Monday, August 04, 2008
Obama on Affirmative Action
As the New York Times noted yesterday, Barack Obama sensibly believes that his daughters shouldn't benefit from affirmative action when they apply to college, particularly if it comes at the expense of less-privileged white applicants. Applying a much stronger economic lens to college admissions is a good idea and I'm glad Obama agrees. Because college admissions is zero-sum, that might mean trading some racial diversity for income diversity. But if that means the children of two wealthy, powerful, and socially-prominent Ivy League-educated lawyers don't get into Princeton, it's a trade off worth making.
Some affirmative action proponents, however, are worried that introducing this kind of nuance to the debate will hurt the larger cause (hat-tip: Russo):
The Supreme Court has...said that universities could consider race as they worked to diversify their campuses. Proponents of such programs point out that blacks continue to face discrimination regardless of class or income. Some fear that Mr. Obama’s focus on the socioeconomic status of his daughters — as opposed to the diversity of experience and perspective they might bring to predominantly white campuses — may help conservatives in their battle to eliminate race from university admissions and government hiring.
This just shows the how screwed-up the affirmative action debate has become. I'm in favor of racial preferences in college admissions as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools and have to live with legacy of historical racism along with discrimination that still exists today. But somehow affirmative action has gotten turned around so that the primary justification is now that it's good for white people. This is partially the legacy of Sandra Day O'Connor's somewhat tortured logic in the Michigan case, and partially because diversity has been diluted into a kind of all-purpose social good that's handy for any rhetorical occasion. It's also a way to be pro-affirmative action without being intellectually honest about the hard tradeoffs that position entails, and leads to absurd conclusions like the idea that some other Senator's daughter would learn more from hanging out with Senator Obama's daughters at Princeton than she would from a white first-generation college student from a low-income family.
Elsewhere in the article there's also this:
Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a professor at Harvard Law School and an adviser on black issues to Mr. Obama...and civil rights lawyers like Mr. Payton say Mr. Obama’s daughters should not be barred from affirmative action programs because they may well encounter racial discrimination, unlike their white peers. Studies suggest that employers often favor white job seekers over black applicants, even when their educational backgrounds and work experiences are nearly identical. Mr. Obama’s “daughters are not going to be judged in a colorblind way throughout their lives,” Mr. Ogletree said.
I'm pretty sure that the single biggest thing affecting the way people judge Barack Obama's children throughout their lives will be the fact that their dad was a world-famous Senator and possibly the President of the United States of America, not their race, gender, or anything else. And while this is somewhat of an extreme example, many students at the relatively small number of elite colleges where affirmative action is an issue have social capital that dwarfs that of ordinary students.
Affirmative action is meant to help students who were, say, raised by a single parent who struggled to earn enough to put food on the table, students of promising intellect who bounced around from different schools in their younger years. Students, in other words, like Senator Obama himself (the article suggests that Obama "chose not to mention his race in his application to Harvard Law School to avoid benefiting from affirmative action," although this is unconfirmed.) But once it works, it shouldn't become an intergenerational inheritance, particularly when there are far more worthy lower-income students out there than elite institutions currently choose to serve. -- |
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