The American Civil Rights Institute‘s Jennifer Gratz is featured in a story on NPR about “affirmative action,” also known as racial preferences.
The plaintiff in Gratz. v. Bollinger, in which the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the University of Michigan’s use of a racial point system in admissions, told NPR that there “were rumors in high school that the University of Michigan used race in their admissions policy. I remember hearing that and thinking, ‘There’s no way — that can’t be true.’”
Sadly, it was true, and it’s true in colleges and universities across the country.
In Grutter .v Bollinger, the companion case to Gratz, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that the court expected racial preferences would no longer be necessary 25 years from now. How she came up with that figure is anyone’s guess, but it was just filler. The court found that the government had a “compelling state interest” in racial diversity, and if lowering standards for black students was the way to achieve it, so be it.
The article quotes people on both sides of the so-called debate. John McWhorter says he has no problem with racial preferences, but doesn’t like the lowered expectations the policy fosters.
“What concerns me is that until you get rid of a system that says B-plus is about as well as you have to do, then that’s about as good as all but a few strange shooting stars are going to do…In general, people do as well as they have to. How can black parents know what it is to qualify your student for Yale and Princeton in the way that white and Asian kids can, if black students can get into those schools without their parents having had to learn those sorts of things?”
Preferences proponent Tim Wise gets the last word, calling out the “myth” of quotas.
“The idea that colleges have to have a certain number of black students and certain number of Latino students just isn’t true. But the overwhelming majority of white folks in all the research I’ve seen believe those lies — believe those myths.”
I don’t know what sort of preferences opponents Wise has talked to, but the ones I know don’t make distinctions between racial quotas and lowered standards for blacks. The point is not that schools set quotas; it’s that schools consider race an admissions qualification, quotas or no quotas.
As far as admissions committees are concerned, race serves as a signifier of certain attributes deemed beneficial in the name of skin deep-only diversity. Rather than moving beyond racial stereotypes and assessing the individual as an individual—not as a member of a preferred racial minority group—we allow our government to hold fast to those stereotypes. As long as they “benefit” blacks. That’s not progress. That’s shameful.
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