Mark Halpern identifies the biggest concern about Souter’s replacement:

Aw, poor white guys! We only make up seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices. Why, one of them’s a woman! And there’s even a black guy! What more do you people want?

(Via Josh)

Editor’s Note: I’m posting this hastily, so it still needs a cold proofread. You may notice a few little changes after I cold proofread it tonight. Ok, it should be fixed.

My partner and I were having a discussion the other day with a mutual friend of ours. Our friend is a middle to upper middle class professional black man, and he has recently experienced some trouble in his workplace, in particular being passed over by a coworker who failed a qualifying exam three times¹ We were joking about racism, like we often do, and we got into a discussion of some of the more subtle ways that whites are advantaged in the workforce.

He made a joke that was funny, but unfortunately this joke is indicative of some serious problems in the labor force. in this conversation, we were discussing a Latino friend who is woefully underemployed. He was trained at a fairly good private university in a applied technology field, but in spite of having a degree from a good school, he’s struggled to get a good job in the 10 years he’s been out college. Given the rapid changes in his field since his graduation, his likelihood of getting a job in that area today are slim. The nature of his field, like many, is such that a person goes into a job with basic knowledge, but much of the training comes when the person actually gets the job. My partner said, “Yeah, you only know 50% of what you need to know for a job before you start it.” Our friend had a great come back in the form of a joke² –”The problem is Carlos is the 50% brother. Nobody wants to hire the 50% brother.”³ The two black men (my partner and his friend) in the conversation were high fiving and laughing hysterically, “That’s minorities in the workforce.” I got in a few laughs myself, but the sad thing is that their joke reveals a truth that most people of color know–you need to be more than just a qualified person of color to get a job.

They were arguing that it is much harder for people of color (and white women) who have the 50% knowledge to get their foot in the door for jobs that require more on the job training. Moreover, they felt that even though it would be expected that a person would not know everything required for one of these jobs, lack of knowledge is often held against people of color as a sign that they are unqualified or less qualified, whereas whites without that knowledge are viewed as trainable. In fact, they both felt that an overqualified or very highly qualified person of color (or white woman) stood a better chance of getting a job than even their white counterparts, in part because employers would be surprised and would be more likely to see this as an opportunity to diversify.⁴ I’m not a sociologist in the field of work and occupations, so I don’t know much of the research emanating out of that field, but I have heard the 50% Brother/Sister Argument before from many people of color, and I tend to think it is true.

The first issue that many people of color (and white women) face in 50% jobs, is the fact that their lack of knowledge is held against them more than it is for whites. Part of this problem relates to camaraderie, which I discuss below, but the other issue is that there is a common stereotype that people of color are less qualified than whites in the first place. Some people of color worry about acknowledging that they do not have a particular skill, fearing that their lack of knowledge of this particular skill will be viewed as a sign of being unqualified. On the other hand, there is also a fear of saying that they know everything because it can come off as bragging.⁵ When a person feels close to an interviewee or a co-worker, their lack of knowledge fades more into the background and their trainability is more evident.

These 50% jobs require that the person hired work closely with the others around him or her, so the extent to which potential coworkers feel a degree of camaraderie with this person will make a much greater difference in evaluations during a job interview. Carlos has spent most of his life in NYC, and he’s spent very little of his time in predominantly white environments. He doesn’t necessarily know the insider jokes and norms that middle income whites have, and most middle incomes whites are probably unfamiliar with the same insider norms and jokes the he grew up with in his predominantly black and Latino neighborhood. My partner and his friend were arguing that this was one of the key problems Carlos was having.

One of the biggest barriers, when it comes to race, is the level of interactional comfort and camaraderie that people feel when they are in the presence of people of other races. I think this is one of the primary manifestations of contemporary racism. Many people have a discomfort that is conscious or unconscious, and this hurts people of color in the job market because it profoundly affects how they are evaluated by higher ups and co-workers⁶ I think this is really hurting Carlos and many other people of color like him, who don’t have extensive interpersonal interactions with the middle class whites who will be hiring them.

I think camaraderie is always going to be a factor in job hiring and promotions, but we can work on the two other problems. We can make sure that race doesn’t affect people’s perceptions of qualifications.⁷ This may mean making parts of the hiring process more race blind and other parts more race conscious. We also need to address the issue of comfort and camaraderie. Until the discomfort many people feel in the presence of people of other races subsides, people of color are routinely going to be passed over for hires and promotion when they are definitely qualified. I understand that racial discomfort is often a two way street with both whites and people of color feeling discomfort at times, but if we are talking about this in relation to institutional power, people of color are significantly more likely to be negatively impacted by whites discomfort than the reverse. There is no way in a short blog post I can detail all of the ways we can work to stop the interactional uneasiness created by racism and racial prejudice, but the workplace and most other social institutions will never be equal until this problem is addressed.

1. If I remember correctly this coworker is Latino, and race is likely one of the factors in the background of our friend being passed over, but he thinks the greater problem is cronyism. (back)
2. Yeah, it doesn’t read like a joke, but he was laughing and talking goofy when he said it. (back)
3. I’m changing his name here. (back)
4. I don’t think they are right about this, and I’m not sure what exact comparison they were using. I’m not sure if they meant to compare the overqualified black candidate to overqualified whites, qualified whites, or whites at all levels of qualifications, but it was interesting argument. I have seem a few cases where this has happened, but I’m quite reluctant to say it’s a trend unless I see some data. (back)
5. I’m going to do a second post on race and bragging in the workplace because this was the second part of the conversation we had that day. (back)
6. Here is an example of a study that found whites experience increased stress when they are around people of color. This finding does not appear to be an anomaly. (back)
7. I’m reminded here of a recent discussion we had at Alas about Barack Obama’s qualifications. In that discussion Amp, linked to a post by Dave Schraub, where he notes that Obama has more experience in elected office than Clinton, Giulinani, Romney, Thompson, and Edwards. But somehow, Obama is viewed as inexperienced and less qualified. (back)

[This post was originally written and posted in January of 2003, but it got dropped from the database in some blogmove or other, so I'm reposting it now.]

One of the benefits of affirmative action in college admissions, it seems to me, is that it offers a really substantial benefit to blacks at a tiny cost to whites. Not everyone agrees with my rosy view; Michael Lind, for example, once wrote that “in order to accommodate a few less-qualified black students, the University of Texas Law School, like other leading schools, must turn down hundreds or thousands of academically superior white students every year.”

So does the existence of affirmative action bring about a substantial harm to white students applying to selective colleges? Goodwin Liu, in the March 2002 issue of the Michigan Law Review, argues that the cost to whites is actually quite small; and the tiny number of whites who actually are rejected because of affirmative action policies are the least likely people to sue.

