Who Qualifies For Membership In a “Minority” Organization?

I can almost sympathize with the co-chairs of the Minority Rights Coalition at the University of Virginia as they strive, mightily but with absolutely no success, to define “minority” in a long, painful column in the Cavalier Daily today.

“Here are two questions to chew on,” they write.

(1) What is the Minority Rights Coalition? and (2) What is a minority? We can answer the first question in two sentences, but the second, we could work on for years and not develop a solid answer. Sometimes we feel like a broken record:

“The Minority Rights Coalition is the umbrella organization which advocates on behalf of its constituent organizations and seeks to draw strength from the connections and common struggles of its members. It is composed of the Black Student Alliance (BSA), the Asian Student Union (ASU), the Latino Student Alliance (LSA), the Middle Eastern Leadership Council (MELC), the Queer Student Union (QSU), and Feminism is for Everyone (FIFE).”

As for the second question, I completely agree: they did “not develop a solid answer.” Indeed, by the time I finished their column-long attempt I felt like I had been reading the column for years. Some snippets of their attempt:

• “The definition of ‘minority’ is not an altogether unanswerable question….”
• “The word ‘minority’ can obviously mean a group with fewer members than the majority….”
• “… if we choose to define ‘minority’ as “a group with fewer members than the majority,” then it seems strange that the MRC, together, makes up a large majority of the student population at the University. Even FIFE alone, about whose membership we are frequently asked, would stand to claim to represent the interests of a majority of the student population here, since women compose more than half of the school’s student body.”
• “Minority” does not necessarily mean “a group with fewer members than the majority,” but “[a]n alternative is elusive and nebulous….”
• “There are too many ways to define minority to touch on them all.”

Thank goodness. As I said, painful.

In desperation or resignation, the co-chairs of the Minority Rights Coalition offer the following definition:

groups of individuals targeted in bias incidents (e.g. keying a woman’s car with derogatory slurs like “bitch” or “whore”), groups that struggle against institutional discrimination (e.g. refusing to provide a minimum amount of unpaid leave for care for a newborn child), or groups that cannot effectively voice their concerns for a variety of reasons (e.g. population size, educational limitations, language capabilities).

…. There are so many individuals and so many groups who are marginalized in so many ways….

I could have saved them some words, since their definition of minority actually can be expressed in one word: victim. But even that doesn’t completely work, since they are fixated on groups, or in their terminology, “populations.”

Moreover, defending and advocating for the rights of minority student populations is a multifaceted purpose. It is not simply pushing for a new major, for a more diverse incoming class, or for more money. It is standing firm as a voice for any underserved or targeted population.

Having settled Question 2, let’s return to Question 1, what is the Minority Rights Coalition? One can see by its constituent members that it is a coalition of aggrieved “populations.” It is worth pausing to note, however, that not all potentially “targeted” minority (whatever) groups are included: no conservatives or libertarians (who would be protected species at UVa, if they were protected), no Jewish “population,” no evangelical Christian “population,” etc.

There is something else noteworthy about the MRC’s membership: despite the patently ideological litmus test its members must pass, the interests of these member “populations” often conflict. As it happens, just yesterday U.S. News and World Report published an article, “Do Elite Private Colleges Discriminate Against Asian Students?,” highlighting research revealing that

A recent study of the applicants to seven elite colleges in 1997 found that Asian students were much more likely to be rejected than seemingly similar students of other races. Also, athletes and students from top high schools had admissions edges, as did low-income African-Americans and Hispanics.

Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges in 1997 as whites who scored 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s…..

Espenshade found that when comparing applicants with similar grades, scores, athletic qualifications, and family history for seven elite private colleges and universities:

• Whites were three times as likely to get fat envelopes as Asians.

• Hispanics were twice as likely to win admission as whites.

• African-Americans were at least five times as likely to be accepted as whites….

I’m no math maven, but doesn’t this mean that Hispanics were six times as likely and blacks 15 times as likely to get admitted as similarly qualified Asians?

Alas, Espenshade himself exhibits the pitfalls of the group think that his research otherwise exposes. For example,

Espenshade warned against concluding that his study proved that colleges improperly discriminated. For one thing, Asians, who make up less than 5 percent of the U.S. population, often make up nearly a third of the applicant pools to elite colleges. And they generally account for at least 10 percent of the student body.

So what? The fact that some, even many, Asians are admitted to elite colleges does not mean that those colleges did not discriminate against all the Asians who were not admitted despite having higher qualifications (often very much higher qualifications) than many whites, Hispanics, and blacks who were admitted. Roger Clegg made a similar point today, here, and I’ve criticized this offensive argument many times, such as here:

This argument, a foundation of the preference principle, has far more radical implications than is generally recognized, for it in effect redefines discrimination as something that applies only to groups. To say that preferences cannot be discriminatory because the University of Michigan is still 80% white is to say that discrimination against individuals doesn’t count, until and unless it is massive enough to affect the statistical representation of the racial or ethnic group to which they are said to belong. Do “civil rights” groups really want to go there?

The pervasive discrimination against Asians that results from preferences for blacks and Hispanics is not news to DISCRIMINATIONS readers. See here, for example. And mentioned here, but not in the U.S. News article, is that Espenshade’s research also found that if all admissions were eliminated “Asian-American enrollment would jump 40 percent (while white enrollment would drop by 1 percent).” And here (among other places) I discussed Jian Li’s complaint against Princeton for anti-Asian discrimination, a complaint bolstered by the use of Espenshade’s data. (Li is a frequent commenter here.)

In that post I quoted a Daily Princetonian article that (incorrectly) found Li’s complaint “adds a new twist” to anti-discrimination arguments “since previous complaints about universities’ racial preference policies have been filed by white students alleging bias.” (Actually, as I pointed out, Li’s twist was not as new as the Daily Princetonian thought, but let’s return to the article.)

In Li’s case, however, “you have a minority candidate, but a minority candidate from a category that is not regarded by the [court] as an underrepresented category,” University politics professor and noted constitutional scholar Robert George said. “This is a minority candidate who is saying, ‘I don’t want my race to be counted for me or against me, but for my race not to be counted against me, it is important that no race be counted in any way that reduces my chances of admission.’”

“So you have two different categories of minority whose interests are allegedly in conflict.”

Thus the University of Virginia’s Minority Rights Coalition includes groups whose members have been given preferences at the expense of “populations” to which other MRC members belong. No wonder its co-chairs have such trouble defining “minority,” much less what “rights” they possess.

Here’s a thought: following the example of corporations who issue preferred stock and common stock, perhaps students should consider organizing two categories of minority rights groups. One would contain the minority groups whose “populations” receives preferred treatment at their institution (Hispanics, blacks, Native Americans, “Middle Easterners,” women feminists, etc.); the other all the common, un-preferred minority groups (Asians, Jews, evangelical Christians, conservatives, libertarians, ROTC cadets, etc.)