Anti-Affirmative Action Crowd Achieves Pathetic Failure
Anti-Affirmative Action advocates need to relax. They need to open up a bottle of cognac and curl up with a book. Any book will do — even one with a lot of pictures and small words. They need to do something because their arguments devolved so far that they need to get some intellectual stimulation beamed directly into their pre-frontal cortex.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal informed me of something called an “Affirmative Action bake sale.” At first, I thought this was an event where sweet potato pie was placed prominently right next to apple pie. But that is just because I couldn’t conceive of how pathetic affirmative action detractors have become.
An affirmative action bake sale is one where conservative college students hold a bake sale where they charge minorities a lower price for baked goods than white people or Asians. The bake sale is a protest against the pernicious philosophy of affirmative a
ction. This activity is supposed to represent how affirmative action works at universities and in the job market: despite operating with equal currency — blacks and Latinos are charged less for the same goods.
The thought — and I use that word most generously — behind the protest exposes just how reductive the anti-affirmative action argument has become. They’ve moved far beyond the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” and are now just rank with the petty jealousy of seeing minorities get something that they want for themselves. Who doesn’t want to get a good job? Or to get into a good school? Or receive half-priced baked goods? I know I struggle to even remember any single instance of racial oppression in my life or the lives of my family members when confronted with cheap pie!
As these bake sale idiots have shown, affirmative action remains one of the most dangerously misunderstood concepts in modern America. Even affirmative action supporters don’t do a particularly good job of explaining it. After the jump I’ll take one for the team and explain the difference between affirmative action and a racist bake sale.
Here are two issues that a lot of people wrap into the affirmative action debate that are poorly understood: A) It does not make up for centuries of slavery and racial oppression, and B) A standardized test is not an objective measure of future performance.
Most people can wrap their minds around the first concept. Trust me, I’d rather have had a family that was allowed to own property, vote in elections, build wealth, not get lynched, and rise or fall on their merits for the past four centuries than whatever piddling, token opportunity somebody thinks they are giving me thanks to affirmative action. There is nothing that can be done to “make up” for centuries of oppression, just like there is nothing that can make up for the systematic extermination of millions of Jews, the forced removal of Native Americans from their land, or the final season of Battlestar Galactica. All we can do is to move on and try to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. Affirmative action doesn’t redress the wrongs of squat.
But it does begin to contemplate an answer for the second point. I say this as a person who beats standardized tests like they stole something from me — but doing well on a standardized test has as much to do with future results as buying someone a drink at a bar has to do with getting laid. The two things are not completely disassociated, but there is a whole lot that has to happen in between.
Deans of admission or hiring coordinators are trying to determine how people will succeed going forward, while a standardized test tries to codify a person’s past achievements. Only looking at a test is a terribly incomplete analysis, and successful institutions know it.
There were three people from my high school that got into Harvard. One (white girl) had excellent grades and scores and was one of the best athletes in our school. Another (white guy) had excellent grades and scores and was an amazing pianist. I was the third one. I had excellent grades and scores and had the “I’m involved in 15 different clubs and organizations because I have no life,” douchebag resume. Did being black help my application?
I don’t know and I don’t particularly care. Because what I do know is that I didn’t “take” a spot that should have gone to a “more deserving white man.” Harvard, like most institutions, starts with a list of what it deems to be “qualified” candidates and then has to pare that list down. Anybody who has ever hired somebody for a job knows that you generally deal with a number of people that could complete the assigned task, from there you have to make a decision based on arbitrary factors and nonobjective criteria like “fit” or “feel.” Dessert — whatever that means — doesn’t even come into play.
And here’s where affirmative action transcends from an interesting intellectual debate into something that has the potential to be truly enriching to society. The policy reminds us that a diversity of experiences and backgrounds makes for a stronger institution, company, and nation. We learn from each other. I met a lot of white people at Harvard who had never met or even conceived of a black man who preferred Pearl Jam to De La Soul (no disrespect to Busta Rhymes). Conversely, I had classes with poor white people from Texas who couldn’t rope a steer to save their life and loved bagels. Don’t even get me started on what an African-American learns about Africans (white or black) when you meet a couple and excitedly ask them if they have a lions in their “village.” I can show you the scars later.
If you don’t learn these kinds of things when you are young and impressionable, it’s far too easy to get racial generalizations locked into your consciousness.
Affirmative action isn’t about grand intellectual ideals. It’s about a quiet conversation shared between two people who wouldn’t otherwise have any reason to talk together, to learn together, or to work together. It’s about people with all different kinds of test scores and qualifications and experiences coming together in a place of business and producing something much more interesting than any of them would have come up with on their own.
