In his National Journal column this week, Stuart Taylor Jr. asks, “Do We Want Another 100 Years Of Racial Preferences?” He’d prefer not.
If the Supreme Court upholds the very large preferences at the University of Michigan and its law school in two pending cases, it will probably perpetuate governmental use of racial preferences as a permanent feature of the American landscape, not only in university admissions but also in faculty hiring and promotions, elementary and secondary education and federal, state and local government employment and contracting.
For a generation, racial preferences have been advertised as a temporary and transitional “affirmative-action” corrective for past discrimination. But there is nothing temporary about elite universities’ plans to continue their systematic discrimination against whites and Asians. Their rationale is not to remedy past discrimination, but simply to enroll as many applicants from the preferred races as the diversity bureaucrats say they need for a “critical mass.” No university has pledged that there will ever be an end point.
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If … the Court blesses diversity-based racial preferences, universities and other affirmative-action bureaucracies will make cosmetic changes to distinguish any aspects of the Michigan process that the Court finds excessive, as they did after Bakke, while continuing their own racial-preference regimes in perpetuity. More and more, we will be a country in which opportunities are apportioned by race-based formulas. And we might as well forget about Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of an America in which people are judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
As I have argued here on a number of occasions, the only way diversity can be held compelling enough to justify racial discrimination is if our traditional notion of fairness as non-discrimination is scrapped in favor of a principle of fairness that grants a right of roughly proportional racial inclusion and requires the elimination of all disparities among racial and ethnic groups.
