Slouching Towards Gomorrah (39 page)

It is doubtful, in any event, that much discrimination occurs now that governments are no longer requiring it. Any fair-minded observer would have to admit that this country has undergone a drastic decline in racism. Discrimination is alleged much more often than it exists. When job discrimination complaints get a fair hearing, it usually turns out that the complainant was not hired because he or she had poor job qualifications.
¹³
Recently, to take another instance, there have been widely reported allegations of discrimination in mortgage lending, based on the observation that a higher percentage of blacks than whites are turned down. That kind of statistic, by itself, is meaningless, but most people, including government bureaucrats, take it as proving discrimination. The allegations were shown to be baseless by the fact that the default rates of the two races were the same. Had blacks been rejected who had financial qualifications equal to accepted white borrowers, so that blacks had to be more qualified to get loans, the default rates for whites would have been higher than those for blacks.

Mortgage lenders, not surprisingly, were more interested in economics than in race. What is true in that business is true generally. The prevalence of discrimination is to be doubted because it is economically irrational in any business where rivalry between firms exists. The employer who hires the best people, regardless of skin color or sex, will have a significant competitive advantage over any rival who discriminates. Hence discrimination is likely only where rivalry is muted or nonexistent.

As Thomas Sowell put it, “Prejudice is free but discrimination has costs.“
¹⁴
That is the reason private businesses have resisted government-ordered discrimination. Even in South Africa, Sowell points out, private firms, run by folks presumably as racist as the government, persistently evaded the laws discriminating against blacks in employment. In the American South, bus companies publicly opposed and then tried to ignore municipal laws requiring separate seating of whites and blacks. The difference in attitudes was entirely due to the fact that governments bore none of
the costs while businesses did. Discrimination against Jews was practiced far more often in regulated industries than in competitive ones, discrimination being costless where the firm was shielded from competition by regulators.
¹⁵
Businesses would, of course, discriminate when it paid, usually when their customers preferred not to associate with minorities. Hence the days of segregated lunch counters in the South. The phenomenon of private business resistance to discrimination when discrimination costs money is universal.

Sometimes preferential policies are justified as a form of reparations for a past history of discrimination. That would make sense, however, only if we ignore individuals and think of races as undifferentiated blocs whose members live forever. The individual beneficiaries and victims of past discrimination are now almost entirely unknowable. It is hardly sensible to prefer a person who has not suffered discrimination because a member of the same race or sex suffered it thirty years ago. Whatever happened in the past, in the present the policy does harm to guiltless individuals and benefits those who have suffered no harm. At some point, history must be accepted for what it is, history.

Though affirmative action has few if any legitimate benefits, it does have heavy adverse effects. To start with what many will think the least significant, it is obvious that jettisoning the achievement principle for reward according to skin color or genital arrangements has a serious economic cost. Peter Brimelow and Leslie Spencer estimated that affirmative actions direct and indirect costs in 1991 were about $115 billion; opportunity costs added another $236 billion; the lowering of the gross national product may have been about 4 percent.
¹⁶
Worse, it all may be wasted. The authors quote Charles Murray: “There’s hardly a single outcome—black voting rights, access to public accommodation, employment, particularly in white collar jobs—that couldn’t have been predicted on the basis of pre-1964 trend lines.” “That’s pretty devastating,” the authors say. “It suggests that we have spent trillions of dollars to create an outcome that would have happened even if the government had done nothing.“

If affirmative action had merely squandered trillions to accomplish little or nothing, that would be a considerable misfortune; but the truth is worse than that. This misbegotten policy has
caused serious damage to blacks and Hispanics, to whites and those of Asian extraction, and to relations between those groups. Though these consequences are felt throughout our society, we may use the venue of higher education to illustrate the point.

Blacks and Hispanics do not currently perform as well on standardized tests or in school as do whites and Asian-Americans. If admissions were made on the basis of academic achievement, blacks and Hispanics would not be represented in the most prestigious and demanding universities in the same proportion that they bear to all university students. In their zeal to get minority numbers up, universities admit members of these groups with lower SATs and lower high school grades than they demand of whites and Asians. At many universities the practice is to compare black and Hispanic applicants only against others in the same ethnic group. The result is often startling differences in the academic qualifications of those groups and white and Asian students. Not only do some such admittees find themselves overmatched as they would not have at schools one rung down the prestige ladder, but the latter schools, deprived of minority students who would have done well there, must also admit lesser qualified minority students to get
their
numbers up. The result is a mismatching of universities and minority students at every level. This probably accounts for the higher drop-out rate for students who would have gotten good educations and graduated had the universities not done them so harmful a favor. Since everyone knows about affirmative action, those who do graduate are likely to be suspected by prospective employers and fellow employees of not really having the credentials their diplomas suggest.

Perhaps even worse than this, overmatching minority students may lead them to reject the standards for achievement that they will need to succeed after graduation. Sowell points out that the overmatched black or Hispanic student who does not keep up with his classmates has a choice. He can admit to himself that he is not qualified to compete at this level or, in an effort to retain his self-respect, he can attack as illegitimate the standards by which he is judged. It is hardly surprising that many choose the latter course. Most humans would. But a student who rejects the criteria by which our society judges achievement is himself handicapped, probably for life. The admissions office has done him no favor.