Liu calculated how much the odds of whites being admitted to five highly selective universities would change if affirmative action programs did not exist.

(The data on this table comes from pages 1075 and 1078 of the March 2002 Michigan Law Review.)

There’s obviously some statistical noise going on here (at the highest levels of SAT scores, Liu’s numbers indicate that whites have a microscopically better chance with affirmative action programs in place). But overall, the trend is clear: at combined SAT scores of 1300 and above, the presence or absence of affirmative action makes no significant difference at all to the odds of a white student being admitted. At lower scores, the difference exists, but is tiny. A white student with a combined score below 100 has a 96.7% chance of rejection from a selective school with affirmative action, and a 93.3% chance of rejection if aa didn’t exist. In either case, the odds are overwhelming she’ll be rejected; and the primary reason for the rejection is her poor SATs, not her race.

But what about those famous anti-affirmative-action lawsuits? Well, virtually all those suing are whites like Allan Bakke (of the precedent-setting Bakke case). Baake didn’t get into Davis Medical School, but sixteen minority students from poor backgrounds did get in with the help of Davis’ affirmative action program. (Minority students from middle-class or wealthier backgrounds did not qualify for Davis’ affirmative action program). Baake, deciding that he didn’t get in because those darn colored people had taken his seat, sued, claiming that he had been “barred… by reason of race alone - from attending the school.” Despite Baake’s eventual court victory, his claim is untrue; Baake didn’t qualify because he wasn’t good enough, and even if there had been no affirmative action program at Davis, he would have been rejected.

As Liu argues, the very few white students who are genuinely rejected because of affirmative action are the least likely to sue.

A white applicant who seeks admission to a particular school, but is displaced by affirmative action, is necessarily one who has come very close to being admitted. If an applicant of that caliber were to apply to several comparable schools, it seems improbable that she would be rejected in every instance. An applicant who is truly close to the cusp of admission at one institution will more than likely fall on the other side of the cusp at one of the other institutions to which she applied. Such an applicant makes an unlikely plaintiff. If, for example, a white student applies to ten selective schools and, though rated highly at each school, is rejected by all but one or two, the applicant may have legitimate grounds for complaining that she was displaced as a result of affirmative action. But because she has gained admission to one or two schools of comparable quality, her incentive (and, I suspect, psychological urge) to file a lawsuit is considerably attenuated. In this regard, it is interesting to note that in 1973, Allan Bakke failed to gain admission not only to the Davis Medical School, but also to ten other medical schools to which he applied. Bakke, like most white applicants and plaintiffs, was not close to the cusp. (Page 1094).

Anti-affirmative action lawsuits are not put forward by whites who would have gotten in to a selective college if only affirmative action didn’t exist. They’re put forward by whites who have such a strong sense of entitlement that they can’t admit they failed to gain admission because, on the merits, they didn’t deserve admission.

If I were ruler of the world, affirmative action admissions would be the least of the racial remedies we would see; it is certainly far short of what is needed to fight the effects of past and present race discrimination. Nevertheless, in some ways affirmative action admissions are an ideal case: they provide a greatly increased chance of attending the best colleges for blacks, at an incredibly tiny cost to the chances for white applicants. Given the extremely modest nature of AA, my guess is that anyone who finds AA to be too extreme, would find any substantial program that helps blacks too much to ask for.

Update: Sisyphus digs up another piece of trivia about the Michigan case currently being considered by the Supreme Court: one of the folks suing had a legacy preference when he was attempting to get into Michigan. Also, she points out something I didn’t know (but should have guessed) - a century or so ago, legacy preferences were sometimes instituted to exclude Jews.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

In the comments of an earlier post, Robert Hayes has been arguing that racial preferences in college admission are bad because they harm minority students through what Robert calls “the ratchet effect.” But “the ratchet effect,” as Robert describes it, is dependent on what social scientists have called the “fit hypothesis” or “the mismatch hypothesis.” If mismatch isn’t true, neither is ratchet.

So what is the mismatch hypothesis? Robert describes the mismatch hypothesis perfectly when he writes:

People who get racial preferences turn in dreadful statistics on completion and performance in academia. [...] The cost of the policy isn’t paid by the institutions, it’s paid by the students. It’s paid by the really bright black kid who would do great at Cornell but fails out of Yale. It’s paid by the decently bright Hispanic kid who would do great at UT but fails out of Cornell. It’s paid by the adequate fill-in-the-blank kid who would have done fine at Oklahoma State but who can’t cut it at UT.

That’s an exact description of what the mismatch hypothesis claims. Asked to provide evidence for his argument, Robert linked to this Cato Institute report (pdf link).¹ But Cato’s discussion of drop out rates, written by Marie Gryphon, is shoddy at best. Empirical evidence shows that the mismatch hypothosis is fiction. The truth is, minority students in colleges that practice AA are more likely to graduate than minority students with identical academic “qualifications” (i.e., SAT scores, class rank, etc.) who attend less-highly-ranked colleges.

How can this be? Doesn’t common sense tell us that putting less-prepared students in a harder college is a recipe for creating drop-outs — that “the really bright black kid who would do great at Cornell… fails out of Yale,” as Rob said?

This is a case where “common sense” is mistaken. There are many reasons why that really bright black kid might be more likely to graduate from Yale. One strong possibility is that high-status schools have better support systems for students. Another is that the peer groups at high-status schools create a social evironment in which better academic habits are a norm. Higher-quality teachers and TAs could make a difference. As social scientists Alon and Tienda write, “empirical studies have repeatedly demonstrated the advantages of placing students in higher ability groups with better instruction, less distraction, more time spent on task, more academic role models, and more serious learning climates.”

Having more grants (rather than loans) available to undergraduates also makes a difference.²

The exact mechanisms will require further research to pin down, but it seems likely that all of the above factors contribute in some way to lower drop-out rates for minorities in higher-status schools, compared to similarly-qualified (i.e., SATs, class rank, etc) minority students in lower-status schools.

So what kind of evidence do right-wingers marshall to deny the facts? Let’s look at the Cato report Robert cited. Cato’s researcher, Marie Gryphon, begins by criticizing Bowen and Bok’s well-known study The Shape of The River,³ which examined outcomes for minority students at a group of top-tier colleges. In this article, Bowen summarized some of his and Bok’s findings:

First, there is no systemic evidence that race-sensitive admissions policies tend to “harm the beneficiaries” by putting them in settings in which they are overmatched intellectually or “stigmatized” to the point that they would have been better off attending a less selective institution. On the contrary, extensive analysis of data reported in The Shape of the River shows that minority students at selective schools have, overall, performed well. The more selective the school that they attended, the more likely they were to graduate and earn advanced degrees, the happier they were with their college experience, and the more successful they were in later life.