And yet there are people who would sacrifice all of the potential for the sake of a vocabulary test. There are people who think the benefits of living in a diverse society can be reduced to a half-priced cupcake.
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Wow. A bake sale to make a point. How clever. The sort of thing one would see on the Apprentice, something Trump might like. So do does the student with a legacy admission from a rich white daddy get a pie for free? I often wonder why conservatives go for the simplistic as in dumb, argument…remember Bush explaining foreign policy like he was speaking to a first grade class? Bill Buckley must be rolling in his grave.
Perhaps you should have spent a bit of time explaining the racism of the stunt and why these conservatives chose to have Asians included in their camp.
Your point is well made. Diversity works and enriches society simply by increasing the talent pool. I grew up poor in a large city, so my group of friends looked like refugees from the UN and my life became richer in the experience. Especially when my best friend introduced me to warm Syrian bread while his favorite was fresh baked bagels.
Yes, libtree brings up a good point. If they really cared about only letting in deserving candidates, they’d be marching in the streets about legacy admits and children of faculty – matriculates who have far spottier records and whose preferential treatment is a slap in the face to the notion of a meritocracy. But they don’t care. Their motivation is, and always has been, “Damn! Somewhere, somehow, a minority is getting something they don’t deserve!” It’s why we have a miserly social safety net and a pathetic health care system. It’s sad to say, but there’s a healthy chunk of White America that would rather be broke themselves than to see tax dollars go to non-whites. Nose sliced off – take that, Face!
Great post, Elie. You convinced me that I should be paying $1 for my muffin.
[...] * Yesterday, The WSJ Law Blog told us that some conservative students organizations are holding affirmative action bake sales. Obviously, I have some thoughts. Here’s my best attempt to help these people. [True/Slant] [...]
Good points man! Respect!
As someone once told me when discussing these types of bake sales, they’d be more factually correct if you sold the cupcake for $1 to everyone, but first made the person of color do an obstacle course to prove that they deserve the cupcake.
“…the petty jealousy of seeing minorities get something that they want for themselves.”
It’s pretty ironic you’d accuse anyone of being petty, given that you frequently prod discussion about school prestige and are transparently giddy whenever some sort of inane ranking comes out. You openly and casually boast about Harvard on ATL, but when people take issue with the social mechanism that you can thank for your admittance, they are “racist.” And I apoligize for assuming AA played a factor in your acceptance. Alas, that is perhaps the most pernicious effect of AA: you may have been the smartest, most promising applicant the committee saw that year, but people will always assume your application was given a “plus” because of your race.
You apologize for making assumptions about my qualifications, but blame those assumptions on a policy you have no idea if I benefited from, instead of your own world view. And that makes sense to you?
Anyway, you are essentially making the Clarence Thomas argument against AA. I think it breaks down because it assumes that a black person like me is constantly worried about what other people think about how I got my job.
I am not. I’ve met a lot of people that I felt received an opportunity solely because their family had money. Legacies, you know.
What I learned from them was that they really didn’t give a crap about what I thought about their qualifications. Middle class people tend to say “I’ve earned every single thing I’ve ever had.” Rich people tend to say “I was in a position to buy [stocks/houses/foreign governments], now that investment has doubled.” It’s less about how they got there, and more about what they are going to do with the opportunity.
Thank God I went to a school that admitted legacies!
Hence, I can honestly say I don’t care what you or anybody else thinks about “how” I’ve gotten to where I am. Instead, I’m concerned about how I can maximize the opportunity.
Based on his years on the Court, it’s a lesson Clarence Thomas still needs to learn.
In response to another comment. See in context »Elie,
I think it would be great to quell discussion on the Above the Law site if you would disclose your undergrad GPA and LSAT score. If HLS accepted you on merit, please back that up.
HLS rejected me (3.85 undergrad GPA (Georgetown), 171 LSAT, but white male), but I realize that my GPA/LSAT weren’t at the top of HLS’s range. I and many others are curious to know how you can be so sure that you were admitted to HLS based on merit.
Thanks.
Brother, you kind of aggressively missed my point didn’t you? I totally disagree with a stats-based analysis of what you call “merit.”
Just looking at your stats, it seems like you were right in the range of a lot of people who get into HLS, and a lot of people who get rejected by HLS. Why do you think that being a “white male” was the crucial difference between you getting in or not? I’d imagine that you got into schools that are of similar caliber to HLS, do you think that those schools had fewer minorities competing with you?
Anyway, I’m not going to answer your question because I don’t accept the premise of your question. I don’t think that merit has a lot to do with these stats and figures.
