Burying the dream of a color-blind society

Cluefon
    By Dan Dudis

A friend (I'll call her Jill) and I were talking about the upcoming MCAT at dinner the other night. Jill said that she and a friend had been at Undergraduate Career Services looking at the binders that profile Yale students admitted to medical school. These binders list GPA, MCAT score, and home state for each student admitted to one or more schools. Jill told me how low some of the scores and GPAs were and how excited this made her, since it seemed to indicate that her chances for admission were better than she had previously believed. Jill then recalled the short-lived nature of her jubilation: "My friend turned to me and said, `Jill, those people probably don't look like you.'" Jill is white.

"I think people are absolutely right to be concerned about [the drop in the number of black and Hispanic students admitted to UC Berkeley]. I think it shows how absolutely wrong-headed the decision [to end affirmative action] was. Those are dire numbers," Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw said (YDN, 4/13/98).

Affirmative action invariably draws many different responses, both pro and con, but the above two reactions basically sum up the debate. Shaw is strictly a numbers man: affirmative action guarantees respectable numbers of blacks and Hispanics. Jill and her friend are from what I would characterize as the sandbox school. Like a young child playing in a sandbox who has had her toys taken away, Jill and her friend repeated the age-old recess refrain, "But it's not fair!"

I don't mean to belittle their response by labeling it juvenile. Quite the opposite. Children have an incredibly well-defined sense of justice. They seem to inherently know when something is fair and when it isn't. And affirmative action is most definitely not fair.

Fairness is really what this debate is all about: fairness of outcomes versus fairness of process. Supporters of affirmative action, when you wade past all the mumbo-jumbo about diversity (let's hope that we can all agree that diversity has a lot more to do with what goes on in one's brain than with the amount of melanin in one's skin) and remedying past wrongs, are really only interested in the numbers.

They propose that as long as black and Hispanic representation in big business and elite undergraduate institutions closely approximates their representation in the most recent census, all is right with the world.

College admissions is a zero-sum game. There is a (relatively) fixed number of admittees. One group can't be over-represented without another group being under-represented. As such, those who live by the sword of proportional representation also die by the sword of proportional representation.

In order to achieve the proportional representation that affirmative action supporters so desire, the percentage of Asian students at Yale would plummet from its current level of 15 percent to about three percent while the percentage of Jewish students would fall to two percent. All of these adjustments to give currently under-represented white Catholics and Protestants their fair representation. And yet, I don't see any people wearing yellow paint on their faces or dressing up as giant matzo balls running around campus.

The most insidious part of affirmative action, however, is not that it flies in the face of fairness and meritocracy, nor that its ends-based reliance on proportional representation is inherently contradictory to the desires of its proponents.

No, the most insidious part of affirmative action is how it leads to statements such as the one made by Jill's friend earlier in this column. Affirmative action, by advancing the less qualified, only further serves to alienate white from black in this country. The policy creates an atmosphere where whites automatically regard their black colleagues as inferior--the "he's only here because he's black" response.

We say the same things here at Yale when it comes to legacies, athletes, and occasionally--when we think that the thought police aren't listening--about minorities. Not only is such an environment terrible for race relations, it's insulting to the blacks and Hispanics who got into Yale on their own merits.

Prolonging affirmative action will only serve to let those in high places ignore the real problems of poor schools and bona fide racism, while causing a further deterioration in race relations.

As long as quotas are met, the theory goes, all can go on as before. America's leaders think they are wrapping themselves in a fire blanket when they embrace affirmative action in order to protect themselves from the fires of racial division. That blanket is now burning.

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