Intellectuals and Race (22 page)

Those who celebrate the rise in incomes, occupations, education and in other ways among blacks, Hispanics and other American minorities— and in many cases celebrate the ideas, policies and leaders supposedly responsible for this progress— seldom even attempt to cite ideas, policies or leaders responsible for such things as a rising murder rate among blacks and others in the 1960s, despite the fact that their murder rates had been going down, especially among black males, prior to the 1960s.
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The catastrophic decline of the black family, and the social consequences of increasing majorities of fatherless children, in the wake of the burgeoning welfare state in the 1960s, has few contemporaries prepared to take responsibility and many prepared to blame it on a “legacy of slavery,” when in fact more black children grew up with two parents even under slavery, and in the generations that followed, than today.

Nor is such degeneration peculiar to the United States. In Britain, Dr. Theodore Dalrymple paints a very similar picture of a violent and disorganized subculture with family disintegration and widespread ignorance in lower-class white neighborhoods. He says of his young patients: “Very few of the sixteen-year-olds whom I meet as patients can read and write with facility; they do not even regard my question as to whether they can read and write as in the least surprising or insulting.” He adds: “One can tell merely by the way these youths handle a pen or a book that they are unfamiliar with these instruments.” As for mathematics: “I cannot recall meeting a sixteen-year-old white from the public housing estates that are near my hospital who could multiply nine by seven (I do not exaggerate). Even three by seven often defeats them.”
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When a race of people who produced Shakespeare and Sir Isaac Newton now produces large numbers of young people who are functionally illiterate
and unable to do simple arithmetic, do we need to resort to either genes or discrimination to explain this degeneration?

These British youths have no “legacy of slavery” to fall back on as excuses. Nor is it clear that such excuses are valid for black youths with the same behavior patterns on the other side of the Atlantic. Such behavior patterns escalated on both sides of the Atlantic with the ascendancy of the welfare state ideology that is essential to establishing a welfare state in a democratic society. Once brought into being, a welfare state can subsidize counterproductive behavior, which the welfare state ideology excuses or promotes, but which would be unsustainable without being underwritten by the taxpayers’ money.

Much of the social progress among lagging groups which took place in the latter half of the twentieth century, and for which many intellectuals, politicians and others have taken credit, represents the continuation of strong trends that antedate the social legislation which has so often been regarded as the primary cause. The largest rise out of poverty among black Americans, for example, occurred
prior
to the civil rights legislation and escalating social welfare legislation of the 1960s.
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Nor has this pattern been confined to America. Group preferences have been demanded and instituted in various parts of Europe and Asia
after
there had been a significant increase in the number of members of lagging groups who became more educated,
⁶
so it is difficult to disentangle how much of the group’s advancement has been due to the preferences and how much is due to the rising level of education that preceded the preferences.

Where there has been a degeneration in behavior, however— whether in falling test scores or rising crime rates or other indicators— this has seldom been correlated with the kinds of factors that have been widely used as explanations, such as poverty or discrimination. Some of the most visible and most persistent degeneration, such as skyrocketing crime rates in the 1960s, occurred when poverty and discrimination were becoming demonstrably less severe.

Such external explanations do not square with the facts. Something has been happening within the minds of people, whether spontaneously or as a result of ideas spread by others. In the United States, much of this moral or ideological source of social degeneration can be traced to what can be called the race industry.

Race is more than a biological category or a social category. It has become an industry, with its own infrastructure, branches, incentives and agendas. The most obvious examples are the political representatives of particular racial or ethnic groups, as exemplified by the Congressional Black Caucus or the Hispanic Caucus or such non-governmental organizations as La Raza or the NAACP. Many academic institutions have various ethnic studies departments or programs, and their thrust is by no means confined to academic scholarship seeking objective facts about those groups. The legal profession is also well represented among those specializing in racial issues, and here too the disinterested search for truth is seldom the overriding consideration. “Diversity” consultants in private industry and community organizers in racial or ethnic neighborhoods are among the many other occupations that are part of the race industry.

Despite the wide variety of occupations in the race industry, there are commonalities in their underlying visions and agendas. Central to their mission is the presumption that economic lags, educational deficiencies or even high crime rates among the respective groups they represent are due to the failings or malice of others. Views or facts to the contrary are to be discountenanced, or if possible banned or punished, rather than engaged.

In addition to the particular portrayal of racial or ethnic issues promoted by the race industry, there is a highly selective view of what sorts of “solutions” are needed— almost invariably these are policies or actions that enhance the role, power, prestige and economic flourishing of the race industry itself,
even if these policies or actions are demonstrably counterproductive in their effects on the people in whose name the race industry speaks.

A classic example is the policy of preferentially admitting members of specifically selected minorities
*
to colleges and universities under the rubric of “affirmative action” or “diversity.”

In addition to promoting particular policies, such as affirmative action, the race industry promotes more general ideas and concepts, such as “social justice” and “disparate impact.” Both the specific policies and the general concepts need closer scrutiny than they usually get from the media or even academia. Since “social justice” has already been covered in
Chapter 7
, we can take “affirmative action” as an example of a policy, and “disparate impact” as an example of a concept, both heavily promoted by the race industry.

