Race Preference Contortionists

After you read Affirmative-Action Programs for Minority Students: Right in Theory, Wrong in Practice (excepted at TaxProf Blog), you may come away as amazed as I was. Proponents of race preferences contort themselves into strange positions to justify the practice and avoid stating the obvious.

The article is adapted from the four authors’ new book, Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities. “Critics” of skin color preferences have three basic arguments, they contend: 1) the practice is reverse discrimination; 2) the practice creates a mismatch between students and their respective schools; and 3) the practice creates a stigma for students admitted under preferences.

Reverse discrimination is a term some people use to distinguish between discrimination against whites and discrimination against blacks. Obviously, there is no difference. Racial discrimination is racial discrimination, and regardless of what the Supreme Court says, it should be illegal in all contexts.

The authors admit that minority students at 28 colleges and universities they studied tended to have test scores below the school’s average. “Such results assume that minority-group SAT scores fall below the institutional average because admissions officers trade off test scores against other criteria associated with their desire to recruit more minority students — the essence of affirmative action.”

In the name of skin deep-only diversity, schools admit minority students, who tend to have lower grades and scores than the rest. You can debate whether the practice is justified, but there is no debate that the practice goes on at colleges and universities across the country.

Strangely, the authors assert that “black and Latino students with relatively low SAT scores do no better or worse than their counterparts who scored at or above the average for their institutions,” but admit to finding a “significant effect of institutional affirmative action on the grade performance of black and Latino students…A sizable minority-majority test-score gap within any given institution appears to create a social context that makes it more difficult for minority students to perform academically.”

In other words, race preferences harm minority students not because students who “benefited” have lower qualifications and are less prepared for their respective academic settings; they harm minorities because of how others perceive them and how they perceive themselves. Let me say it another way. Race preferences, which tend to produce large gaps in scores between minorities and other students, lower minority achievement by creating a stigma and a sort of stereotype threat, both of which affect a minority student’s ability to perform.

Don’t laugh. They’re quite serious.

The authors believe the inherent weakness of skin color preferences isn’t about academic gaps and institutional mismatch. It’s how race preferences are administered.

An easier way to eliminate “reverse” discrimination, the gap, the mismatch, and the stigma would be to remove race from the equation altogether and admit well-qualified students, regardless of race.

But that would make too much sense.

I echo Roger Clegg’s sentiment. When attempting to refute the mismatch theory, the authors cite William Bowen’s and Derek Bok’s The Shape of the River, which defends racial preferences, while ignoring the more well researched work of Richard Sander, who said that law school race-based preferences result in fewer black lawyers, because blacks admitted under these conditions are placed in schools that exceed their levels of preparation. As a result, they failed the bar exam at higher rates.

Also, I recommend picking up a copy of a book that critiques Bowen’s and Bok’s thesis, Getting Under the Skin of “Diversity”: Searching for the Color-Blind Ideal, by Larry Purdy.

The four authors, like most preference proponents, support lowered standards for minorities to satisfy some arbitrary notion of diversity. Their solution to problems stemming from this practice is simply to put a different spin on what’s actually happening. Athletic and legacy preference beneficiaries don’t suffer similar problems as race preference beneficiaries, contend the authors, so there’s “no good reason that affirmative-action programs for minority students cannot be run in the same way.” (I say get rid of athletic and legacy preferences, too.)

Like all roads that lead to a very hot place, this one is paved with good intentions.