Affirmative action

A small debate has broken out on the subject of affirmative action on my post about how Bush thinks we're stupid. Earnest has defended Bush's assertion that education is the key to helping racial minorites gain greater access to the upper economic spheres, and I can't say that I disagree. If schools in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods were brought up to the standards that middle class white schools have, then things would improve dramatically.

But I don't see why it's an either/or situation. It's a both situation. We need both to improve schools and continue implementing affirmative action. Affirmative action is a corrective--whites have a natural affirmative action in that they are generally better received than racial minorities. It's an evening out thing.

For some reason, no one wants to talk about how affirmative action benefits society as a whole in many ways besides just getting some justice for under-served groups. Universities have a right to craft diverse student bodies--diversity in a classroom creates learning possibilities that didn't exist before. Affirmative action made the explosion in identity-politics studies possible, and even though a few white men grumble, the benefit to society has been enormous. I am no expert on racial politics, but I do know that making universities more inclusive for women has benefitted fields from literature to research sciences, as Echidne's post on the Nobel Prize-winning women demonstrates.

Even if we managed to fix education problems in a generation and wipe out residual racism and sexism, that would still leave a generation of talented women and racial minorities who are missing out on the best education and jobs. The corrective is affirmative action, which is not and rarely has been quotas. In fact, one of the problems with affirmative action is it's difficult to describe exactly how it works, so people just assume it's something simplistic like quotas. At least in college admissions, it tends to work by people just using race and sex as two of the many factors they look at in gauging applications. It's definitely not letting lesser students in order to fit a quota.

The example I like to use is this--two students, both good grades, both in school clubs, roughly the same SAT's. The black student graduated from a public school, but the rich WASP from a prestigious prep school. In theory, the prestigious prep school credentials should outweigh the public school ones and the WASP would get in. (And usually does.) But odds are your public school graduate will be the better student because he got all these things without using family advantages. Many, if not most, of the people actively trying to eradicate affirmative action just want to return to the older system where race, sex and class were exactly what got you in--if you were a rich, white male.