I’ve long thought that we need affirmative action in the public sphere, including admission to colleges, to graduate and professional schools, and in hiring (but, in universities, it should stop before tenure is awarded). I think this is necessary not primarily because diversity is an inherent good, but for two reasons: as a form of reparations for groups treated unjustly in the past, and because a society that is grossly segregated in jobs and schools shows itself to be not seriously devoted to equality of opportunity.
Yet, like many, I’ve always been uncomfortable with affirmative action, mainly because I think it’s the wrong approach. When I was a kid, and affirmative action began in the form of busing, it was always seen to be a temporary expedient, one that would be discarded when equality of opportunity was attained. Well, we’re sixty years on now, and nowhere near that equality. In fact, it’s worse in some ways.
The problem is that equality of opportunity has to start when a child is very, very young. And those born in poverty, in areas where there are bad schools and many incentives to do things other than achieve, simply lack the opportunity to show their drive and merit. Affirmative action, then, is a Band-Aid, an expedient that ignores the real problem: inequality among groups that is there at the start of life, as a remnant of historical oppression. What we really want to do is to eliminate those remnants.
Of course that’s a task that looks insuperable, but only because we don’t want to sacrifice the time and enormous amount of money it would take to level the playing field. But unless society has the will to do that, we’ll have affirmative action forever.
I thus was pleased to see that, with some caveats, Glenn Loury generally agrees with me. But he’s thought a lot more about the issue than I have, and in a long interview with Michael Sandel in Quillette, has a number of provocative things to say, some of which only a black man could get away with saying. It’s certainly worth reading (click on screenshot).
Loury sees affirmative action as “covering ass”, that is, it’s about optics rather than a serious endeavor to attain true equality. He worries a lot about two things: the lack of performance in the future of those given advantages because of their race despite less “merit” (this is the stuff that white people aren’t able to say), and about the reduced “honor” and “dignity” of black people who are given preferential advantage. I’ll give a few quotes, but will try to restrain myself from quoting a lot (all quotes are from Loury):
If I’m transitioning from a status quo ante of black exclusion, I may want to rely upon some preferential methods as a temporary, stop-gap mechanism. But, at the end of the day, I must address myself to the underlying fundamental developmental deficits that impede the ability of African Americans to compete. If, instead of doing so, I use preferential selection criteria to cover for the consequences of the historical failure to develop African American performance fully, then I will have fake equality. I will have headcount equality. I will have my-ass-is-covered-if-I’m-the-institution equality. But I won’t have real equality.
I’m not here concerned with any particular mechanism of selection—you may not like the SAT score and prefer to rely on letters of recommendation or high school Grade Point Averages for college admissions. But whatever the mechanism of selection, it should eventually be applied in the same way for selecting African Americans as others. Otherwise the consequence is going to fall short of what I’m calling genuine equality. That’s a statistical argument, not an ethical argument. Are those criteria—SAT scores, ACT scores, high school grades, advanced placement classes, and so forth—correlated with the performance of the selected person in the competitive venue after selection or are they not? If they are not correlated, we shouldn’t be using them. At all. Why would you use them if they’re not predictive of how people are going to perform after they’re selected? But if they are correlated, then if we use them differently for African Americans than for others, there will be on average different performance post-admission for African Americans than for others.
Now, if I’m getting on average different performance by race, that’s not equality. We can pretend it doesn’t exist, we can look the other way, we can grade inflate, we can formulate various institutional responses to the objective fact of racially differentiated average performances in our competitive venue. We can live with it, but it’s not equality. That’s what I’m trying to get at—the quality of equality. It’s the difference between counting people by race while saying we’re open and inclusive and adopting an objective means of promoting and measuring performance which allows people to achieve genuine equality of honor, standing, and respect.
He emphasizes “honor, standing, and respect” a lot, and I’m not in a position to tell those of other races what they should strive to attain or achieve, but that at least sounds reasonable. But it does lead Loury into some blind alleys, as when he justifies affirmative action by colleges for “legacy” students by saying that, unlike affirmative action for blacks, those students don’t wear their group membership on their bodies, and so don’t have to prove anything after they leave college. That seems a bit unfair, but Loury is more concerned with gaining honor and dignity for those who have black skin.
As you see, he’s concerned with the future performance of people who are given advantages in education and hiring because of their race. But he also thinks that, despite that concern, there’s still a need for affirmative action:
. . . a person can argue that gatekeepers to elite institutions like Harvard or Princeton or Brown might want to have some people of color coming through its winnowing process. This is Bowen and Bok’s argument in The Shape of the River—that society as a whole has a profound interest in having within its stratified elites a representative number of people of color so as to sustain the legitimacy of institutions and to facilitate the smooth operation of society. So I’m not a colorblind person. I would actually subscribe to the argument Randall Kennedy makes in his book For Discrimination: “Look, I acknowledge that this is racial discrimination we’re engaging in here when we do affirmative action, but it’s not racial discrimination that should be precluded by the 14th amendment to the constitution.”
