unequal?
You can’t legislate against ignorance.
All things considered I think that we have come a long way since the fifties and sixties.
I know that we all hoped that it would be faster but progress takes time.
Rocky
Pretty much that’s what I think. People should be treated equal under the law. I think we should strive for similar opportunity. I don’t believe equality in outcomes is a possible or even a desirable goal.
“Anybody see the 60 minutes thing on the “top 10” rule in Texas?”
I saw this, and I thought it was great also because it helps minorities from poor schools. As the segment pointed out, it has it’s shortfalls, but these could easily be eliminated with a minimum GPA requirement.
Posted by: political news at November 15, 2004 01:21 AMPolitical news
Julia mentioned it above. Probably most people think it is a good solution to make the pie bigger, but we still have a distribution problem. I live in Virginia. We have a good state system, which seems to provide a space for everyone. I don’t know the figures, but I would bet that anyone in the top 10% of his/her class can find a seat in the system in fact, if not in theory. You can probably get a good education at any of the campuses, but students who attend the University of Virginia or William & Mary get more prestige and better job prospects. There are only so many spots at these particular institutions and their high standards are maintained by selective admissions. If you greatly expanded enrollment at these places, they would lose the qualities that make them unique. We are still back to who gets what.
Posted by: jack at November 15, 2004 04:14 AMQUOTAS. “Quotas”…a topic I know of well. I even have the scores which are 100 points in verbal and math scores below for RACE quotas admissions.
And,I have the scores and figs. on how many high scoring kids did not get into med. schools because of quota admissions. Every member of my family and assocs. have faced reverse discrimination over last 20+ years. We are totally disgusted with quotas over merit. Seventy percent of the univ programs, subjects, staff, and students don’t belong in any univ. They’ve been sending this country down, down, down.
We are well aware what all this has done to this country. We are no longer going to be polite and openly mocking and scorning all quotas who were given positions. We know the scores and more.
Posted by: Alex at November 15, 2004 10:39 PM
I appreciate how these “moral issues” like getting rid of a leg up for minorities motivate folks in the Red States to vote for Bush. I am making over $300K per year and love how Bush will help reduce my tax bill, although my tax savings from Kerry losing will be a drop in the bucket compared to those making $300 mil per year. Funny how “morality” pays for the rich. Hey Joe Publics in the Red States, as Bush calls you, keep voting for us Rich guys. You’ll only understand how hoodwinked you are when they automate the last jobs that can’t be outsourced, like flipping burgers. You’ll have plenty more time then to think about these “moral issues.” In fact, there won’t be work for any working stiffs, with true equal opportunity unemployment for all.
Posted by: J at November 15, 2004 10:50 PMI think I pointed this out to somebody in the Baylor Lariat a long time ago, but College Admissions are discriminatory by their very nature. If you’re so close to the borderline that you’re not accepted because of Affirmative action, Reverse Discrimination is not the the sum total of your problems. Also, given the many applicants that come in, you’d be making such close choices anyways.
Besides, how can you call it reverse discrimination when whites are overrepresented as a race in colleges? You could make the case that by allowing a black person to sit at a diner instead of being segregated, you were denying a deserving white man of an opportunity to eat lunch there.
When it comes down to it, the fight against affirmative action is mostly about race-baiting: Deserving whites deprived of their due by incompetent, underqualified Blacks. I doubt you support that, but that is the underlying logic of the thing.
Posted by: Stephen Daugherty at November 15, 2004 10:53 PMJ
Glad you are so rich. Maybe that is why you have trouble understanding that many people vote for who they think is best for their country, not only for their own economic interests.
The red states did not elect George Bush by themselves. More than half of all voters voted for him. He increased his lead in 2000 in 45 out of the fifty states and did better in 2004 even in California and John Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts. The fact is that many of your neighbors voted for George Bush. It wasn’t a trick; he won.
Stephen
I suppose some people oppose affirmative on racial grounds. I oppose affirmative action in its stronger forms because it is racist.
The problem with admissions goes much deeper than being near the cut off. In order to increase their quotas, universities have gone to great lengths to cloud the whole process.
For example, admission offices have downplayed standardized tests. Remember why universities started to use standardized tests? It was to help poor and underprivileged students who couldn’t have the high class experiences compete. Now we are back to the bad old days. Rich kids’ parents can afford to send them on trips to Europe. They can afford to do volunteer work, instead of a summer job at McDonalds’, or they can get impressive sounding internships. A poor, but smart kid has a good chance of doing well on an SAT. He has almost no chance of getting the other things the rich have. So we now make it easier for the rich white kids (who no longer are threatened as much by the standardized tests) and some richer black kids. We got the colors right, but we haven’t addressed the real problem of opportunity.
