In an article dated yesterday Black World Today significantly misstated the issues involved in the Michigan AA cases and then proceeded to give a garbled presentation of the statistical evidence based on its misstatement.
The article begins as follows:
So the Supreme Court has announced it will hear the long-simmering affirmative action case from the University of Michigan law school, in which white plaintiffs sued, claiming to have been denied admission even though they had grades and test scores that were comparable to those of students of color who were admitted. [Emphasis added]
The case in question–which the Circuit Court decided in favor of the law school and their affirmative action program–will now fall into the lap of a high court that has been increasingly hostile to such policies and tends to consider race-conscious affirmative action efforts little more than illegitimate “racial preferences.”
In fact, the plaintiffs claim that applicants for non-preferred groups with higher qualifications are systematically passed over in favor of students from preferred groups with lower qualifications.
Black World Today appears, through its use of quotation marks, to agree that “racial preferences,” if they existed, would be “illegitimate.” This is quite odd, since Michigan does not deny that it employs racial preferences. There is really no debate about that. Just to pick one example, the following exchange with an admissions dean at the trial is quoted in Barbara Grutter’s appeal brief to the Sixth Circuit:
Q.And in order to achieve that critical mass of minority students the practice was and the policy called for, a willingness to admit minority students from generally lower academic qualifications [than] majority students, isn’t that a fair statement?
A.[Dennis Shields]: I think that’s a fair statement. [pdf page 47]
The article’s failure to recognize that the case does not involve a complaint against preferences to minorities with “comparable” qualifications distorts its entire analysis.
Simply put, if whites tend to be better off and face fewer obstacles to their educational success than blacks, and if blacks tend to be worse off and face more obstacles, then any black applicant to a college, law school or graduate school will likely have a greater claim for their merit at a given test score level than a white who scored the same.
To visualize the point, imagine a four-leg relay race. If whites tend to start out two laps ahead of blacks and the runners finish the race tied, is it fair to say they were equally good as runners; or would we instead say that the black runner was superior, having made up so much ground?
That’s easy, because it’s unreal. The question presented by real life is harder: do regard the application process as a race, where all contestants start at the same point and are timed by the same clock according to the same rules; or do we regard it as golf, where some minority groups are automatically awarded a handicap?
It’s also interesting to note that even though the argument is (as always) framed as being about “better off/worse off” and “more obstacles/fewer obstacles,” those considerations aren’t truly part of the calculus. The factor that’s being challenged is race, not income or “opportunity.” And while there’s obviously some correlation, race is not even close to being a perfect proxy for those considerations, since the positions at the elite schools (which receive most of the attention), tend to go to relatively well-off minority students. Conversely, the majority of Americans who are not “well off” are white, and thus receive no special consideration.