Judah Bellin, a junior at Cornell University, addresses the stigma and academic consequences of racial preferences in the pursuit for skin deep-only diversity.
“The most potent critique of affirmative action is that it brings students to universities they’re unprepared for. As UCLA law professor Richard Sander showed in a comprehensive study of American law schools, the affirmative action regime has forced universities of every caliber to accept minority students with lower standardized test scores and grades than the average of the entering class. This leads to devastating results: Almost half of black law students place in the bottom tenth of their graduating classes. Furthermore, entering black law students were 135 percent more likely than whites to not complete their law degree.
“Worse, even the students who can succeed in these environments are always suspected of benefiting from preferential treatment. Sonia Sotomayor and Clarence Thomas can certainly attest to that.”
Somewhere along the way, the idea of skin color “diversity” took hold and became an all-important goal, one I believe is based on emotionalism and misplaced guilt. What is the basis for the belief that adding more brown faces to the campus produces an educational benefit that justifies lowering standards for owners of those brown faces? FYI, it’s disingenuous to argue that preferences don’t entail lowered standards.
This is how “affirmative action” works in theory: an admissions committee faced with a black and a white applicant with equivalent grades and scores would select the black applicant. (Justifications include remedying past discrimination.) The black applicant is given a special but small advantage over the white applicant, and that advantage is his race.
But that’s not how it actually works. Studies have shown – and common sense dictates – that “affirmative action” admittees have lower grades and scores than their Hispanic, white, and Asian counterparts, and they graduate at lower rates. This indicates a widespread thumb-on-the-scale phenomenon.
Who gains the most from the obsessive quest for skin deep-only diversity?
“We often forget that the argument for diversity is just a little bit presumptuous,” Bellin writes. “Essentially, proponents can often argue something like this: We should bring in disadvantaged or minority students so that we can gain something from them. They’re just pawns in our nice little game of self-awareness. So who really cares about the consequences they face? At least we’re learning.”
My main problem with racial preferences is that the practice gives the government power to make hiring, contracting, and admissions decisions based on race. Once upon a time, that was considered odious. Why is acceptable now? Running a close second is the lowered-standards aspect of racial preferences. If blacks in America want to unburden themselves of the inferior stigma and consequent negative stereotypes, they must take a stand against any government policy that implicitly reinforces that stigma and perpetuates those stereotypes. Racial preferences do both.
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