Is Affirmative Action Systemic Racism?

Image: The motto on the Supreme Court building: “Equal Justice Under Law”.

1. Affirmative Action at First Glance

I remember when I first heard about the idea of “Affirmative Action” (AA). I was in high school at the time, and I knew next to nothing of the political landscape. I didn’t know what the “left” and “right” positions were. But I knew that racial discrimination — e.g., refusing to hire someone because of their race or skin color — was wrong. Obviously, because that would be unfair and irrational.

Then I heard that some people believed that because there was a lot of racial discrimination in the past, we should make up for that by discriminating in the opposite direction today. I found that such a mind-bogglingly benighted thought, obviously irrational and immoral, obviously committing the same error as the original discriminators, that I could scarcely believe it.

It struck me kind like the following. Say there is a criminal who murdered your child. You decide that, to get justice, you will murder his child. The person who could think that makes sense is the sort of person who would think that discriminating against whites today makes up for white people having discriminated against blacks in a previous generation. I couldn’t believe that anyone needed to have the error explained.

Later, I learned that most affirmative action proponents would probably not describe their view as “we should discriminate in the opposite direction today, to make up for past discrimination”, partly because they would refuse to use the word “discrimination” for the things they approve of. Instead, they would say (a) that we need to give conscious racial preferences in favor of, e.g., blacks, to counteract our unconscious biases against them, or (b) that we should give racial preferences in order to reap the benefits of diversity.

I’m not going to directly address the assumptions behind (a) and (b) here, though, due to time constraints (but see:

Who Cares About Diversity?

on diversity). Instead, let’s just consider whether affirmative action is racist.

2. Background

The background fact that I’m assuming that everyone knows is that affirmative action policies make it much easier for members of certain races to be admitted to college or hired for certain jobs (with employers who support AA), than members of other races. AA does not merely counteract unconscious bias, leaving things equally easy for all races, nor does it merely act as a tie-breaker for equally-qualified candidates; it gives large preferences, such that a white or Asian applicant has to be much better with respect to objective criteria in order to have the same prospects. I can’t speak for other industries, but in academia, AA is often an enormous force. Some job searches completely exclude white males from consideration. (

Outlaw Universities

)

3. Anti-White-and-Asian Racism

The obvious argument is that it’s racist against whites and Asians. In the popular discourse, Asians tend to be ignored, but they may be even more harmed than whites by race-conscious admission and hiring policies. Obviously, a preference for blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans entails a dispreference for whites and Asians.

Example: It is estimated that “at Harvard, blacks get a fourfold increase in their chances of admission”; at UNC “more than 40% of Hispanic admissions and more than 50% of African-American admissions are the result of racial preferences” (https://www.manhattan-institute.org/does-affirmative-action-lead-to-mismatch).

We know this stuff about Harvard and UNC because of the lawsuit against them for anti-Asian discrimination. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v._President_and_Fellows_of_Harvard_College; the case is now being considered by the Supreme Court.) Asians are the race that has the hardest time getting into Harvard, which turns out to be because admissions officers rate Asians lower than people of other races in the subjective category of “personality”.

Image: The Harvard University admissions manual.

If the situation were reversed — if black applicants had to have significantly higher scores to get in, and if admissions officers explained that this was because blacks tended to have worse “personalities” than other races, we wouldn’t hesitate for one second before declaring this impermissible racism.

Of course, the double standard exists because whites discriminated against blacks in the past, so blacks get the benefit of affirmative action today. We also discriminated against Asians in the past (though obviously not as severely), but Asians are doing well, so they don’t get affirmative action.

But imagine that someone started listing wrongful actions done by black people in the past, and then used this to explain why we should prefer other races over blacks today. Again, I doubt you’d take more than one second to recognize this as an unacceptably racist idea. The Nazis had a similar notion of racial guilt, by the way — that because “the Jews killed Jesus”, all Jewish people today are to blame for that.

4. Anti-Black Racism

But you already know all of the above. Here’s the part you might not know: affirmative action may also be racist against black people. Specifically, it is an example of “systemic racism” or “institutional racism”, as woke people use those terms (these terms don’t require intent to disadvantage blacks; they only require such disadvantage as an actual effect).

The Mismatch Problem

Say your university has an affirmative action program. The blacks admitted to your university will fall into two categories: (a) those who were already sufficiently well-qualified to be admitted, without taking race into account, and (b) those who were not.

The blacks of category (a) are harmed by AA, because their accomplishments will be discounted by observers who suspect that they just got in because of affirmative action. In fact, they’re equally qualified (by stipulation) as whites or Asians from your school, but they won’t be perceived that way since everyone knows about your university’s AA policies.

The blacks of category (b) will also often be harmed by AA. By hypothesis, they’re less qualified than the average person at your school, often significantly less qualified. E.g., they might have lower SAT scores and lower grades than most people at your school. For this reason, they’re going to fall behind in classes, since classes will be geared towards the typical student at your school, or possibly even towards the upper end of the distribution, depending on the professor; few professors teach to the lower half of the class. So they’re going to get poor grades, learn less, compare unfavorably with the other students, and hence be more likely (in the case of undergraduates) to drop out, or (in the case of law students) fail the bar exam. If instead they’d gone to a school matched to their qualifications, they’d be more likely to succeed. Hence, AA might actually reduce the number of black college graduates, or lawyers, or doctors.

This is the “mismatch” theory advanced by Richard Sander and others (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465029965). For an even-handed review of the evidence on this, see https://www.manhattan-institute.org/does-affirmative-action-lead-to-mismatch. TL;DR: There is mixed evidence regarding the mismatch effect. The most reasonable conclusion is that large racial (or other non-merit-based) preferences are harmful to the recipients, due to mismatch, but small preferences are not. In other words, if someone is almost able to qualify to go to Harvard based on his non-racial qualities, then that person is benefitted by being given a little boost to get in. But if a person is far from able to qualify, yet is admitted anyway, then that person is probably not going to benefit, since the school will just be too hard for him.

Promoting Racism

AA programs probably also reinforce racial stereotypes and prejudices, because other students can see that the black people in their classes tend to be worse students. People are not going to just fail to notice that because you tell them that it’s “immoral” and “racist” to notice it. By contrast, without affirmative action, other students would see fewer blacks, but the blacks they saw would all be just as qualified as everyone else.

There is probably also an effect whereby AA promotes racial resentment on the part of white people who blame their own lack of success on minorities taking the spots that more qualified white people could have gotten.

So AA is probably doing more to promote racism than to end it.

Conclusion

Whether existing AA policies are overall beneficial or harmful to blacks is far from clear. It’s at least plausible that they might be overall harmful to blacks. When we add to that the obvious harm to the whites and Asians who would have been admitted and could have benefitted from such admission if not for AA, it’s fairly clear that the policies are overall harmful.