And even if I did, it wouldn’t really shut anybody up who needs to believe that I’ve been unfairly promoted through life thanks to AA.
But I’ll tell you this, I didn’t graduate with a 4.0 GPA, and I didn’t score a 180 on LSAT. That means that there are some people out there that scored and graded better than me, and yet didn’t get into the same law schools I got into. I’m sure they feel aggrieved.
The last time I was in Vegas, I pushed all in before the flop with cowboys against a sloppy drunk Englishman who had been playing like an idiot. He called me with Queens. The flop came down King, crap, crap. I had him statistically dominated. He pulled runner-runner, queen, queen, took all my money and did a little dance all the way up to the MGM lions.
While planning my homicidal revenge the dealer said “he’s been waiting for you all night. he got lucky, but he been doing it to people like you all week.” Life is often more complicated than it looks.
In response to another comment. See in context »I must say this exchange pissed me off a bit. There are many qualified students who would like to go to a good university or college. They know it gives one a leg up on the economic scale. However it is money that is the problem. My niece could barely afford the books required for her classes and until the passage of the new GI Bill couldn’t afford college at all.
In response to another comment. See in context »Now I barely got through high school but managed to survive as an entrepreneur but my niece is entering a world where our president says you will need a least four years of college. She wants to get into Forestry and she will have to be in hock for the rest of her life to do it. And here you two are pissing away about grade point average while Harvard sits on a ton of money that could have allowed both of you admission. Yes, life is more complicated, more complicated by far for the average guy or girl.
This is an excellent point. I’ve been discussing the pros and cons of AA from the kind of academic theory behind it. But it is unmistakably true that you can’t fully look at AA without adding economic factors as an important — perhaps the most important — overlay.
Many of the factors we are all discussing have a much bigger correlation with money than they do with race, color or creed.
In response to another comment. See in context »Thank you for giving a real life example to what I mentioned before re: the affirmative action bake sale. It’s nice that you want to ask the African American person what his stats were to prove he deserved entrance into Harvard Law. If/when you ask white applicants and they fall short of your numbers, do you then judge them and think they didn’t deserve to get into HLS/must be undeserving beneficiaries of some program? Or do you just assume they have something special about them?
In response to another comment. See in context »In criticizing those who conducted the bake sale, you make their point. Race has absolutely nothing to do with bringing “a diversity of experiences and backgrounds [that] makes for a stronger institution, company, and nation.” We all are individuals with diverse backgrounds–as your experiences at HLS so aptly demonstrate.
My complaint about affirmative action has nothing to do with whether or not there was “a more deserving white male.” Rather, my complaint stems from the fact that a person’s race is even a consideration. If anything, affirmative action detracts from the goal of analyzing a person for who they are and the experiences they bring to the table and replaces it with how a person looks.
Stated differently, how can a person’s race ever be relevant to determining whether or not they should be admitted to a school, be hired for a job or be elected to a political office, UNLESS you are making sterotypical generalizations based solely on a person’s skin color (apple vs. sweet potato pie–the exact generalizations you seem to condemn)? And if race is not relevant, how can it make sense to have a policy that demands it be considered?
Mike,
There was a time in this country when a black or latino man could not achieve a high position in a fire company nor could they become a fireman. It wasn’t a southern thing, it was a major northern city thing. Your evaluation is spot on, it shouldn’t matter, we are on our way but not there yet. Keep thinking the way you do.
In response to another comment. See in context »Assuming you are correct that “we are not there yet,” how does continuing to require that race be a consideration through afirmative action programs bring us closer to the goal of a color-blind society? While Elie makes fun of the “thought” behind the bake sale, and persuasively argues that people should be considered as individuals rather than stereotypes, he does so in support of a policy that is premised solely upon the exact stereotypes he denounces.
I think Justice Thomas has it exactly right; the simple fact that quotas exist serves to diminish–or at least call into question–the validity of his (or Elie’s for that matter) accomplishments, which truly are laudable. If you desire to be judged on the content of your character rather than the color of your skin, why would you ever permit, not to mention demand, that the color of your skin be a consideration?
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] up over four hundred years of racial oppression has seemed to vanish. Nobody ever questions my credentials or intellect anymore. I get along fabulously with police officers. And Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize which [...]
[...] up over four hundred years of racial oppression has seemed to vanish. Nobody ever questions my credentials or intellect anymore. I get along fabulously with police officers. And Obama even won a Nobel Peace Prize which [...]
That is true. This does happen. I work at a cable company that offers bundles and the english bundle is more expensive then the spanish bundle.