Second, the available evidence disposes of the argument that the substitution of “race-sensitive” for “race-neutral” admissions policies has led to admission of many minority students who are not well-suited to take advantage of the educational opportunities they are being offered. Examination of the later accomplishments of those students who would have been “retrospectively rejected” under race-neutral policies shows that they did just as well as a hypothetical reference group that might have been admitted if GPAs and test scores had been the primary criteria (which is, itself, a questionable assumption). There are no significant differences in graduation rates, advanced-degree attainment, earnings, civic contributions, or satisfactions with college.

Gryphon criticizes The Shape of the River by claiming “Bowen and Bok argued on the basis of SAT scores alone that equally qualified students are actually more likely to graduate if they attend more selective schools.” But that’s simply not true: Bowen and Bok also analyzed class rank (based on GPA) and SATs together, but still found that minority students are more likely to graduate when they attend high-status colleges. (Gryphon grudgingly acknowledges this in endnotes, where few readers will see it.)

Gryphon continues:

Economists did subsequently analyze the question of dropout rates in more detail and got very different results than Bowen and Bok. Economists Audrey Light and Wayne Strayer were able to better predict university completion patterns among students of different abilities. They did this by using methods that took into account unmeasured student qualities…. When student differences were held equal, Light and Strayer found that the likelihood of graduating from college depended on how close the “fit” was between a given student and his or her classmates in terms of academic preparedness. They write: “Our estimates reveal that the ‘match’ between student ability and college quality does have a causal effect on college completion.”

Gryphon’s footnotes credit these findings to a 2000 study published in The Journal of Human Resources.⁴ But when I looked the study up, I was surprised to find that far from using a deeper measure of student achievement, Light and Strayer did just what Gryphon falsely accused The Shape Of The River of: they used a single test score (the AFQT)⁵ as their sole measure of academic ability.

Furthermore, Light and Strayer’s Journal of Human Resources study isn’t well designed to address the question of affirmative action and “mismatched” minority students. The relevant question isn’t if students as a whole are more likely to graduate from high-status schools if they have high AFQT scores (which is what Light and Strayer’s study primarily addresses), but if students whose college placement might be affected by affirmative action - that is, black and hispanic students - are more likely to graduate from high-status schools than otherwise similarly “qualified” (i.e., identical SATs, class rank, etc) black and hispanic students at slightly lower-status schools. Although this study implies that affirmative action policies “may” lower the chances of graduation for some students, the question can’t really be answered without a more focused study design.

Interestingly, a later study by the same authors and using the same data source specifically addresses the question of affirmative action and college graduation.⁶ So why doesn’t Gryphon discuss this later, more relevant study (apart from one mention buried in endnotes)? It’s obvious why: In their later study, Light and Strayer conclude that the data is “consistent with the notion that racial preferences in college admissions boost minorities’ chances of attending college and that retention programs directed at minority students subsequently enhance their chances of earning a degree.”

Light and Strayer rightly caution readers not to take their work as conclusive evidence that affirmative action works (there could be unmeasured confounding factors). Nonetheless, Light and Strayer’s results are not consistant with Gryphon’s claim that affirmative action is hurting minorities by pushing them into harder universities.⁷

A third, more recent study, by Sigal Alon of Tel Aviv University and Marta Tienda of Princeton,⁸ uses a more thorough methodology than either Light and Strayer or The Shape of The River (among many technical improvements, their analysis includes asians and hispanic students as well as black and white students). Alon and Tienda conclude:

…Our results are consistent with claims that minority students thrive at selective postsecondary institutions, despite their disadvantaged starting lines (Bowen and Bok 1998; Massey et al. 2003). Minority students’ likelihood of graduation increases as the selectivity of the institution attended rises. Our findings, based on three data sets and several analytical methods, suggest that the mismatch hypothesis is empirically groundless for black and Hispanic (as well as for white and Asian) students who attended college during the 1980s and early 1990s. On the basis of the robust evidence we presented, we conclude that affirmative action practices both broaden educational opportunities for minority students and enable minority students to realize their full potential.

These findings clearly demonstrate the advantages that are associated with attending a more-selective institution and call for future research to identify the mechanisms that produce such an advantage.

The evidence is clear:There is no “mismatch” problem with affirmative action. Being able to attend better universities increases the odds that black and hispanic students will graduate. Right-wing proposals to eliminate affirmative action, far from helping hispanic and black students, would deprive some minority students of access to the best colleges while lowering their odds of graduating.

[Crossposted at Creative Destruction. If your comments aren’t being approved here, try there.]

UPDATE: Robert responds to me here.

1. The Cato Institute is a right-wing think tank with a pro-market emphasis. (back)
2. Alon, Sigai. 2004, October 28-30. “The Influence of Financial Aid in Leveling Croup Differences in Persistence among Students Attending Selective Private Institutions.” Paper presented at the conference of the Association for Public Policy and Management, Atlanta, GA. Cited in Alon and Tienda, 2005. (back)
3. William G. Bowen and Derek Bok (1988), The Shape of the River, Princeton: Princeton University Press. (back)
4. Audrey Light and Wayne Strayer (2000), “Determinants of College Completion: School Quality or Student Ability?” Journal of Human Resources v35. (back)
5. AFQT stands for “Armed Forces Qualifying Test”; there are legitimate reasons for social scientists to use the AFQT, but it’s no better than the SATs as a measure of academic ability, and it’s ability to predict future college performance - like the SATs - is mediocre. (back)
6. Audrey Light and Wayne Strayer (2002), “From Bakke to Hopwood: Does Race Affect College Attendance and Completion?” Review of Economics and Statistics, p. 34. (back)
7. Gryphon dances around this in endnotes by falsely claiming that the second, more applicable Light and Strayer study is only about “the most highly selective schools,” but that’s not true; Light and Strayer specifically say their results are for “colleges of all selectivity levels,” and anyhow, both studies use the same database. (back)
8. Sigal Alon and Marta Tienda (2005), “Assessing the ‘Mismatch’ Hypothesis: Differences in College Graduation Rates by Institutional Selectivity,” Sociology of Education, Vol. 78 (October): 294-315. (back)

This has really been crazy week in politics. The American political system was in turmoil all week and, of course, the saga that leads up to the election played out like an episode of Dallas. Well, maybe not Dallas. I guess we need a new prime time soap opera called “DC.” I just thought I’d summarize a few choice headlines from the week.

