On November 25, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Yascha Mounk, who teaches expository writing at Harvard, about his school’s policy of discriminating against Asian Americans in admissions and, in particular, the policy’s historical parallels with Harvard’s anti-Jewish quotas of yesteryear. All good stuff, and it’s good that the Times ran it.
The only off-note is two or three paragraphs that defend Harvard’s policy of giving racial preferences to African Americans and Latinos in order to achieve a “critical mass” of them. That kind of discrimination is okay, says Mr. Mounk, but giving whites a preference over Asian Americans is not.
Really? If you have a quota-floor for African Americans and Latinos, then you have a quota-ceiling for Asian Americans and whites. But, as we have seen, Mr. Mounk doesn’t like quota-ceilings for Asian Americans. So Mr. Mounk must be arguing either (a) that it’s okay to have a quota-ceiling for Asian Americans vis-à-vis nonwhites but not vis-à-vis whites, or else (b) he thinks that the quota-floor for African Americans and Latinos should be entirely at the expense of whites, and never at the expense of Asian Americans. That is, either it’s okay to discriminate against Asian Americans in favor of African Americans and Latinos but not in favor of whites, or else it’s okay to discriminate in favor of African Americans and Latinos against whites but not against Asian Americans.
Now, can either (a) or (b) be justified? The first hinges on their being something particularly unobjectionable about discrimination in favor of any “underrepresented” minority group, and the latter on there being something particularly unobjectionable about anti-white discrimination.
I don’t think that Mr. Mounk is arguing (b), and I don’t think that there’s anything in the Supreme Court’s “diversity” caselaw to support (b) either. So we are left with (a).
But wait: If it is okay to give any “underrepresented” group a preference over any “overrepresented” group, then why shouldn’t it be permissible to discriminate against Asian Americans in favor of whites? After all, Asian Americans are much more “overrepresented” at Harvard than whites are. In fact, of the four groups we have been talking about — whites, African Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans — only whites are significantly “underrepresented” in comparison with the general population, according to Harvard’s own numbers. And this is without drilling down further: Surely there are some white subgroups (Eastern European non-Jews, for example) who are outnumbered even in absolute terms by some Asian subgroups (Chinese Americans, for example).
The best approach, though, is to say it’s all spinach (discrimination), and to hell with it.
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“Academic Science Isn’t Sexist.” So says another op-ed in the New York Times, of all places, so it must be true. A key paragraph: “So if alleged hiring and promotion biases don’t explain the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields, what does? According to our research, the biggest culprits are rooted in women’s earlier educational choices, and in women’s occupational and lifestyle preferences.” Gee, fancy that.
What’s more, a piece in The New Yorker re-explains that social psychology academia is biased against conservatives. Wow.
Sanity is breaking out in some unlikely places.
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Well, but let’s not get too complacent. The New York Times also ran recently a dubious editorial titled, “Silicon Valley’s Diversity Problem.”
Now, to the extent that the editorial is calling on companies to ensure that they do all they can to ensure that they recruit, hire, and promote the best qualified individuals regardless of race, ethnicity, or sex, no one should disagree. But to the extent that the editorial is urging companies to weigh race, ethnicity, and sex in their recruitment, hiring, and promotion, it is asking companies to violate the law.
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans discrimination by public and private employers. The Supreme Court has carved out a remedial, affirmative-action exception for jobs that have been “traditionally segregated,” but it is unlikely that this exception applies to Silicon Valley’s companies, which did not even exist in the era of traditional segregation.
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Worse was Brent Staples’s New York Times op-ed, “The Racist Origins of Felon Disenfranchisement.” It is simply not true that felon disenfranchisement has racist origins.
Even opponents of felon disenfranchisement have acknowledged that the practice “in the U.S. is a heritage from ancient Greek and Roman traditions” and “English colonists brought [this practice] with them.” The scholars cited by Mr. Staples concede, “Restrictions [on felon voting] were first adopted by some states in the post-Revolutionary era, and by the eve of the Civil War some two dozen states had statutes barring felons from voting or had felon disenfranchisement provisions in their state constitutions.” That means that over 70 percent of the states had these laws by 1861 — when most blacks (except in New England) could not vote in any case.
It is true that, during the period from 1890 to 1910, five Southern states passed race-targeted felon-disenfranchisement laws, but they are no longer on the books. Alexander Keyssar’s book The Right to Vote says that, outside the South, disenfranchisement laws “lacked socially distinct targets and generally were passed in a matter-of-fact fashion.” Even for the post–Civil War South, Keyssar has more recently written, in some states “felon disfranchisement provisions were first enacted [by] . . . Republican governments that supported black voting rights.” Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment itself acknowledges the legitimacy of felon disenfranchisement; its history is elaborated in a 2012 Yale Law Journal article.
If a disenfranchisement law had racist origins and was still on the books, it could be challenged in court and struck down (there is Supreme Court precedent — a unanimous 1985 opinion written by Justice Rehnquist). But those challenges aren’t being brought, because they would be baseless. There are good reasons for these statutes, starting with this question: If you won’t follow the law, why should you have a role in making it?
You can read more about this issue in testimony I gave to Congress, here.
