As our readers know, the Center for Equal Opportunity has been every involved with urging (successfully) the Supreme Court to hear Fisher v. University of Texas, a case in which the use of racial and ethnic admission preferences in school admissions is challenged. That case will now be argued next month, and CEO continues to discuss the case and how it ought to be decided. Last week, I participated in a symposium on the case, published on the influential SCOTUSBlog website. Below are some excerpts from my contribution, and you can read the whole thing here:
Here’s the basic question in Fisher: Just what is it that we expect African-American and Latino students to say to white and Asian-American students that will provide the latter with such compelling “educational benefits” that racial discrimination by the government is justified to make it more likely that these conversations take place?
The purported existence of such conversations – which is what the “diversity” justification boils down to – is the only justification for admission preferences that the University of Texas is using or can use. The Court has rejected the remedial justification in this context (and rightly so); it has rejected the role model justification (and rightly so); there is nothing else left (and rightly so).
So we need to think carefully about what these conversations might be. Now, I am going to discuss why I think it is hard to imagine anything that will fit the bill, but those who disagree ought to spell out what oral observations they think do fit the bill. Fair enough?
For starters, I say “oral” because they really ought not to be something that could just as easily be read, since then the observations might simply be assigned as class reading. It would be better if the lessons were not simply about equality or tolerance or treating other people as human beings, if it is likely that such straightforward lessons have already been learned (at home or grade school or church or on Sesame Street) or can be learned elsewhere (say, at work). And the observations should really be about something that only black and Latino students are likely to know.
So it can’t be an observation about growing up poor, because there are poor people of all colors; and of course the overwhelming majority of, say, African Americans who are admitted to our more selective schools – that is, the ones likely to weigh race and ethnicity – are from middle- or upper-class backgrounds (eighty-six percent, according to the race-preference bible, The Shape of the River).
It can’t be an observation about growing up as a slave, or under Jim Crow, or during the Civil Rights Era – because the eighteen-year-old students getting these preferences in 2012 were born in, let’s see, 1994, thirty years after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. True, these students may have faced other discrimination – but then, so may have Asian students and Middle Eastern students (and, for that matter, the European-American students who’ve recently applied to college). One reason that, say, Justice O’Connor might have assumed that all black people and all white people live in different worlds growing up was that, for her when she was growing up, there was a lot more truth to that than there is today.
If it’s not socioeconomic disadvantage or history, then perhaps there is a particular African-American perspective on calculus, or a Latino perspective on economics. I mean, to be compelling it must have something to do with something weightier – less stereotypical – than food or rap music. No?
Well, there must be something that middle-class eighteen-year-old African Americans and Latinos can tell eighteen-year-old whites and Asians that they are incapable of thinking of or reading about on their own. Perhaps whites and Asians have never heard of racial profiling or the Trayvon Martin case, for example.
Whether the lesson schools are trying to teach is that African Americans have a particular point of view or, rather contradictorily, that African Americans don’t have a particular point o f view – both are urged with equal vigor, even though the former relies on stereotyping and the latter seems rather obvious in a country that includes Condoleezza Rice and Whoopi Goldberg, Bill Cosby and Snoop Dogg, Herman Cain and Barack Obama – it is odd that schools use racial essentialism in admissions and expect students to use it when listening to someone. At least, it is odd if students are being taught not to judge other people by their skin color.
Perhaps it’s not so much what the student says as it is how he or she says it. That is, what schools are really hoping that whites and Asians will learn from “diversity” is that African Americans and Latinos are just as smart as they are (by the way, is there any evidence that, in a country whose laws and popular culture systematically condemn racial bigotry, this is a widespread problem?). Of course, if it is of compelling importance that this point get made, it would be foolish to create a campus where the white and Asian students are systematically required to have better academic qualifications than the black and Latino students – which is exactly what schools are doing, of course.
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The Department of Transportation issued some proposed “Program Implementation Modifications” last week, involving its preferential treatment of minority-owned businesses. My favorite passage:
Additionally, we propose to modify the existing definition of a “socially and economically disadvantaged individual” to align with [Small Business Administration] principles. Most importantly, the definition specifically states that being born in a country does not, by itself, suffice to make the birth country and [sic] individual’s country of origin for purposes of being included within a designated group. For example, a child born of Norwegian parents in Chile would not, based on that fact alone, be regarded as “Hispanic” under the definition. Minor technical changes to references within the existing definitions are also proposed.
Glad that the Obama administration is being vigilant on this problem. A child born in Chile of Mexican parents presents a different question, and if the child had one Norwegian parent and one Mexican parent — well, I’m just glad that we have plenty of federal bureaucrats to figure this all out for us.
P.S. And what about Chileans living in Norway?