He worries about whether one should select students on the basis of effort, ability or privilege, all of which could be considered aspects of “merit”. But in the he argues that it really doesn’t matter much so long as the criteria used to choose can predict future performance. So, argues Lowry, someone who attained a good high-school record despite an oppressive and difficult environment might be given preference over someone with an equal record but who had a better environment, for overcoming bad environments takes effort and hard work—indices of good performance in the future.
And why performance as the gold standard? That’s because Loury thinks that the honor and dignity of his fellow blacks depend on their making a good showing in society, and, ultimately, a showing that doesn’t depend on the advantages of affirmative action. I was glad to see that this thoughtful man agrees with me (and I think everyone must agree on this) that we ultimately need profound structural change in society to allow everyone the same opportunities to achieve. Two bits on that:
I see the consequences of American history as leaving a huge project of the development of the human potential of African American people in this society. I see the legacy of our ignoble past as partly reflected in deficiencies or inadequacies of human development so that the relative number of African Americans performing in certain kinds of rarified intellectual pursuits is low. Taking the long view of history, the only viable solution to that historical inheritance is a focus on the development of the capacities of African American people to perform. That is a huge multi-dimensional decades-long project. Institutional dependence on racial preferences merely diverts us from that necessary task.
. . . consider that primary and secondary education—whatever your view about school choice and charter schools and whatnot—objectively is not serving the least advantaged people in our society well. And yet it is a fundamental engine for these people to be able to improve their social position. It could be that you think the schools are underfunded. We can have a debate or a discussion about what to do about primary and secondary education. But the huge disparities in the quality of the educational services available by class and by race and by social location are a fundamental issue of fairness. So, in my view, racial justice and equity understood in the largest sense would be 95 percent talking about things like that and five percent talking about who got admitted to the most selective higher education venues. They’re not unimportant, but it’s the tail wagging the dog if that’s the main thing we’re talking about.
This will not go down well in colleges and universities with their bloated diversity apparatus. Nor will it be welcomed by the apparatchiks employed in that industry, for when true efforts to achieve equality are made, it will put them out of business. But I don’t think anybody can argue about our ultimate goal being the elimination of affirmative action because it’s no longer needed.
Sounds sensible to me.
Loury doesn’t mention what could well be a more-important factor: culture. Quality of school matters a lot less than is often supposed. The evidence suggests that it’s not the school that makes a “good school”, it’s the intake.
Some minority groups in the US have a culture where doing well at school is highly important to both the kids and their parents. Other groups have a culture where this matters less (both to the kids and their parents), and indeed where trying hard and doing well at school can be seen as “acting white” and discouraged by the peer group. Funding schools better or more equally is not going to change that (though may well be needed anyway.) Fixing culture is rather harder.
There are moves to change admission to “magnet” schools from selection on merit to selection by lottery. That’s because the politicians don’t like the racial balance that selection by merit leads to. But, again, this overlooks that what makes a school a high-performing magnet school is not so much the quality of the teachers, facilities and buildings, it’s the selection by merit.
And to add, Critical Race Theory makes things worse. CRT strips young blacks of any agency and of any responsibility for their own future, treating them as perpetual victims subject to “systemic racism” (whereas whites, as “oppressors”, do have agency). CRT tells blacks that the path forward is waiting for whites to “stop being racist” and asking for affirmative action and reparations (all of which are things done to them, not by them).
True equality will come from the attitude that they’re responsible for their own futures, and that starts with next week’s maths test. And that holds even if they do start from a less-advantaged starting point (as have many successful people).
Sorry, I under-stated, it’s even worse. CRT then tells them that maths tests are colonial and racist, and that they shouldn’t even try to do well, and that instead they should be given equal credit for their “other ways of knowing” and their “lived experience”.
On the point of education, an easy view into assumptions and problems is the film Waiting for Superman.
In short, the assumption that poverty and living conditions account for most of the poor outcomes is wrong — the teachers are a major factor. Public school gets it wrong, hence the plethora of other school forms/names.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waiting_for_%22Superman%22
Trailer : https://youtu.be/ZKTfaro96dg
Featured are Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee
Sub
I think I’ve said this before: I’m OK with affirmative action targeted on the basis of objective criteria (family income, parents educational attainment, etc.), but not “race” which is a pretty subjective construct, often based on self-identification. Should the offspring of a black lawyer and a black physician with decidedly upper middle class incomes receive preference over the child of a single, working class mother who happens to be “white”?
