Go Navy!

Or rather, go immediately to the Washington Post and read “Not Affirmative, Sir,” a fascinating and very impressive discussion of the screwy admissions system at the U.S. Naval Academy by a professor there, Bruce Fleming, who served on the admissions board. I hope all the Supremes read it.

Although Fleming is quite sympathetic to the desire for an inclusive and representative officer corps, Fleming concludes that racial preferences lead to “obvious absurdities, even inequities” and that “the Bush administration’s decision to oppose racial affirmative action in college admissions seems like a good thing.”

High on Fleming’s list of absurdities is the impossibility of determining who should qualify for the preferences, let alone why.

A student whose parents had emigrated from Ghana, we found, was considered a member of a “protected” minority, the same as a student whose family came here generations ago in chains. Does that mean the policy is meant to benefit not just the disadvantaged descendants of slaves but also newly arrived immigrants? Apparently not all of them. An applicant whose parents had emigrated from India was ineligible for preference. The question remains: Whom exactly is the policy meant to benefit?

Hispanics, of course, can be any skin color. Many Cuban and Dominican immigrants are, by most people’s standards as well as their own, white. I have had students with Spanish parents, white by my visual “once-over,” who entered Annapolis as “Hispanics.” Was this the intent of the directive? If not, what was? The board also debated whether students of Brazilian origin “counted” as Hispanics. They speak Portuguese and are therefore Lusophone, not Hispanic. Yet what’s the difference between a Brazilian and someone from a neighboring Spanish-speaking country? When we say “Hispanic,” do we really mean “brown-colored and poorly educated”?

[….]

… we give greater weight to an applicant’s, say, one-eighth protected ancestry than to his or her seven-eighths unprotected ancestry. The same is true for all mixed-race students, a growing minority.

Contributing to this confusion is that racial and ethnic identification is completely a matter of self-definition, and thus totally arbitrary.

This led to apparent howlers like the student with an un-Hispanic last name attending the flossiest private school in his part of Texas, who identified himself as Hispanic and received preferential treatment. There have also been cases of “minority” students being identified as “white” by their schools. (We debated whether we could nail these applicants for lying, but finally decided that a school’s visual impression could not be taken as fact, either.)

At one point, in frustration and with an attempt at Swiftian irony, Fleming suggested

that we send out paint cards with varying skin tones and ask applicants to circle the one closest to their own: Browner than a certain level would lead to preference, lighter would preclude it. We wouldn’t have to dance around all these other categories that weren’t really the point. The reaction, of course, was shock. We can’t do that! Of course, we can’t. But this is why our current situation is so untenable, and why the administration, at least to this degree, is right: If we’re aiming for colorblindness, we can’t get there via color-definition.

The only thing Fleming misses, in my opinion, is that preferentialists are no longer aiming for colorblindness. They have replaced that ideal with a committment to permanent color-coded racially proportional representation.