Do you know why race preference proponents don’t like socioeconomic affirmative action? Because it doesn’t “improve diversity.” So said preference supporters last week at a debate about race- and class-based preferences.
I support class-based affirmative action for the same reason I don’t like race- and sex-based preferences. Widening the pool of lower-income candidates so they’ll have access to educational resources and financial aid is a good thing. “Widening the pool” is affirmative action. Lowering academic standards so as to admit more lower-income students is a bad thing.
Diverse Education reports on a recent debate about class-based affirmative action and race-based preferences. More here.
John McWhorter, one of the debaters, has seen first-hand what happens when schools lower standards for minorities. “If you set the bar low, that is the kind of performance you will get,” he said. “[Moreover] there is no evidence that the presence of Black and Latino students significantly improves education.” McWhorter supports class-based affirmative action.
Class-based affirmative action supporter Dalton Conley, said the so-called wealth gap between students is larger than the racial gap. Tackling the former gap would benefit more people.
Julian Bond, chair of the NAACP, gets his terms wrong, as preference proponents often do. “Affirmative action resulted from an American consensus,” he said, “a remedy for past racial injustices. Changes in our society, not least in the election of our first African-American president, do not signal a change in our racial temperature so significant that race-conscious affirmative action can now be discarded.”
Affirmative action in its truest sense was designed to widen the pool of people considered for jobs and admissions, not as a racial spoils system, which it has become.
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