1. Bill Clinton Goes Off on Fox News: I’m sure most of you have seen this by now. It was rather remarkable; last time I saw him that ticked he was saying, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman…Ms. Lewinsky.” Conservatives tried to spin the interview as an “angry Clinton is out of control” moment and liberals were just happy that a Democrat finally showed some backbone and didn’t kowtow to Bush. My favorite headline about this story is this one–”Angry white man meets the smirk“. I’m not necessarily thrilled with the content of the article, but I had to laugh at how the “smirk” has taken such a prominent role in contemporary politics. President Bush has perfected it. While some debated the smirk, others asked whether or not the “blow-up” was orchestrated.

2. Virginia Senate Race–Racist vs. Misogynist: Jim Webb, the Democrat, has a nice history of assailing women in the military. I watched the debate between him and George Allen on Meet the Press. You can watch the debate in its entirety here. The gender question comes up 30 minutes into the discussion. Webb refuses to denounce his 1979 statements, but he did admit that he regrets, saying the Naval Academy is a “horny woman’s dream.” However, it’s not just 1979, as recently as 1997 he made similar comments. He very half heartedly backs down (ever so slightly), from his earlier position. Of course, Allen is no better. He opposed gender integration at VMI, but he admits in the Meet the Press interview that he was wrong. While Webb has a “women problem,” Allen has a racism problem. He called an Indian American man macaca, and said “welcome to America.” Apparently, macaca is a racial slur (one I was not familiar with), but I think the “welcome to America” comment leaves no doubt about his views. But it isn’t just the macaca issue that brings out his bigotry. Allen also revealed his anti-Semitism when he was caught by surprise and was apparently offended that someone “discovered” his Jewish roots. In the process, he declared his love for ham sandwhiches, to prove that he is not Jewish. The most recent racist gaffe for Allen includes the revelation that Allen used the N-word in college. It’s not like Jim Webb is much better. He has called affirmative action state sponsored racism (check the Meet the Press interview) and goes on to revise his position ever so slightly to say that not only African Americans should benefit from affirmative action and that poor white “cultures” should also be included. So I guess poor white people and Blacks should get affirmative action, but Latinos, Asians, and American Indians should not. It looks like the people of VA have a great choice.

3. Woodward Releases Book on Bush Denial–Bush Denies Denial: Ok, I couldn’t really find an article of Bush directly denying anything about the book, but his press secretary did call the book cotton candy. Apparently, the book also lays out the internal conflict in the administration, making the White House look like an episode of Survivor with alliances and backstabbing.

4. New York Attorney General Candidate Tries to Wiretap Husband: This New York Attorney General Candidate has a big problem–her husband. Seems that she thought he was cheating on her, so she decided to enlist former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik to wiretap her husband’s boat. The feds intercepted the conversation and have launched an investigation into the legality of this. I didn’t know that it was illegal to eavesdrop on your spouse, and I have heard conflicting reports about whether or not this would have been legal to do. Personally, I would not think this was a big deal if it was an isolated event, but legal woes, including jail time, have followed the husband for years. When you read this time line provided by the local newspaper, Jeanine Pirro doesn’t exactly come out smelling like roses either.

5. Florida Congressman Resigns After Sending Sexually Suggestive Emails to Underage Page: Yes, just when you though the Dateline catch a predator series was over……OK, I’m just joking. Dateline didn’t catch this guy online, but somebody did, and his email reads just like one of those “Dateline Catch A Predator” chatlogs. What makes this case even more absurd is that this guy served on the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. He even proposed legislation that would crack down on child sex offenders.

I’m sure there are some other great political stories out there this week that I missed. Please do share them in the comments section. I thought these rather salacious stories read more like National Enquirer headlines. What if anything do you think this crazy week in government says about the state of the American political landscape?

Since it’s a magazine that’s pretty solidly liberal, and which usually avoids overt issue cartoons on its cover, I was pretty surprised by the current New Yorker cover, which seems to me to be a pretty blatantly anti-affirmative action piece.

The drawing, by Edward Sorel (one of my favorite current illustrators), is entitled “musical chairs” and shows a bunch of young folks in graduate gowns playing musical chairs.The most central three figures are a white man with a frightened, vulnerable expression surrounded by two smirking, devious-looking figures, one a black man and one a white woman; the black man and white woman have both gotten seats, meaning the central white male figure is out of the game.

In the background, this general theme is repeated - distressed white men, aggressive women or blacks - plus a black woman and a white woman struggle with each other for control of the same chair. (Less prominently positioned, two probably-white guys on the sides of the image have gotten chairs and are happy). In the foreground, a white male tenured professor happily controls the music.

I keep on thinking “surely they wouldn’t have.” But the “look how affirmative action hurts white men” interpretation of the cover is so obvious, it’s hard to imagine how Sorel and the New Yorker editors could have missed it.

In a recent post about affirmative action in India we had a relatively good discussion going in the comments section, but what I realized is that most people don’t have a real understanding of what affirmative action is and how it is actually implemented. Of course, the reason most people don’t know what it is or how it is used is because most people have never sat on a university admissions committee, or they have never been responsible for making hiring decisions in a corporate or educational setting. Having been involve in a few hiring decisions and having been on an admissions committee, I have a little experience, I thought I would share a little about how these committees work. One of the first things that people should know is that affirmative action is used not only for race. Other factors such as national origin, gender, veteran’s status, and age. (For the sake of brevity, I’m only going to discuss hiring, and not admissions.)

When most universities (not all but most) hire faculty members, they asked that job candidates send their resumes directly to the head of the search committee or the head of the department. Once applications are received candidates are sent a small postcard asking about their basic demographic information, including race and gender (and often a few other questions…like how did you hear about the job, are you a veteran and so on).  That card is then sent back to the human resources department or affirmative action compliance office on campus. The search committee does not see this card, and the race and gender of candidates is never given to the hiring committee.

