On July 3, the Trump administration announced that it was rescinding Obama-era guidance on the use of race and ethnicity in student admissions (higher education) and assignments (K–12).
This is good news. As I explained on National Review Online as the Obama statements were issued — here and here and here, for example — they misread the law and were bad policy as well.
It’s not that complicated: As a policy matter, skin color and national origin should not play a role in deciding where a student can go to school. The costs of such discrimination overwhelm any claim of “educational benefits” from having a politically correct racial and ethnic mix of students. As a legal matter, while the courts have, alas, left the door ajar for this sort of discrimination, they have also placed significant restraints on it. The federal government should not be encouraging schools to do as much of this as they can get away with, which is what the Obama administration’s guidance did.
Most of the arguments against politically correct racial discrimination have been around for a long time, but I’ll mention briefly the two that have recently, and rightly, attracted greater attention.
First, it is not just white students who are frequently discriminated against, but Asian-American students as well. Indeed, as America becomes increasingly multiracial and multiethnic — and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic — it becomes more and more untenable for our institutions to sort people according to what color skin they have and where their ancestors came from.
Second, the evidence is now overwhelming that, because of the “mismatch” phenomenon, it is not only the students who are discriminated against who are hurt by these policies, but also those who are supposedly receiving racial preferences. That is, if a student is admitted to and attends a school where his or her academic qualifications are significantly below the rest of the student body’s, that student is less likely to graduate and more likely to flunk out or switch majors, and will receive lower grades — all to the student’s detriment.
I pause to note a wonderful essay published last month by John McWhorter on why this discrimination should end.
So the Trump administration is wise to set a new course and to jettison the Obama administration’s bad guidance in this area. Here’s hoping that the administration issues new guidance and, in particular, supports the lawsuit that Asian Americans have brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill for their admissions discrimination.
No doubt the Left will characterize this shift as somehow racist, but in fact it is not only nondiscriminatory but also the only approach that will not divide our multiethnic and multiracial society. Being against racial preferences is not being against diversity – it’s being against racial discrimination. It’s worthy of the nation whose birthday we celebrated this month, on July 4, the day after the new Trump policy was announced.. E pluribus unum.
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The matter just discussed is one of the topics about which the Center for Equal Opportunity has been in touch with the administration. And CEO was very aggressive in defending the Trump administration’s rescission and received quite a bit of media.
I’ve listed a few links below, and that’s just a sampling. We were also in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and many, many others in the print media, as well as doing several radio shows and some television, including the BBC.
NRO post: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/trump-affirmative-action-pulling-obama-guidance-right-move/
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/politics/trump-affirmative-action-race-schools.html
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Not all press we got was favorable, of course. The Houston Chronicle criticized the Trump administration’s action, and in the course of it quoted and criticized me as well. But the next day it did publish my response:
Regarding “Trump’s disdain for affirmative action could kill college diversity programs” (HoustonChronicle.com, Friday), it’s ironic that your editorial defending racial preferences in university admissions would cite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. After all, Dr. King’s most famous declaration was, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” That’s the principle most Americans would like to see universities follow when it comes to admitting students: Don’t weigh skin color or what country someone’s ancestors came from.
As America becomes an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic country — where individual Americans themselves are more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic — it also becomes increasingly untenable for our institutions to classify our people and treat some better and some worse based on which box they check on some form.
Indeed, when I said that universities’ politically correct discrimination would come under greater scrutiny “as the demographics of the country change,” I was talking about discrimination not only against whites but also against Asian-Americans “and others as well,” who are now all targeted.
So the Trump administration was right to rescind the Obama administration’s “guidance” in this area, which pushed schools to treat students differently on the basis of race and ethnicity. Here’s hoping that one day the Supreme Court, and the Houston Chronicle, will also come around to this view.
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Modest Proposals – Last month, we Virginians voted in our primaries for the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. An acquaintance of mine was lamenting the fact that polling places are so often located at public schools, where the employees are disproportionately left of center. We came up with a list of better alternatives, namely the nearest (1) police station; (2) Chick-fil-A; or (3) shooting range.
Also, we decided to move Election Day to April 15.
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Recommended Reading on Race – America’s race problem is mostly a problem about African-American disparities in a variety of areas, and it is an article of faith on the Left that these disparities are caused principally if not entirely by racism. I want to recommend recent work by two authors rejecting this view, one who has had as distinguished a career as one can imagine, and the other who is an undergraduate: Thomas Sowell’s compact new book Discrimination and Disparities and Coleman Hughes’s sharp essay in Quillette, “The Racism Treadmill.” If you don’t believe me, both are nicely written up with some excerpts by AEI’s Mark J. Perry — Sowell’s book here and Hughes’s essay here.
