Yale student Jonathan Pitts-Wiley has an interesting, even impressive, column yesterday in the Yale Daily News. As someone who’s often been told he got into Yale because he’s black (“the way I’ve generally figured it is, it’s about damn time being a Black man in America worked to someone’s advantage”), he admits to being “pissed off” that Yale freshman Jian Li had the temerity to file a complaint against Princeton alleging discrimination against Asians (see here).
As a member of a racial minority well-represented in the college ranks, did he really have the gall to bring suit on the grounds of racial discrimination? Did he really think affirmative action, a system meant to benefit people like himself, was giving him short shrift?
I was, as my mother might say, too through and took it upon myself to write an opinion piece in the Daily Princetonian in which I took him to task for disrespecting the struggles others went through so he could even bring such a suit. I dressed him down for indirectly belittling the Asian-American applicants who had been admitted to Princeton and I generally let him have it for being a freshman punk who needed to be a few more months removed from the senior prom before trying to shake the foundations of certain institutional practices.
And then Pitts-Wiley did something all too unusual on both sides of the profound divide over racial preference:
I decided to e-mail Jian myself. I figured since I’d already smashed him in the paper, now was as good a time as any to make sure my dismissal of his case was on track.
And he was, and is, surprised by the result:
So we met. And we talked about his argument and his case. I have to admit: the meeting was terrible. I was placed in the unfortunate position of listening to a compelling argument that is certainly more persuasive in person than in quotes from the newspaper. While we disagreed on certain points — I wasn’t sold on the merits of his particular case and he also used that dangerous “should” word frequently — I was forced to reexamine my argument. While I didn’t agree with the angle he was taking with his argument, I found myself appreciating the spirit of it. Regrettably, I had to acknowledge that he’s a decent kid who deserved a lot more respect than he got from me and others.
Many of us could benefit from Pitts-Wiley’s willingness to go to the source, to listen carefully to opposing arguments, to be willing to reconsider our own. And that is true even though most of us, like Pitts-Wiley, will then generally proceed to come up with new, if not improved, reasons why we were basically right to begin with.
Pitts-Wiley’s rethinking began with a question Jian Li asked him: “Why does race still matter?” His answer is that it still matters because prejudice still exists.
After much thought and conversation, I came to this: Race still matters because the positive gains in policy do not directly parallel changes in certain attitudes and beliefs; they’re close, but equilibrium has yet to be found. It’s dangerous to conflate the success of integration — namely the laws that facilitated it — with the eradication of racism itself.
Civil rights legislation and integration did do a good job of dismantling overt, state-sanctioned racism — Jim Crow, Segregation, “separate but equal” — which in turn did an admirable job of combating and eliminating some racial prejudices and tactics of discrimination within the society. But we must caution ourselves against the belief that all these prejudiced notions and tactics are artifacts from a bygone era. It is true that they do not flourish as they once did; indeed, they are, in public, socially unacceptable, but as Verbal Kint might say, “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Civil rights gains have meant business owners cannot post a sign saying “Blacks/Asians/Latinos need not apply” because it is against the law, but this reality does not mean that no one would if they could.
Pitts-Wiley writes:
Race-based affirmative action in education is attempting to mitigate the effects of history, both in institutionalized racism and the personal prejudice which still exists in this country. It’s not a cure-all. I don’t think that everyone who admits students of color using race as a factor is incapable of harboring personal prejudice. I also don’t think it’s wise to assume that such prejudice is an utter impossibility just because harboring such feelings is considered socially unacceptable.
I believe this is wrong. Civil rights laws, and especially affirmative action, were not implemented to eradicate prejudice or even racism but to end discrimination and require fairness.
Fairness really is the issue, as I believe Pitts-Wiley recognizes since he also writes:
Affirmative action was put in place so that those in power had to give more consideration to playing fair when it came to underrepresented groups. At the time, if you were a person of color, it’s very likely you were poor and disadvantaged, and you had probably been so for quite some time.
It is certainly not true in today’s Ivy League, or other selective schools, that most beneficiaries of affirmative action are poor and disadvantaged and have been so for a long time. But more to the point — and this is the question I would encourage Pitts-Wiley to ponder as he progresses to his fourth thoughts — what does it mean to be fair? And as an aid to considering that question, let me suggest another, related one: why are racial prejudice and segregation wrong?
I have asked this question before, such as here, responding to an argument by Yale law professor Owen Fiss rejecting “diversity” and “compensation” as justifications for racial preference and arguing instead that the most compelling justification for racial preferences is that they combat caste, “the racial ordering of American society.” I will close here with a slightly amended version of my response there to that argument:
This is not the place to argue with Fiss’s failure to explain what precisely is bad about “the racial ordering of American society” if discrimination on the basis of race is not wrong in and of itself. If I were to make that argument, I would begin by observing that society has to be “ordered” some way or other. In the absence of perfect equality, which can exist only under conditions of rigid authoritarian control, society will be “ordered” by something — wealth, talent, family, class, religion, etc., or some combination. If racial discrimination is no different from or worse than other forms of discrimination — class, geography, where your parents went to school, etc., etc. — then why is racial ordering worse than other forms of ordering? Most of us instinctively know that it is, because we have internalized the very principle that defenders of racial preference would have us discard — that every person has a right be treated “without regard” to race. Thus, if Princeton discriminated against Jian Li in any way because he is Asian, that was wrong — and it does not become right even if Asians as a group are not “underrepresented.”
And speaking of rights, Pitts-Wiley would also do well to recall that if generations of believers in equal rights had not used “that dangerous ‘should’ word,” we never would have gotten rid of either slavery or segregation.