In the mean time, the hiring committee reviews applications. In both of the committees I have been on there was an initial screening that weeded out unqualified candidates and less qualified candidates. How did we decide who was qualified? It depended on the particular search, but several key issues were…did they have the right area of study, could they teach the classes we were looking for, were they committed to research (at the research school), did they have publications, and would they be done with their dissertation or at least very close to being done. At this stage race and/or gender were not discussed much at all because it was evident that the candidates were not qualified for the particular position described. Once we had a “long short list,” which consisted of our top 10 (or so) candidates. We went through their files more thoroughly to look for other possible problems or prospects that may have been overlooked. In one case, we ended the search because we only had 1 candidate who we thought was qualified for the position. This person was a person of color, but we knew that bringing in one person would not pass the muster with the compliance office or the higher level administrators. There is a strong expectation that at least 3 candidates be brought in for an interview, and there were not 3 in the applicant pool who were qualified. In both cases we did discuss race once we had a long short list (The were not many substantive discussions of gender, as women candidates were well represented in the departments.) Both departments had a severe underrepresentation of racial minorities…one department had all Whites, the other had 3 people of color. People on the committee did not agree about how much of a factor race should play, but it was unanimous on both committees that it would be “good” if we ultimately hired a person of color since the department was not diverse.

But there was a major obstacle when it came to considering race; we did not know the race of the candidates. For the most part it is easy to figure out what gender people are from their applications, so it would be untrue to say that the process is gender blind. Race can sometimes be determined from a close look at the application, and in some cases a references letter would let people know the race of the candidate. In the committees I was on, many people thought they knew the race of the candidates but were wrong in several cases. I say this because I have met some of the candidates after the fact since the world of sociology is relatively small. (I suspect this would not be the case in corporate settings where resumes and applications are significantly shorter and have significantly less information. It is not unusual to have applications that are over 30 pages, including references, teaching evals and so on.) So unless it was readily apparent from the application, we could not determine race, which makes it very difficult to use race as a factor in the hiring process.

Once the top candidates are announced, their names are passed on to the university’s affirmative action compliance or human resources office. The office checks the race and gender of the applicants based on the cards returned to them…many of these are not returned and they are optional. The compliance office usually approves the search. The final candidates might not be approved if the department has a long history of not bringing in diverse applicants. If a search is not approved, the compliance office may ask the department to try to increase the diversity of the applicant pool by extending the search or advertising in other outlets. If the department still doesn’t get a diverse group of candidates, then the search could continue as is or be extended. The whole process of revising a search is rare, but not unprecedented.

Once candidates get to campus they go through a long interview process (which I think is the part of the process that is most opened to racism or sexism). I can say that some people in the interview process strongly believed that if two candidates were equally qualified that candidates from underrepresented minority groups should be offered the position. However, few people thought two candidates were equally qualified. After the interview, most people had a clear favorite candidate, and the department ranked candidates 1-2-3 and decided if they were hirable. It is very difficult get people 20 some people to agree so this part of the process is very difficult. The reason I think the part of the process is most opened to racism is because race seems to dramatically impact how candidates are viewed face to face. But people are allowed to have their biases and do not have to give any particular reason as to why they oppose a candidate. Since the particular hiring committees, I was on didn’t result in hires, I can’t say exactly how the process would have played in those particular cases.

This is actually why I think affirmative action is not particularly powerful at ending discrimination. It is very limited in its scope. In the cases I have seen the only real stop gap on discrimination is the compliance office. This office also does a very good job at tracking hiring trends, which lets a school know if there is a pattern of exclusion, but as far as the decisions, people are pretty much left up to their own devices to decide on which candidates that they like, which of course means that they still have their biases.

I give this very long drawn out discussion to let people know how affirmative action in hiring actually works in at least one real life case. There are no quotas and no hiring requirements. In fact, quotas have been illegal since 1978, when the US Supreme Court ruled that quota based affirmative action was not constitutional (See University of California Regents v. Bakke 1978). So what constitutes affirmative action? Here are a few examples taken from sociologist Barbara Reskin’s book The Realities of Affirmative Action:setting goals and time tables, identifying under utilized talent, using recruitment methods that reach the whole pool of candidates, fully utilizing employees skills, forging alliances with school and community groups to increase pool of possible workers, monitoring sex and race differences in hiring and promotions, self evaluation, advertising as an equal opportunity employer.

What is fascinating about most of these techniques is that they have little or nothing to do with the application review process. Instead they focus more on reaching the full applicant pool, and monitoring overall trends in recruitment. The notion that White applicants or male applicants are put at the back of the pool or ignored is incorrect. Additionally, the idea that women, Blacks, Latinos, or American Indians are put at the front of the pool and some how treated better is also incorrect. In fact, many of the biggest supporters of affirmative action are White business owners and educational leaders, who are mostly male. Most businesses have voluntary affirmative action programs. There have never been laws passed or executive orders issued requiring any type of affirmative action in hiring or promotions for private companies. The reason big businesses want affirmative action is because they benefit tremendously from a diverse workforce, and the impression (often false impression, but image counts) that they do not discriminate. If affirmative action was harmful to Whites, why would White business owners institute affirmative action policies on a voluntary basis.

Having been involved in a few hiring committees and one admissions committee I can assure people that affirmative action doesn’t exclude Whites, especially those highly qualified Whites. In fact, my personal sense is that the very limited scope of most affirmative action programs allows discrimination to remain firmly entrenched in the hiring and promotions process. But it is important for people to know exactly how a hiring process works in order for htem to understand the realities of affirmative action.

I’m not posting this entry at Rachel’s Tavern, but it will be posted at Ally Work if you would like to help me debate with some affirmative action opponents.

Dollars and Sense has a terrific interview with Lani Guinier (via Blackfeminism), questioning how the idea of “merit” has been applied in law school admissions. Here’s a sample, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

Relying on things like the LSAT allowed law school officials to say they were determining admission based on merit. So several colleagues told me to look at the LSAT scores because they were confident that I might find something to explain the significant differences in performance. But we found that, surprisingly, the LSAT was actually a very poor predictor of performance for both men and women, that this “objective” marker which determined who could even gain access was actually not accomplishing its ostensible mandate.

I then became interested in studying meritocracy because of the attacks poor and working class whites were waging against Affirmative Action. People were arguing that they were rejected from positions because less qualified people of color were taking their spots. I began to question what determines who is qualified. Then, the more research I did, the more I discovered that these so-called markers of merit did not actually correlate with future performance in college but rather correlated more with an applicant’s parents’ and even grandparents’ wealth. Schools were substituting markers of wealth for merit. [...]

RP: Can you talk about the Harvard and Michigan studies?

LG: Harvard University did a study based on thirty Harvard graduates over a thirty-year period. They wanted to know which students were most likely to exemplify the things that Harvard values most: doing well financially, having a satisfying career and contributing to society (especially in the form of donating to Harvard). The two variables that most predicted which students would achieve these criteria were low SAT scores and a blue-collar background.

That study was followed by one at the University of Michigan Law School that found that those most likely to do well financially, maintain a satisfying career, and contribute to society, were black and Latino students who were admitted pursuant to Affirmative Action. Conversely, those with the highest LSAT scores were the least likely to mentor younger attorneys, do pro-bono work, sit on community boards, etc.

