Kevin Brown, a law professor at Indiana University who says that he was a beneficiary of affirmative action at Yale Law School, claims that affirmative action is helping the wrong blacks.
Colleges are giving fewer and fewer spots to “the traditional African-American” students with two black parents, whose ancestors endured discrimination, while giving more spots to black immigrants, Brown told Business Insider.
Black immigrants, who started coming to the U.S. in larger numbers after the 1970s, tend to have higher incomes than non-immigrant blacks, which leads to stronger college applications. Now there are a disproportionately high number of black immigrants at elite colleges….
Brown says colleges should make a special effort to include “traditional African Americans” as well as immigrants.
“Traditional African-Americans … clearly have a far greater claim to being members of a group that has suffered from the history of discrimination based on race and ethnicity….”
Prof. Brown, despite his Yale Law School education, appears to be unaware that the Supreme Court has ruled out compensation for past discrimination as a justification for the current racial discrimination on which affirmative action relies.
The risk of promoting group rights over individual rights is that you might find yourself, like Prof. Brown and “traditional African Americans,” in the wrong group.
ADDENDUM
Prof. Brown is not the first supporter of affirmative action to notice that it all too often benefits the wrong blacks, something I discussed nearly a decade ago in Preferentialists: Hoisted On Their Own Pétard!
Well, we’re ALL equal on the discrimination “alleviation via other folks labor” for offically denoted-oppresed victim- bus, it’s just that SOME of “us” are more equal than others.
“What do you mean “WE” kimosabe?”
Once again, a prominent voice questions affirmative action. Yet, once again, that prominent voice asks the least troubling questions. The professor is concerned that affirmative action, arguably intended to correct for the legacy of slavery and discrimination, is benefiting often more wealthy and more highly educated black immigrants who were not subject to these past injustices. But the professor should push his questioning further. For example, the professor might have also asked:
1) Why does affirmative action benefit white persons with Latino heritage? Why, for example, do Sergio Garcia (famous for inviting Tiger Woods to come over to eat fried chicken), Charlie Sheen, and LA’s newest white/Jewish/Latino/Italian mayor, receive the same affirmative action benefits?
2) Why do the white Latinos, perhaps descendants themselves of past Latino slave owners, receive the same benefits as the descendants of the past slaves of Latin America?
3) Why would a person of Japanese descent from Brazil (according to Wikipedia, more than 1 million persons in Brazil are of Japanese descent), upon coming to the USA, receive the same affirmative action benefits as the “traditional African Americans” the professor highlights? (Note that research suggests American-born Asians receive more admissions discrimination in the US education system than American non-Hispanic whites. Note also that the benefits are not precisely the same, since research shows that African Americans receive relatively more favorable treatment in admissions than Latinos.)