John McWhorter, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Mary Frances Berry, history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed the future of race preferences. Specifically, the two talked about whether the election of the nation’s first biracial president has rendered “affirmative action” unnecessary. Listen to the show here.
Berry rallies around the same justification for lowered standards for blacks: diversity. McWhorter supports socioeconomic affirmative action, which would benefit people of all races. He opposes preferences for people who happen to have a certain skin color and who “benefit” from this policy whether they want to or not.
In January, McWhorter discussed the same topic on NPR with panelists Dahlia Lithwick and BAMN’s Shanta Driver. In that interview, McWhorter raised an important point. He wondered whether it was “really such a tragedy” if, in the absence of race-based admissions, a black student gets a degree from the University of California at San Diego rather than UC Berkeley.
In my view, race preferences are immoral, should be illegal, and are unnecessary no matter who’s sitting in the White House.
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