Group preference policies known as “affirmative action” in the United States have existed in many other countries around the world, often longer than they have in the United States, and under a variety of names, such as “positive discrimination” in India and Britain, “sons of the soil” preferences in Malaysia and Indonesia, and “reflecting the federal character of the country” in Nigeria.

Though based on a variety of rationales peculiar to particular countries, these group preference policies have had a remarkable similarity in their actual consequences, which have often differed considerably from the visions or rationales on which they were based.
⁷

One of the common characteristics of group preference programs in many countries has been that their proponents have said that these are “temporary” programs, and in some countries there have even been specific cutoff dates for the ending of these programs. Yet these programs have been extended as these cutoff dates approached, and sometimes re-extended, but seldom, if ever, actually ended. More commonly, these programs have expanded over time, spreading to more institutions, to more processes within institutions, or to more groups.

In the United States, for example, “affirmative action” referred initially to positive steps to ensure equal opportunity “without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin.” But, within a very few years, “affirmative action” took on the meaning of numerical “goals” that amounted to group quotas. In Malaysia and India, preferences spread to the grades of students that were adjusted for the benefit of groups preferentially admitted to universities.
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In short, the expansion of preferences has been the rule, not the exception.

What might seem to be the simplest and easiest of the goals to achieve by group preferences— the advancement of the group or groups selected as beneficiaries— has in fact proved to be one of the most elusive. Although the rationale for providing preferential treatment for particular groups has usually been to aid their rise from a disadvantaged position, the actual beneficiaries of group preferences have often been individuals who have been more fortunate than other members of their group, and even more fortunate than the average member of the society as a whole. That has been true in India, in Malaysia and in the United States, among other places.

Under the headline, “With Affirmative Action, India’s Rich Gain School Slots Meant for Poor,” the
New York Times
reported that in that country’s universities “those given set-asides at their institutions were generally the children of doctors, lawyers and high-level bureaucrats.”
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In Malaysia, just over half of the scholarships awarded under affirmative action went to Malay students whose families were in the top 17 percent of the income distribution.
¹⁰
A 2004 study found that a majority of the black alumni of Harvard were either West Indian or African immigrants, or the children of these immigrants,
not
native-born American blacks who provide the rationale for preferential admissions. Similar findings have appeared in studies of some other elite colleges.
¹¹

Where students from genuinely disadvantaged minority groups have been preferentially admitted to college and universities, it has been by no means certain that this has been, on net balance, a benefit, and actual harm inflicted on the supposed beneficiaries has been by no means unknown. As noted in
Chapter 5
, black and other minority students with the qualifications for success have been artificially turned into failures by being mismatched with academic institutions they do not qualify for under the standards applied to other students. This mismatching effect can be seen by what happened when racial preferences were banned in the University of California system.

Despite dire predictions that there would be a drastic reduction in the number of minority students in the University of California system after racial preferences in admission were banned, an empirical study showed that there were “modest declines in black and Hispanic enrollment but an
increase in black and Hispanic degrees.”
¹²
There were major declines in minority enrollment at the top-ranked Berkeley and UCLA campuses— 42 percent and 33 percent, respectively— but these declines were almost completely offset by increases in the number of minority students at the other campuses.
¹³
More important, there was an
increase
in the number of black and Hispanic students
graduating
from the University of California system, including an increase of 55 percent in the number graduating in four years and an increase of 63 percent in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher. The number of black and Hispanic students who graduated with degrees in science, technology, mathematics and engineering rose by 51 percent and the number of doctorates earned by black and Hispanic students in the system rose by 25 percent after preferential admissions policies were banned.
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Data from other colleges and universities likewise show higher graduation rates for black students at colleges and universities when their academic qualifications are more similar to those of the other students at those institutions.
¹⁵
Moreover, black students who are mismatched with law schools do not pass the bar examination as often as black students with very similar academic qualifications who went to law schools where the other students had similar academic qualifications. The end result can be fewer black lawyers than if there were no affirmative action.
¹⁶

The negative effects of affirmative action on the non-preferred groups, such as whites and Asian Americans, have been obvious. But when there are also negative effects on groups preferentially admitted, it is by no means clear who has gained, other than the race industry, which can trumpet the successful imposition of its agenda, ignoring the needless failures of minority students created by that agenda.

The indisputable fact that life has never been fair, in the sense of offering equal likelihoods of success to all, at any time or in any place, in the thousands of years of recorded history, provides an inexhaustible supply of grievances for all sorts of groups at all sorts of places and times. The question is whether we allow that to be an automatic indictment of any
particular institution or any particular society for causing disparities in outcomes that are found in that particular institution or that particular society. There is no question that someone born in a slum in Brazil or Bangladesh has far less chance in life than someone born in an upscale American community. Indeed, there is no question that Americans born in different economic circumstances— or even in the same economic circumstances, but raised by families with different values— have very different chances in life.

Against this background, it is hardly surprising that different individuals and groups meet the standards in numerous kinds of endeavors to very different extents. Yet the “disparate impact” of particular standards on the success rates of different groups is widely taken as a sign of “unfairness” in the criteria themselves, rather than being a consequence of existing differences in real and relevant qualifications, which may in some instances be due to prior unfairness in the circumstances in which less qualified people were raised— or in other cases reflecting differences due to the attitudes, behavior and performances of those people themselves.