The problem is not simply that minority students are placed in universities where they have difficulty competing. The recipient of preferential admission has his self-doubt increased, which will in turn tend to encourage race-holding and underperformance. It is now fashionable to speak of seeking diversity, but the change in terms does not disguise the fact of preference. Whites seek innocence through absolution for their treatment of blacks in the past, while blacks seek power, which they can achieve by playing on white guilt. Shelby Steele writes,

Of course, no minority (or majority either) will achieve proportionate representation in all fields of endeavor. Neither sex has done that, nor has any ethnic group. But Steele’s point is entirely valid: preferential policies do not build the incentives for individual development that are necessary to uplift a formerly oppressed people, or anybody else for that matter.

The mistake the universities and society have made is to treat blacks and Hispanics by different standards from the rest of us. Christopher Lasch denounced the notion that “respect for cultural diversity forbids us to impose the standards of privileged groups on the victims of oppression.” He calls this “clearly a recipe for universal incompetence (or at least for a disastrous split between the competent classes and the incompetent).“
¹⁸
A split between the competent classes and the incompetent would be disastrous for social stability. A more likely outcome is that if standards are lowered for minorities, they will also eventually be lowered for others. Since “privileged groups” and “victims of oppression” occupy the
same classrooms and take the same tests, it will be impossible to demand different standards of the two. Just as the training of male cadets was scaled back to levels at which female cadets can perform, so educational standards will suffer in civilian universities if the standards of the privileged are not enforced on the formerly oppressed.

If preferential admission policies for blacks and Hispanics in colleges damages them, it certainly works a serious injustice on those who lose out because of preferences to others. A law professor referred to these results of affirmative action as “transitional inequities.” That is a way of avoiding thinking about what you are doing. What the universities and employers are doing is inflicting permanent harm on people who have done nothing wrong. The inequities are not transitional or temporary for those who lose what they deserve on the merits because of their race or sex. If a white male does not get into Yale because of his race, he does not get into Yale forever, and chances are he forever does not get into Harvard, Stanford, etc. either. (Or, if he does, some other white male gets left out.) He may also not get the job he wants and that his talents and achievements qualify him for; he may well not get the promotion he has earned. Perhaps in ten or twenty years some other white male will be treated fairly, but that does not restore the life the first one who endured discrimination deserved to have. The damage to the individual is permanent, not transitional.

It may be thought that affirmative action is a way of buying social peace by enforcing proportional representation for all groups in all institutions. If so, it is obvious that the policy does not work. The results of affirmative action have been greater group antagonisms and self-segregation. The demand for equality of results is surely one cause of the increasing racial acrimony in our society. It is to be seen everywhere, from the new separation of the races on campuses to racial bloc voting on juries to workplace antagonisms. Nor is this just a problem between whites and blacks. Adjustments between races were difficult enough when that was only a question of those two races, but now we have large numbers of Asians and Hispanics, with many divisions within each group. By referring to non-whites generally as “persons of color,” an attempt is made to range all non-whites against all whites. The tactic cannot work in an ethnic spoils system. The chancellor of a
major university told me that blacks were calling him a racist. I asked why. He said, “Too many Asians.” The prospects for racial and ethnic peace seem to be diminishing.

It is no wonder affirmative action creates racial hostilities. When a white male who has never discriminated against anyone loses out to a black male who has never been discriminated against, despite the formers superior qualifications, anger will flare up on both sides. The reason for the white’s anger is obvious; the black will be angry because he knows that others know he has succeeded not on his own but because of his skin. The black is particularly likely to feel anger if he is placed by affirmative action in an environment in which he cannot compete equally. He may be college material but not ready for the college that takes him in. Perhaps, instead of being at Harvard, he should be at the University of Massachusetts.

It will be difficult to get rid of affirmative action. There is no reason to think that the infliction of inequities will come to an end at some unstated time in the future, at least not without acrimony and further racial anger. The rhetoric of victimhood will continue as long as there are benefits to be derived from it, which is to say as long as whites seek absolution. Judging by the universities’ pusillanimity on this and similar issues for the past thirty years, unless authorities outside the universities intervene, affirmative actions inequities in the academic world will last forever, the period of transition will be eternity. Modern liberals have gotten us into a mistaken policy that we cannot continue and will have the greatest difficulty in ending.

Modern liberals in government agencies, universities, and elsewhere will do their utmost to preserve affirmative action. But there is a new mood in the public. There is a move to put the elimination of affirmative action in California to a vote in 1996, and the issue promises to become national. The initiative to be put to a vote in California states: “Neither the State of California nor any of its political subdivisions or agents shall use race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin as a criterion for either discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group in the operation of the State’s system of public employment, public education or public contracting.” This is an attempt to restore what Congress thought it was doing in the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. But the passage of the initiative would apply only to preferential policies put in place by the state or its subdivisions. Federal preferential policies override state law.

Interestingly enough, some liberals now think affirmative action has lasted too long. Joseph Califano, who pushed hard for affirmative action in both the Johnson and Carter administrations, wrote in 1989 that the policy was intended “only as a temporary expedient to speed blacks’ entry into the social and economic mainstream” and that “its time is running out“
¹⁹
Susan Estrich, a law professor and campaign strategist for presidential candidate Mike Dukakis in 1988, said that “For all its good intentions, affirmative action was never meant to be permanent, and now is truly the time to move on to some other approach.“
²⁰
Ward Connerly, a black member of the Board of Regents of the University of California, said, “I tell you with every fiber of my being that what we’re doing is inequitable to certain people…. To those who say, ‘Affirmative action now, affirmative action as it is now’—that’s what George Wallace said about segregation.” The Board of Regents has ordered the California university system to stop preferences, but is said to be meeting covert resistance from educators and administrators.