Harvard found that many of its “black” students are immigrants to the U.S. or sons and daughters of privileged black people. That is not what we are looking for. Diversity on campus should mean diversity of ideas. Maybe they should work on getting more conservative professors at the Ivy League. After all, a rich, black Harvard lawyer and a rich white Harvard lawyer might come in different colors, but they don’t really represent any diversity.
Baloney with the sitting at the diner analogy!!!
Use your common sense. We don’t want anyone abused.
I know of what I commented about! We know the scores. Oh, yes, it has been reverse discrimination.
It would be great to have more conservative faculty in the Ivy League but people are so cautious on campuses nowadays. I remember one day, a decade ago walking on campus and a group of minority students had gone out the night before and thrown away all of the Daily Pennsylvanians as a protest. I don’t think it was in response to any particular article I thnk it was about the lack of minority columnists (none had applied). Anyway, this action was never criticized by the faculty or administration but imagine if this had happened to the publication of black students, it was a weekly at the time. Academia is the last place to look for real scholarship or debate anymore.
Posted by: Bettina at November 16, 2004 08:38 PMWhat ever happened to the give a hand up philosophy? Wouldn’t it be cheaper in the long run to help out promising minority students, so they could help mentor those that come after them?
Rocky
We should help out in general. The problem with affirmative action is that you are often helping the already well off and leaving the rest behind.
It didn’t help poor whites that the Rockefeller children went to college and it doesn’t help the poor black kids when the richer blacks get special help.
The best way to help the poor succeed (black or white) is to offer opportunity and consistent standards.
I really think the white establishment supports that affirmative action precisely because it is unfair and benefits them. The biggest threat to the rich kid is a smart poor kid and a standardized test. Records and grades can be manipulated. Job experience can be created. Performance on an SAT can be enhanced with practice, but there is no way to bring a 900 to a 1300. These tests are an equalizer. Affirmative action discounts them and emphasizes “intangibles”. The rich kids have the intangibles because their parents can buy them. Now little Johnny Rockefeller no longer has to worry about some smarty poor kid taking his position. He can easily sacrifice some of the positions that would have been awarded on merit. He wasn’t in competition for them anyway. Everyone feels good and anyone who criticizes the system can be labeled a retrograde bigot.
What is worse, the black kid who got in questions his own ability and feels grateful to the people who “got him in.” If left alone, he probably could get in somewhere on his merits. Now he feels he dependent on the affirmative action system.
So what are the effects?
It maintains the establishment
Rewards the politically savvy
Simultaneously creates a feeling of entitlement and dependence in its recipients
Makes merit less important
Makes a large segment of the non-recipient population angry
Perpetuates racist ideas of inferiority
Is it worth the price?
Jack,
That’s just what this country needs, more kids with political savvy.
Rocky
Political savvy in the sense of destructive politics of personal aggrandizement is not what we need and that is what it teaches.
Posted by: jack at November 17, 2004 11:38 AMJack,
please excuse my sarcasm. I have a problem with the tenor of speech on collage campuses today. Students need to take a step back and realize the importance of an exchange of ideas from both sides. The recent trend of squashing any opposing view is appalling.
Rocky
Sorry. I misinterpreted your intent.
Posted by: jack at November 17, 2004 12:17 PMAs an Added Comment:
Sounds like many who commented have little lige and career experience.
Quotas are put ahead in many areas and in many careers. Try having them put ahead in career positions. Try dealing with that over merit. Family members and assocs. left positions because of that going on. Know of what I speak. That is what I meant when I stated my family members and others have known have faced awful reverse discrimination. Oh, yes, we are very smart people and multi-talented. So, I was not just speaking of univ. scores or med. admissions. I speak from a wide variety of experiences of many different people. We have seen so much that we are going to mock and scorn to people’s faces. Better not not give any of any quota doctor or pilot or …
Posted by: Alex at November 17, 2004 08:27 PMAlex,
Please explain what this word “lige” means. I can’t find it in the dictionary.
With the type of work I do, I will admit that I have never, and probably will never see such a thing as “reverse discrimination”.
Having said that, I have had to endure folks of all races, who, with no real experience, expected to rise to the top with out paying their “dues”
Life is hard enough without having anything at all to look forward to.
I agree with Jack’s sentiment. I think that giving some one of lesser means a hand up can’t be a bad thing