Agreed absolutely. In the UK, the problems are perpetuated by those who can afford it either sending their offspring to private schools (confusingly called “public schools” here) or buying houses in the catchment areas around good state schools. Ensuring that all schools are good is the only long-term solution, but some sort of additional assistance to the genuinely disadvantaged is needed in the meantime.
“Ensuring that all schools are good is the only long-term solution, …”
Though, as above, “good” schools are those filled with the offspring of parents willing to pay over the odds to buy a house in an area giving access to a school filled with offspring of such parents. It is the intake that makes a school “good”. It follows that we can’t have all schools being “good”, only average.
I think that schools which are bad tue to the background and attitude of a significant proportion of students could be improved by splitting classes into smaller groups, to minimize peer pressure and to allow to teachers pay more attention to individual students.
However, doing so requires admission that a huge part of the problem is in the students, and politically this is a big no-no.
Oh, there are some white people quite willing to saying it — the late Justice Antonin Scalia comes prominently to mind — the problem being that those most willing to say it are most often those most willing simply to let the status quo ante go unchecked, rather than to follow Mr. Loury’s reasoning any further.
Jesus, that’s an articulate discussion by Glenn Loury. I wish I could get whoever “lightly edited” that transcript to come sit in my skull and lightly edit my oral pronouncements as they’re being made. 🙂
Or, he’s extremely intelligent (I can tell because he agrees with me… 😉 ) and he’s talking about something he’s studied deeply (… with a lot more detail and evidence).
🐾🐾
Glenn Loury’s, Brown University, bi-weekly (or so) discussion partner is John McWhorter, Columbia University. I highly recommend that you listen to their podcasts.
Here is a 3-minute excerpt from a longer discussion with Dr. McWhorter that Dr. Loury posted to his twitter account regarding race and American society and it is direct:
https://twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/1343976246099775493?fbclid=IwAR10JCN4L-oexpUIzF7bpyCI_8gfWXJojBe6atl2JbNZYbn_M2X4HotiL0Y
There is a school of thought that for the elite this aspect of the current system is a feature not a bug. It provide effective social stratification (crudely, into “winners” and “losers”) more subtly than manifestly oppressive systems such as apartheid. It pushes the “losers” to believe that they *deserve* to be such, having been judged so by fair criteria. This then makes them less likely to want to burn the system down.
This is indeed a problem, which by the way is more pronounced in Europe. However, I don’t think that burning down the system is a good idea.
That’s interesting about Europe. I’m aware of the English class system and the French /grandes école/, but not about the rest of Europe.
And being elite-adjacent myself, I am definitely not in favour of burning the system down; sorry if I gave that impression.
“I’m not in a position to tell those of other races what they should strive to attain or achieve . . .”
Everybody should strive to attain honor, dignity, and respect. If you’re not willing to say that Black people should strive to attain honor, dignity, and respect, then you’re making a racist exception. It’s the soft bigotry of low expectations again.
Is equality really a matter of arithmatic?
Perhaps the real issue is what happens in the first two years of life when the brain is rapidly growing.
Are the kids that have trouble ins school the ones who did not get the stimulation during these most important years of life.
And, just to stir the pot, can we really make up for lack of learning in the early years with affirmative action in colleges and professional schools, or are we setting up some students for failure when they are behind the more important early years of learning and stimulation?
The assumption here is that we know how to close these gaps and simply don’t want to put forth the effort or money, but I think the truth is that we have invested enormous amounts of time and money, but because we don’t know how to close the gaps those efforts have largely been a failure and a waste.
In the USA, we have some 14,000 school districts, in all of which, where applicable, Northeast Asians are on top, then whites, then Hispanics, then blacks, and virtually every one of those districts is struggling to close the gaps. So far as I know, none have succeeded.
It’s not a problem limited to the United States, either. Nowhere in the world have these gaps been closed. Sub-Saharan African countries that were never colonized and whose inhabitants were never enslaved (at least by Westerners) perform no better, and generally worse, than blacks living in “systemically racist” countries under the lingering effects of past oppression.
I’m not sure poverty has much to do with it either. Certainly rich blacks do better than poor blacks and rich whites do better than poor whites – which doesn’t prove that poverty causes poor performance, since poor performance could just as well cause poverty – but rich blacks still do worse than poor whites, or about the same.
I’m not sure an environmental solution is possible, but if it is, I don’t think we’re anywhere near knowing what it is or how to implement it.
> Perhaps the real issue is what happens in the first two years of life when the brain is rapidly growing.
That’s why there is Pre-K, though it has no long-term effect. Since the achievement gap starts at birth, we should intervene at an earlier date. I suggest we call the new approach pre-minus-270.