The Washington Post: Dishonest On Diversity

Saturday’s Washington Post has an editorial aptly entitled “Dishonest on Diversity.” And indeed it was.

It’s another example, discussed below, that mentions the Top X% Plans as the only alternative to discrimination-produced diversity.

In criticizing “problems” in those plans the Post makes an argument that I’ve criticized at length. (See here and here.) It isn’t clear, says the Post,

why Texas’s 10 percent plan should survive constitutional scrutiny if Michigan’s does not. While formally race neutral, the plan was adopted to produce results similar to conventional affirmative action — substantial minority enrollment — after a court prohibited race-conscious policies. It is, in other words, an overt proxy. But the Constitution doesn’t generally allow discrimination by nominally non-discriminatory means. If considering the race of an applicant is illegitimate, using his school’s location as a surrogate should not solve the problem.

This argument has many supporters, even among people with whom I usually agree, but I believe it is mistaken. Racial preferences give an overt, not a proxy, benefit exclusively on the basis of race. The intent is to reward blacks and Hispanics at the expense of whites, Asians, and other non-preferred minorities, and that is precisely what they do.

On the other hand, in addition to being racially neutral and non-discriminatory on their face, the Top X% plans reward some students of all races. It is not only blacks and Hispanics, after all, who are in the top X% of their high school classes. Nor are all the “victims” of this policy (if it can be said to have victims) whites or Asians. Many black and Hispanic students who finish just below the top X% of their classes, and who would have received racial preferences if they existed, lose out under these plans. If such plans are to be regarded as discriminatory merely because their intent is to produce additional diversity, then one would also have to disqualify the original version of affirmative action — engaging in outreach and taking active measures to eliminate discrimination — as discriminatory. Indeed, one would have to go further and assert that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional insofar as its was to benefit minorities and even to agree with the ACLU that California’s Proposition 209, which barred racial discrimination by state actors, violated the 14th Amendment.

The Post editorial also concludes on a false note:

Nobody should be entirely comfortable with government’s treating people differently by race. But achieving diversity in the educational arena is a goal with such broad support that, one way or another, it likely will be pursued by most states and educators. Does the court really want to remove from the table the most direct and honest way to accomplish an outcome that everyone — President Bush included — embraces?

I’m happy the editors feel at least a little uncomfortable advocating racial discrimination, but their point here is simply wrong. Racial preferences — whether 20 bonus points or thumbs on the scale to produce “a critical mass” of minority acceptances — are not “the most direct and honest way to accomplish” racial proportionality diversity. Preference policies are a poor substitute, forced by the courts, for what preferentialist admissions offices formally did, and would still like to do if they could: group applicants into separate pools by race and ethnicity and select the best from each, with either a quota or a “goal or target” number reserved for minorities. That method was by far more “direct and honest” than the Rube Goldberg workaround colleges have been forced to adopt.

If the pale imitation substitutes are acceptable, one wonders what was so wrong with the more efficient original method. Stay tuned.