So, the use of these so called “measures of merit” like standardized tests is backfiring on our institutions of higher learning and blocking the road to a more democratic society.

Interesting stuff.

It’s been a fairly open secret for years that some colleges give a preference to men in admissions, but as far as I know it’s never been shown in an empirical study before. From the Montreal Gazette:

Men appear to be given preference in admissions as university applicant pools become more female, a provocative new study has found.

Raising the spectre of affirmative action for a group not historically disadvantaged but increasingly under-represented in undergraduate classes, the study examined admissions data from 13 liberal arts colleges in the United States and estimated a tipping point for male preference kicks in when the female applicant pool reaches between 53 and 62 per cent. The study found “clear evidence” of a preference for men in historically female U.S. colleges.

There, being a male applicant raises the probability of acceptance by 6.5 to nine per cent.

“Schools can certainly have more than 50 per cent females and not give preference. But at some point, if females become too dominant, they do seem to give preference to males,” lead author Sandy Baum said in an interview.

Results of the study, completed by economists from New York’s Skidmore College and Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, will be published in a coming edition of the journal Economics of Education Review.

There are thousands of unspoken “affirmative actions” to help men in our society, helping some men into the good job tracks, the positions of authority, the better gallery shows, etc. I’d argue that our entire “Father Knows Best” economy is a covert form of AA that helps men in the job market. Things like this happen all the time.

What’s reported on in this article actually seems like one of the least harmful forms of AA for men. The resource in question - admission to college - is essentially unlimited; the very few unlucky female students who might not get admitted to college X because of this sort of policy will get into college Y instead.

But I’m curious: Why do colleges feel the need to do this? From a “diversity” perspective, there’s really not a significant difference between a student body that’s 50% male and one that’s 40% male; neither one can really be said to be lacking male perspectives in their student population. I presume that tuition money from women spends just as easily as tuition money from men. So what’s so scary about a female-majority campus?

Elsewhere in the article, it mentions that an admissions committee at McGill University suggested that good grades are overemphasized as a measure of student achievement, and might be biased against men:

The committee [discussed]… a more qualitative and less grade-driven admission process. “The application of grades as the sole measure of academic merit may not, in fact, be without an inherent bias,” state the minutes of the admissions committee…

That’s an interesting contrast with a comment made about the “are men better at math” question by Harvard professor Elizabeth Spelke:

Books are devoted to this question, with much debate, but there seems to be a consensus on one point: The only way to come up with a test that’s fair is to develop an independent understanding of what mathematical aptitude is and how it’s distributed between men and women. But in that case, we can’t use performance on the SAT to give us that understanding. We’ve got to get that understanding in some other way. So how are we going to get it? [...]

I suggest the following experiment. We should take a large number of male students and a large number of female students who have equal educational backgrounds, and present them with the kinds of tasks that real mathematicians face. We should give them new mathematical material that they have not yet mastered, and allow them to learn it over an extended period of time: the kind of time scale that real mathematicians work on. We should ask, how well do the students master this material? The good news is, this experiment is done all the time. It’s called high school and college.

Here’s the outcome. In high school, girls and boys now take equally many math classes, including the most advanced ones, and girls get better grades.

So apparently the ability to do well in classes is a false, biased measure of the ability to go to college and… do well in classes. Huh.

I could buy that if we were talking about a group that was substantially disadvantaged - denied access to decent textbooks, AP classes, a reasonably good school, or whatever. If you told me that the grades of the students at the poorest high schools in the USA weren’t a fair reflection of their abilities, for example, I’d be inclined to agree. But I don’t think that boys in general are given less resources for learning than girls in general.

Thanks to “Alas” reader Mel for the tip.

Over on Political Animal, the former Calpundit suggests compromising with the right by replacing race-based affirmative action with income-based affirmative action.

Kevin means well, but I see two immediate problems with this proposal. First, racism against middle-class blacks, latinas and American Indians happens, and shouldn’t be ignored as if it were acceptable.

Second, racism against lower-class blacks, latinas and American Indians happens, and shouldn’t be ignored. Income-based affirmative action would benefit low-income whites who are, objectively, much wealthier than the minorities they’d be beating out for those income-based AA slots.

Why? Because looking at income - even if we concentrate only on low-income folks - vastly understates how much poorer minorities are than whites. Low-income white families are simply much wealthier, on average, than low-income minority families. I wrote a couple of detailed posts about this in 2003 (here and here); this table from one of those posts illustrates what I mean:

Because low-income white families have far more wealth and (on average) live in nicer neighborhoods with better schools, compared to low-income (or even middle class, sometimes) minorities, they’re probably better positioned to take advantage of low-income AA programs. That, combined with their greater numbers, will mean that most low-income minorities - despite being objectively poorer - would wind up being shut out of income-based AA.

(It’s not a simple thing to just make it wealth-based AA, instead. Income can be verified just by looking at last year’s income tax forms - but there’s no such easy way for college admission programs to verify wealth.)

Not that I’m against income-based affirmative action. But while income-based affirmative action would be a good thing on its own, it’s no substitute for race-based affirmative action, and it shouldn’t be proposed as one.

Tommaso at CalJunket articulates something I’ve often thought:

I don’t agree with Tommasso about everything - his rudeness to conservatives, for instance, and his faith in the founding fathers. But he’s got it right about liberalism.

To expand on his point, consider race. Conservatives often criticize liberals for seeking “equality of outcome” rather than “equality of opportunity” on race issues. But here’s the thing - if you believe that people of different races are fundamentally equal, then the distinction between equality of outcome and equality of opportunity fades away. Put another way, since all races are equal in ability, unequal outcomes are proof of unequal opportunity.

Conservatives are happy to let the status quo - one in which whites are unfairly advantaged - go on. In this way, conservatives oppose merit. Leftists want to let merit determine outcomes - which requires measures to fight unfair white advantage, including affirmative action.

Eugene Volokh points out this article in The University of Michigan student paper, reporting the KKK’s endorsement of the anti-affirmative-action Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI).

It is, of course, unfair to blame MCRI for the KKK’s endorsement - they don’t control who endorses them.

But I can’t help but see it as a form of ironic justice, since the MCRI has - either through dishonesty or ignorance - severely distorted Martln Luthor King Jr’s views. Although we can’t know what King would say if he were alive today, there’s no doubt that he favored racial (and other) preferences during his lifetime. Here’s what King said interviewed in Playboy (January 1965):

Here’s what King wrote about the “Operation Breadbasket” program, which he helped create and administrate, from King’s book Where Do We Go From Here?

