Affirmative Action Can't Be Mended
The Cato Institute: December 15, 1997by Walter Williams
Walter Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and department chairman at George Mason University and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Ambivalence about affirmative action pervades our political and judicial systems. On November 3rd, the U. S. Supreme Court decided not to accept an appeal of California's Proposition 209, which embodies voters' judgment that affirmative action should have no role in California law. One day later the people of Houston made the opposite decision, leaving in place racial set-asides in local government contracting.
Affirmative action has become so controversial that even its supporters have begun to distance themselves from its language. Many affirmative action bureaucracies have been renamed "equity" offices, and racial preferences are increasingly referred to as "diversity" or "multiculturalism."
Advocates of affirmative action have muddied the waters by arguing that racial preferences are an aspect of the civil rights crusade. Today's corrupted vision of civil rights goes against the American civil libertarian tradition of private property, the rule of law and limited government. Modern civil rights activists have lost sight of what it means to be committed to freedom of association and equality of opportunity.
They have also tried to paper over the troubling fact that government allocation of resources produces conflicts that do not arise with market allocation of resources. That is largely because any government allocation of resources - including racially preferential treatment - is a zero-sum game. That is, whatever one person gains, another loses. All government can do is redistribute; it has no resources of its own. For example, one study found that UCLA and UC Berkeley, two of California's most prestigious universities, turned away more than 2,000 white and Asian straight-A students in order to provide spaces for black and Hispanic students. The government-created gains for blacks were paid for by government-created losses for whites and Asians.
As the losers in zero-sum games become increasingly visible, it becomes more difficult to shore up political support for winners. In the cases of UCLA and UC Berkeley, one would not expect parents to long tolerate seeing their children work to meet the university's admission standards only to be denied admission because of racial preference programs. Since the University of California is a taxpayer-subsidized system, one suspects that sooner or later parents and others would begin to register complaints and seek the end of racial preferences in admissions. That accounts for much of the motivation for Proposition 209.
There is no question that preferential treatment is unjust to students who are qualified but are blocked at the door to make room for less-qualified students in the "right" ethnic group. But viewed from a black self-interest point of view, it is hard to argue that such affirmative action programs serve black interests. For example, one year all 317 black applicants were admitted to UC Berkeley under affirmative action criteria rather than academic qualifications. Their average SAT score of 952 was well under Berkeley's average of nearly 1200. More than 70 percent of those students failed to graduate from Berkeley.
Not far from UC Berkeley is San Jose State University, not one of the top-tier colleges, but nonetheless respectable. More than 70 percent of its black students fail to graduate. The black students who might have been successful at San Jose State University have been recruited to UC Berkeley and elsewhere where they have been made artificial failures. This pattern is one of the consequences of trying to use racial preferences to make a student body reflect the relative importance of different ethnic groups in the general population. There is a mismatch between black student qualifications and those of other students when the wrong students are recruited to the wrong universities.
Clearly, blacks have suffered historical injustices, and every vestige of discrimination has not been eliminated in America. But discrimination is by no means the barrier that it once was. We can better serve the interests of large numbers of blacks by focusing our energies on fraudulent education, disintegrating families and inner cities with climates that are hostile to economic development and personal safety. Even if affirmative action were not a violation of justice, not a zero-sum game, and not racially polarizing, it would still be a poor cover-up for the real problems and the real work that needs to be done.