It's time to resanctify colorblindness as ideal
Affirmative action in higher education admissions started picking up steam immediately after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968. I would like to think it's self-evident that whatever one thought of race-based preferences at their start, or whatever one thinks about them now, something cried out to be done to increase minority enrollments at selective institutions back then, including the State University of New York at Binghamton, where I was an undergraduate. If I recall correctly, my alma mater enrolled a little under 3,000 students in the mid-1960s. Of that number, I don't think more than a dozen were black -- and at least one of them was a remarkable fellow from Zimbabwe, then known as Southern Rhodesia. So maybe there were a grand total of 10 or 11 African-American students on a major public campus in a very large state. This was neither good nor seemly, by any measure. One of the lines of defense used by affirmative action advocates in those early days went like this: Taking race into account in admissions was admittedly unattractive, but given our country's past and continuing record of racism, we had no other choice. Simple fairness, went the argument, demanded preferences -- at least for a while. How long would that "while" last? In the vicinity of 30 to 35 years, seemed the answer mentioned most often. By the mid-1970s, I had grown so fascinated by the passions and paradoxes of affirmative action in higher education that I picked it as my dissertation topic at the University of Minnesota. What do I mean by passions and paradoxes? Conundrums like the following, as captured in a 1977 report: "Pursuing preferential admission policies would seem to be inconsistent with our deeply held convictions regarding individuality, merit, and personal responsibility. Failing to pursue such policies seems to reveal moral and ethnic blindness on the part of the majority to the historic and contemporary condition of racial minorities in American society, and is therefore perceived to be contrary to humanitarian and egalitarian themes within our national experience." Inspired by such on-the-one-hand but on-the-other-hand analyses, it became increasingly difficult for me to write anything about affirmative action that didn't send readers on pretzeled excursions. I might be a reasonably ideological fellow, but on this issue, my favorite color shaded toward plaid. Well, don't look now, but it's 2003, or a full 35 years since pronounced racial considerations and preferences in almost all aspects of American higher education began to take serious hold. We're also within weeks of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing a case involving the University of Michigan that may clarify what is, and what is not, permissible under the hydra headings of affirmative action. Which is to conclude: The time has arrived to firmly retrieve the fundamentally liberal idea that, when it comes to allocating benefits and burdens, a public institution should hardly ever take account of a citizen's complexion. It's time to resanctify colorblindness as an ideal -- though not just because a chunk of a century has passed. What other, noncalendar reasons might there be to challenge racial preferences? Just about every constitutional argument elucidated in all the friend-of-the court briefs filed by opponents in the Michigan case would apply. But, I hasten to add, I'm ultimately compelled less by legal contentions and more by how affirmative action often stalls the very people it intends to help fly. John McWhorter is a brilliant and brave linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He's also black and has written about how we must eliminate race-based affirmative action not for "abstruse philosophical reasons" or because it can be "laboriously interpreted as discrimination" -- but because it obstructs African-Americans "from showing us that they are as capable as all other people." By requiring less of blacks, he continues, affirmative action cheats them of "the unalloyed sense of personal, individual responsibility for their accomplishments that other students so often can have." More to the practical point, McWhorter claims that as long as African-Americans are held to abridged standards, their academic performance will be abridged, too, as expectations exert an almost magnetic pull on results. The question raised by this malign dynamic is politically tough but straightforward: If race-based affirmative action is a sizable reason itself why so many black students continue to do poorly in school, is it realistic to imagine a time -- no matter how distant in the future -- when it somehow morphs into a spur, rather than a brake, on more substantial learning and progress? -- Mitchell B. Pearlstein is president of Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank in Minneapolis. |
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