As racial preferences go, this is much more radical than any currently operating Affirmative Action program.

King’s proposals didn’t begin and end with race, of course - he also wanted programs to help poor people of every race. But quotes like the above leave no doubt that MLK favored racial preference programs.

So what’s going on in Michigan? A group that continually falsely associates their views with MLK Jr., so they can unfairly benefit from MLK’s moral credibility, is objecting to being falsely associated with the KKK, because they don’t want to be unfairly tarred by the KKK’s lack of moral credibility.

Sounds like ironic justice to me.

I was checking out The View from the Basement, a blog that has rather mysteriously been nominated for a “best new blog” Koufax. (The Koufaxes are for lefty blogs - View From the Basement is a centrist blog, not clearly left nor right). Unlike the Head Heeb, I wasn’t very impressed; the blogger seems to be one of those boring “anyone who criticizes Israel is an anti-Semite” folks.

Anyhow, the reason I’m posting this is the following quote, which adorns the top of her blog:

The problem is that the quote is a fake, as Tim Wise has documented.

The quote does indeed pop up a lot; don’t be fooled.

And hey, while you’re reading Wise on MLK, check out his essay rebutting right-wingers who misuse MLK by claiming King opposed Affirmative Action.

I unfortunately wasn’t paying attention when Prometheus 6 did a brilliant series of posts discussing reparations. But now he’s sort of collected them all (or collected the links to them all, anyhow), and it’s highly recommended reading. From P6’s introduction:

My feeling is that most discussions of reparations - or of affirmative action - are marred by a lack of clarity about the alternatives. Opponents of these plans always talk as if the alternative reparations needs to be compared to is an alternative of justice and fairness. In reality, the alternative is a continuation of the status quo - a status quo in which the US has and continues to have a racial underclass. Compared to continuing with that reality, I think almost any plan is more just and fair; in fact, my real thought about reparations and AA is that neither one of them go nearly far enough.

In the comments to another post, frequent Alas comments resident Joe writes:

Equal treatment is a wonderful ideal, but in the real world that’s not one of our choices.

Here’s the choice we have: do we have a big overall advantage for whites (no affirmative action), or do we have a somewhat smaller overall advantage for whites (affirmative action)? In real life, that’s the choice we have as a society, right now. We don’t get to choose whether racism exists or not (it does); we don’t get to choose to make the white advantage go away (it won’t). All we can choose is whether or not we’ll support a policy which will reduce the extent of the pro-white discrimination.

Would I support an alternative to AA? Sure, if someone has a realistic one. I don’t know of any, though. But, in effect, eliminating AA without providing an effective alternative is increasing pro-white discrimination.

It would be better if we had equal treatment and therefore didn’t need AA at all, just as it would be better if a stabbing victim didn’t need surgery at all. But, since we live in a society in which racism does exist, we should do something to fix it - even if it’s something painful. Once the person’s been badly stabbed, it’s better to go under the surgeon’s scalpel than not.

And, frankly, saying we must oppose AA in the name of “equal treatment,” even when the effects of opposing AA would be to increase discrimination’s overall impact - that just doesn’t make any sense to me.

In an earlier post, I commented on this stirring anti-Affirmative Action essay, written by Stanford law professor Marcus Cole. Mr. Cole argues that assuming Clarence Thomas benefited from Affirmative Action is unjustified.

As Max Power points out, even the author of a very friendly Thomas biography claims that “Thomas benefited from affirmative action throughout his career; a bright and ambitious young black man of his era could not have failed to. He supported affirmative action as a college student, but soured on racial preferences after learning that some of his classmates and faculty at Yale Law School questioned his intellect because of this assistance.”

Unless Cole has evidence to suggest that Thomas’ friendly biographer is mistaken on this point, the belief that Thomas benefited from Affirmative Action cannot be called an unjustified or racist assumption.

Max Power also argues persuasively that Professor Cole, despite his resentment of Affirmative Action, is almost certainly a beneficiary of it.

Nevertheless, it is clear that some Blacks do feel real pain from the stigma of Affirmative Action. But it doesn’t follow from this that Affirmative Action is necessarily a bad policy, or even that eliminating AA would bring about a reduction in stigma or pain. As Bill Keller wrote in the Times:

The Volokh Conspiracy posts a letter from Stanford Law Professor Marcus Cole, arguing that it’s incorrect to assume that Clarence Thomas has benefited from Affirmative Action:

This seems, to me, to be a straw-man. The argument I’ve heard most frequently is not that Thomas benefited from formal affirmative action at Holy Cross or Yale, but that Thomas benefited from informal affirmative action when he was nominated to the Supreme Court. [*] That is, the president passed over other folks who - both in terms of their achievements, and in terms of their legal writings - seemed far more qualified than Thomas in order to appoint a black justice.

Now, this may or may not be the case; I’m not enough of an expert to say, and if Professor Cole were to argue that Thomas’ nominiation to the high court was entirely about qualifications and not at all about race I’d certainly be willing to listen. And one could certainly argue, in theory, that Thomas benefited from a racial preference but not from “affirmative action” per se.

But Professor Cole, by failing to even address the actual “Thomas benefited from AA” argument, is being disingenuous.

[*]Professor Cole’s letter was inspired, in part, by this Maureen Dowd op-ed, in which Dowd writes that Thomas “knew that he could not make a powerful legal argument against racial preferences, given the fact that he got into Yale Law School and got picked for the Supreme Court thanks to his race.” So Dowd did mention Yale (although she makes a distinction between “racial preferences” and “affirmative action” that Cole - and, by the end of the op-ed, Dowd herself - ignores). but she also mentioned Thomas’ rise to the Supreme Court.

By the way, Dowd’s premise is self-evidently wrong; being the beneficiary of X doesn’t mean that you can’t credibly argue against X.

Calpundit has a couple of excellent posts about Jayson Blair, the black New York Times reporter who was caught making up stories and plagerizing. Many folks, both in the media and in the blogosphere, have siezed on this story as a cautionary tale about affirmative action, or diversity, or hiring black folks, or whatever. From Calpundit:

You should also read Kevin’s very practical follow-up.

Atrios, in a post succinctly entitled “Bigots,” writes: “The difference it seems, is that the white people get promoted.”

