The Two Claimed Benefits of Affirmative Discrimination Not Persuasive

There are two basic justifications given for affirmative discrimination.

The first, and the one with the most visceral appeal, is that it is needed to make up for past discrimination. There is a legal and a policy problem with this argument. The legal problem is that the Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected it--that is, it has said that racial preferences cannot be justified by pointing to broad societal or historical discrimination. And the Court was right to do so. Remember, those now receiving college admissions preferences, for instance, are not slaves or former slaves or individuals who were even alive during the Jim Crow era: Rather, they are students born in 1990. This does not mean that racial discrimination no longer exists, and perhaps some of these individuals can point in particular to socioeconomic disadvantages they suffer and can trace to discrimination. But people who suffer from socioeconomic disadvantages come in all colors, so why not include all of them in affirmative action programs? Conversely, the overwhelming majority (86 percent) of African Americans given college admission preferences to select schools are not socioeconomically disadvantaged. (Barack Obama, incidentally, has acknowledged that his daughters shouldn’t receive preferences and that disadvantaged whites should.)

The second justification for affirmative discrimination is that there are benefits to having a student body or workforce that reflects a politically correct racial and ethnic mix. The empirical case for such benefits is very shaky, and that’s no surprise. It hinges on a prediction that we can use skin color and national origin to predict an individual’s background, experiences, and perspectives, and that the individual will interact with the rest of the group in a way that reflects those characteristics. In other words, it relies on stereotyping. But we cannot and should not assume that, because a person is Latino, for instance, he or she will have a particular history or set of perspectives, let alone that they will be shared with other people. If a company wants to hire someone who knows about how to market a product in the American Southwest, which includes many Latinos, then it should hire someone with that expertise (regardless of ethnicity), rather than assuming that any Latino (including, say, a Puerto Rican who grew up in New York City) will do.