When I was in college, well back in the last century, Prof. James Silver came to my campus to give a talk about his hot-selling new book, Mississippi: The Closed Society. He began by saying something like, “I will take questions, and if anyone can ask a question I haven’t already heard I’ll give them an autographed copy of my book … or ten cents in coin.”
If I had ten cents to spare, I would give it to the editorial board of UVa’s Cavalier Daily for their lead editorial today, “A Half-Baked Protest,” criticizing the spate of anti-affirmative action bake sales.
I thought I’d encountered all the arguments surrounding affirmative action, but I’ve never seen this one before:
The problem with these bake sales … is that they target race while glossing over the larger issues at stake. Yes, one can see affirmative action as placing arbitrary values on members of different ethnic groups, but singling out that understanding misses the point entirely. Affirmative action, especially in the way the Supreme Court has recently interpreted it, has admissions officers take into consideration the context of both students’ histories and universities’ commitment to diversity, racial or otherwise.
So, critics of affirmative action make the mistake of assuming it’s primarily about race? The real import of the Supremes’ Michigan decision is to legitimize legacy, athletic, and other non-racial preferences?
On the other hand, it is difficult to defend racial preferences. It’s easy to see why their defenders would want to deny that that’s what they are.
Eqaulity of outcomes is something that I expect to encounter in a different society, not a capitalist one. But this nation is headed for the same trash heap if we reward not merit but skin color.
John, as always, your observations are astute. In Michigan, some of our opposition has made every distraction they know of. Distracting from the issue of race preferences is
their only way of winning.
I’ve seen variants of this argument before. Preference ban proponents are now expected to solve all racial problems on the planet BEFORE ending preferences; otherwise we’re glossing over race as an issue. Of course, this is an impossible strawman; and misses the point that ending racial preferences is itself a necessary precondition to ending many racial problems.
Ending race preferences in Michigan will spark a second debate; one in a political universe devoid of political constituency “soothsaying” that preferences provide to traditional leftists and the avoidance it provides to certain Republican pragmatists (and I don’t always think pragmatism is bad; but it can backfire when the equation is so stacked against Republicans on race issues anyway). This second debate will be without the false “look of diversity” that preferences provide; even though they fail to solve any real problems. Preferences cover up real solutions.
Although this response is entirely personal opinion, for more information on Michigan …
Chetly Zarko, Director of Outreach, Michigan Civil Rights Initiative
http://www.mcri2004.org
Ok, I’m usually arguing with you guys on the other side of this issue, but what does “the context of both students’ histories and universities’ commitment to diversity, racial or otherwise.” mean and how is it supposed to be entirely different from “placing arbitrary values on members of different ethnic groups”?
Hey maybe its true and i’m not a ‘context’ guy but when anyone uses that word it usually means that they are going to ignore the statistics of their actions/argument and focus on an arbirary characteristic of an individual.