Like most of us, I’ve probably read a hundred blog posts on Affirmative Action in the last couple of weeks. This one, by Jack Balkin (who also has written a terrific post consulting the I Ching for Iraq war advice), is one of my favorites. Here’s a sample:

What about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, then? It’s a terrific question, and it cracks the case for colorblindness wide open, because it brings us to the issue of baselines. John argues that laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act that guarantee blacks equal opportunity clearly are designed to help them, so doesn’t that make them race conscious? Well, if your baseline is a world in which everyone has the right to refuse service to anyone they don’t like, and the right to hire and fire anyone they don’t like, yes, it does. The law is altering common law rules of contract and property for the explicit purpose of benefitting black people.

Indeed, this *is* the argument (made in 1964) that the Civil Rights Act does not guarantee equal rights but rather creates “special rights” for black people. It is the argument made in 1883 in the Civil Rights Cases that the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which outlawed public accommodation discrimination (an ancestor of Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) was unconstitutional because it made blacks, in Justice Bradley’s words, “the special favorite of the laws.” Today opponents of gay rights laws say they give gays and lesbians “special rights” because these opponents work from a baseline in which its ok to refuse to deal with someone whose sexual practices they find morally offensive.

Another favorite of mine is Sam Heldman’s, which includes this paragraph:.

First, you’ve got to figure out why we admit people to public universities. It’s not as a reward for making good grades in high school. It’s so that we can improve our society — spending public resources to expand the minds of a lucky relatively-few, so that they will go on to do things that will make the world better. Admission is not an entitlement that arises from being smart. It is a matter of being chosen to be the subject of a public investment. Second, we have decided that we ought to invest in just about as many minority kids, proportionately, as white kids. Why? Because it seems pretty obvious to us that this is the way to improve the world — not by reserving this public good mostly for white folks, but by spreading it around. The world will be better more quickly, we think, if there are black lawyers as well as white lawyers, Hispanic engineers as well as Anglo engineers, etc. And it also appears to us that any fairly-designed system of assessing “merit” just would result in approximately proportionate representation among races and ethnicities — that is definitional, we think, as to the words “fairly-designed” and “merit”. Third, if we went solely on SATs, LSATs, and grades, we wouldn’t achieve this goal — so we make adjustments. It’s not a perfect system, but no one has ever yet designed a perfect system for measuring or even defining human merit in any sphere. So get over it.

A phrase I read over at Eve Tushnet’s place gave me deja vu:

…anti-aff. action people talk about the colorblind ideal, judging people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Eventually, I remembered where I’d recently read something similar: Foxnews’ Wendy McElroy had quoted Martin Luther King Jr. in a recent anti-affirmative action column:

…is it ever proper for a tax- funded institution to systematically privilege one class of people at the expense of another?

Martin Luther King, leader of the ’60s civil rights movement, didn’t think so. In his justly renowned speech “I Have a Dream” King declared, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Contemporary “civil rights” leaders are demanding King’s grandchildren be judged on the basis of skin color.

Both Eve and McElroy are pretty typical of their movement: conservatives love citing Dr King to attack affirmative action. In California, the Republican party has even used film clips of Dr. King in anti-affirmative-action ads.

Strangely enough, none of these folks seem to know - or care - that they’re distorting King’s words and meanings to oppose what King himself believed. Without making too big a deal of it, there’s something dishonest about dozens of conservatives quoting MLK to make their anti-AA case - none of whom admit that they’re arguing against what Dr. King himself believed, and against how King himself meant the “I have a dream” speech.

Did Dr. King oppose affirmative action? Well, the term “affirmative action” wasn’t in play during Dr. King’s life; and it’s impossible to know for certain what King would think if he were alive today. But during his life, he certainly didn’t oppose special programs to help blacks. According to historian Clayborne Carson:

Even before the March on Washington, he had applauded the Indian government’s efforts to help the caste once called untouchables through “special treatment to enable the victims of discrimination” including the provision of Especial employment opportunities.” Moreover, in his 1964 book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” King compared the social reforms he favored to the GI Bill of Rights, which gave World War II veterans special preferences including home loans, college scholarships and special advantages in competition for civil service jobs. King maintained that African- Americans could never be adequately compensated for the “exploitation and humiliation” they had suffered in the past, but he proposed a “Negro Bill of Rights” as a partial remedy for these wrongs. He insisted that African-Americans should be compensated through “a massive program by the government of special, compensatory measures which could be regarded as a settlement in accordance with the accepted practice of common law.” He added that “such measures would certainly be less expensive than any computation based on two centuries of unpaid wages and accumulated interest.”

King wrote that “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years, must now to something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.” King’s organization began “Operation Breadbasket,” an early AA-type program. Here’s how Dr. King described the program in Where Do We Go From Here?

Operation Breadbasket is carried out mainly by clergymen. First, a team of ministers calls on the management of a business in the community to request basic facts on the company’s total number of employees, the number of Negro employees, the department or job classification in which all are located, and the salary ranges for each category. The team then returns to the steering committee to evaluate the data and to make a recommendation concerning the number of new and upgraded jobs that should be requested. The decision on the number of jobs requested is usually based on population figures. For instance, if a city has a 30 percent Negro population, then it is logical to assume that Negroes should have at least 30 percent of the jobs in any particular company, and jobs in all categories rather than only in menial areas, as the case almost always happens to be.

In fact, King’s writings - taken as a whole, rather than the out-of-context quotes right-wingers prefer - make him sound pretty much like any current defender of Affirmative Action. “Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic.”

Conservatives like Eve do share a dream with Martin Luther King: a dream of a society in which everyone is judged by the content of their characters, not the color of their skins. But we’re not there yet; and as Dr. King said, it’s unrealistic to expect that we can achieve equality without preference programs. To use Dr. King to oppose the policies he favored - or to simply lie and claim he’d oppose such policies, as Wendy McElroy did - ain’t playing kosher.

Attempting to reframe Dr. King as an AA opponent is both dishonest and disrespectful.

UPDATE: So what is going on here? If it were just a matter of Eve’s post, there’d be no problem. But what’s going on is a widespread pattern of conservatives using MLK against affirmative action - and generally using him in a far less evenhanded and fair way than Eve did. And I’ve yet to see a single conservative citing MLK’s “dream” acknowledge that MLK himself thought his vision was compatible with supporting AA-type policies.

Overall, I think conservatives cite MLK so much because Dr. King has - not just with liberals, but with virtually all Americans - a great deal of credibility on race issues. Conservatives, in contrast, have zero credibility on race (except among other conservatives). Since conservatives are so lacking credibility on race, they try and “borrow” some of MLK’s for their own purposes.

Eve asks if she should have to cite MLK’s actual views every time the phrase “content of their character” comes up. Maybe not - but it would be nice if the conservative movement, when frequently citing MLK on affirmative action, would cite his actual views at least some of the time.