I'm generally skeptical of people who are "outraged" by affirmative action. I was one of three African American men in my class in college, and all three of us had a white parent. Still, despite the paucity of African American students, affirmative action was nevertheless the focus of eternal outrage from conservative quarters -- and even, occasionally, from liberals. Affirmative action has helped level the playing field, but its effect on racial diversity has been so negligible that I find myself asking why people are so angry. I just don't see the avalanche of under-qualified minorities into elite institutions that would beg the question as to whether AA was unfairly rewarding scores of unqualified applicants.
There are other reasons I'm suspicious of outrage directed at affirmative action, not the least of which is that many people who argue against it nevertheless support race-based decision making under other circumstances, such as determining credit-worthiness or whether or not someone is a criminal or a terrorist. But the No. 1 thing that raises my eyebrow is the ongoing practice of legacy admissions, which have never drawn a fraction of the outrage directed at affirmative action. Notre Dame, where President Obama is scheduled to speak for commencement, is one of the worst offenders, as Rick Kahlenberg and Steve Shadowen write today:
Conservative Catholics have been berating Notre Dame for extending a commencement-speaking invitation to a pro-choice president. We agree that President Barack Obama shouldn't speak at Notre Dame -- but abortion has nothing to do with it. Notre Dame practices pervasive discrimination in its admissions policies. Every year the school reserves 25 percent of the seats in its entering class for children of alumni. These "legacy preferences" result in applicants being granted or denied admission based not on their merit but on their ancestry.
I'm not sure why there isn't more strident opposition to legacy admissions. I can understand why people who honestly subscribe to a philosophy of color-blindness might find affirmative action offensive. I think color-blindness is a myth, and often simply a method of dismissing ongoing discrimination, but intellectually I understand the sentiment. What I most often see, though, is people who are supportive of using race to determine creditworthiness or reasonable suspicion find using race as a factor in hiring and admissions completely offensive. It makes me wonder if the vitriol directed at AA isn't just a matter of competition for resources. People instinctively let legacies fly because the people benefiting from them are white, while affirmative action is seen primarily as a method of rewarding undeserving outsiders. It reminds me of the right's past attempts to mobilize against policies that strengthen the social safety net by presenting the primary beneficiaries as people of color.
Despite the focus on race-based AA, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action remain white women.This points to AA's real purpose: not "punishing whites" for historical injustice, but acting as a corrective against intentional or unconscious discrimination. Once you acknowledge that, it's hard to describe AA as discrimination against whites, which eliminates the line of argument most often used by its opponents. At the same time, the people most likely hurt by legacy admissions are white people of a certain social class. So I have to wonder why people opposed to affirmative action so often invoke race, and so infrequently discuss the ongoing discrimination of legacy admissions.
-- A. Serwer
