One of the few still-controversial aspects of the Brown decision was its reliance on the psychological evidence presented by Dr. Kenneth Clark in its conclusion that enforced racial segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect the childrens’ hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
The risk of this sort of reliance on social science is that judicial opinions that do so become hostage to the reputation of the studies they use, a reputation in the case of Dr. Clark’s doll studies that hasn’t fared very well. A good but far from unique example of this sort of criticism is Ed Whelan’s:
What if research a few years later showed that integrated schools increased black children’s “feeling of inferiority”? Are we to suppose that the Supreme Court might have overturned the decision in Brown? If so, should we respect a methodology that yields results that are so flimsy? And, if (as seems surely the case) differing social-science data would never result in the overturning of Brown, doesn’t that show that the purported reasoning is entirely makeshift?
I was reminded of this controversy this morning when reading a long article about debate over the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI) in the Flint Journal. Here’s how that article begins:
A possible ban on affirmative action isn’t about academic analysis or legal theory, but raw emotion for people such as Miguel Velasquez-Hernandez, 18, of Flint.
“I still don’t feel equal,” said Velasquez-Hernandez, who is Hispanic. “Without affirmative action, the American dream isn’t even reachable for some.”
Do the citizens of Michigan really want to continue treating themselves unequally, preferring some and penalizing others simply because of their race, sex, or ethnicity, to make people like Velasquez-Hernandez feel better?
But then it gets worse. Later on in the article it becomes clear that some, perhaps many, opponents of MCRI really are in dire need of some kind of therapy. A prime example is Renita Coney Mays:
“If [MCRI] does pass, it is going to set us back 40 years. We’ll be still looking at segregated lunch counters again almost,” said Coney Mays, who is black and serves as the affirmative action officer for Genesee County.
She was among the first black students in Flint to attend Pierce Elementary School in the mid-1960s under desegregation and she thrived.
She assumes affirmative action helped her along the way — as both a woman and a minority — and now she is trying to help it help others.
So, state agencies need to keep giving preferences based on race or the state will return to “segregated lunch counters”? (Did Michigan ever have segregated lunch counters? If so, how long ago?)
Ms. Coney Mays didn’t need affirmative action to attend elementary school — all she needed was an absence of discrimination — and she only “assumes” affirmative action helped her afterwards. The one and perhaps only way it is clear that it did help her is by creating a huge bureaucracy of “affirmative action officers” and thus the position she now holds.
Maybe Al Sharpton was thinking only about people like Ms. Coney Mays when he asserted (quoted in my last post, immediately below) something that otherwise makes no sense: “If you do not keep affirmative action in place, you will not have a job at all….”
Perhaps Renita Coney Mays is worried about something much more practical and immediate than the possible return to segregated lunch counters.
Her job.
The story tells us that Ms. Coney Mays is the “affirmative action officer” (google, “zampolit”) for Genesee County. The ugly fact is that for most governmental agencies employing one, the “affirmative action officer “is in actual fact the preference police. The aff action officer has the power to require an employing unit to affirmatively justify its decision to hire a majority male candidate and in practical effect has the power to impose such political costs on such a decision as to effectively overrule the employing unit’s hiring decision.
Eliminating race and gender prefereces in public employment, as passage of Michigan Proposal 2 would, could very well put Ms. Coney Mays and thousands of affirmative preference officers just like her out of work.
Thus, the hysteria.
John,
Having been on the ground, I’m convinced that preference as therapy is the main justification in many minds. It’s a “retributive” therapy (for slavery), it’s a placebo therapy (we can succeed because we’re being given this pill called affirmative action, this is perhaps the most descriptive since preference doesn’t have any measurable success at desegregating society), its a compensatory therapy (for specific injustices individuals will list, although the compensation isn’t exacted from specific individuals responsible for those injustice), and an social therapy (something everyone in the group can unite around).