We Can Promote Justice Without Being Henry Ford-Level Racist Against Asian Americans
There's a better way
On Tuesday, New York columnist Jonathan Chait made waves by stating a blindingly obvious fact: Harvard is discriminating against Asian Americans. Some excerpts:
“The facts, as presented by the plaintiffs, are crystal clear. Asian Americans admitted to Harvard have higher standardized-test scores than any other group including whites.”
“Whatever the legal merits, the political case for Harvard’s system, and the similar systems used by its fellow elite institutions, has been formed by a stream of insultingly dishonest propaganda.”
“[Harvard’s defenders] will suggest Harvard does not hold Asian American applicants to a higher standard and then change the subject to something more congenial to their preferred conclusion. Their arguments tend to employ a jargon-heavy, elliptical style George Orwell derided in “Politics and the English Language”: obfuscatory rhetoric that avoids directly engaging with facts that discomfit the party line.”
“Reality is complicated. But one identifiable aspect of this complex reality is systemic discrimination against Asian Americans.”
I had intended, at some point, to write a column about how Harvard’s argument is so clownish that it makes Benny Hill seem like King Lear. But Chait basically covers it — I encourage you to read his article. Harvard has hidden its de facto quota system with all the effectiveness of a seventh grader hiding his erection behind a math book; their patent-worthy discrimination machine is an evaluation category called “personality”. “Personality” is a completely subjective nonsense category; they could have just as reasonably called it “essence” or “zazzle”. Harvard regularly gives Asian American students shockingly low “personality” scores, and this appears to be the main reason why the school’s Asian population is less than half of what it would be if students were admitted based solely on academic merit. The most charitable interpretation of what’s happening — what Harvard says is happening — is that Asian applicants are overwhelmingly Spock-like automatons whose feelings and behaviors are a pale facsimile of actual human experience, which is an argument so incredibly racist that I think it would spark a dive in subscriptions if it appeared in The Daily Stormer.
The consequences of Harvard’s policies, and the policies of other Ivy League colleges, can be seen in this graph (CalTech is included because they admit students according to objective metrics):
Chait and I seem to agree that the question is not whether Asian Americans are being discriminated against; that question has been settled. The question is whether that discrimination is justifiable. Chait calls himself “a somewhat squishy supporter of affirmative action”, which could also describe me, though it’s probably more accurate to call me a “somewhat squishy opponent”. I think there are times when factoring in race (or gender, or other traits) makes sense, but I also think that we frequently over-apply those considerations in harmful ways. Without a doubt, my general discomfort with our current policies is informed by my background in entertainment, which is a field in which the most tokenizing, crass, and poorly considered types of racial preferences that might be imagined in a conservative fever dream are pretty much the industry standard.
Chait argues that the plain-as-day discrimination against Asian applicants should be weighed against the policy’s benefits. He also gives voice to some of the liberal despair surrounding the court’s all-but-certain impending ruling against affirmative action. He writes:
“Liberals used to speculate about some grand bargain that would trade away affirmative action for some other, more effective way to close the scandalous gap between white and Black America; I don’t believe any such trade is possible. Ending affirmative action will probably just mean less social equality, period.”
Affirmative action’s supporters often portray the policy as a necessary corrective for society’s obvious injustices. If I thought that we true — if I thought we faced a binary choice between addressing manifest inequality through affirmative action or doing nothing at all — I would probably be decisively on the side of affirmative action. But I don’t think that’s true; I think giving students a leg up based on socio-economic status, not race, is both a more fair and more defensible policy, and it would also give many nonwhite students access to elite universities.
Discussions about affirmative action are often actually discussions of socio-economic status. Affirmative action proponents frequently use race as a proxy for class, which is exactly what Tufts professor Natasha Warikoo does in a recent episode of The Argument. In response to the question “Should we consider race in applications to colleges?”, Warikoo begins her argument by talking about socio-economic status for about a minute (at 8:15 here). These are the first words she speaks on the podcast; it’s the part of the discussion when you make your most persuasive argument. And Warikoo determined — probably correctly — that the most compelling argument for race-based preferences is an argument that, if you listen closely, is actually an argument about class.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that I think the advantages conferred by class are extremely real. I moved a lot growing up — I went to six different public schools from K-12 — and my galaxy-brain insight from that experience is that different places are different. Aside from the obvious cultural differences — which are real enough that they formed the basis of my standup act for about a decade — there are major disparities in access to resources and general ease of life. These things are hard to quantify, but I think they shape our lives a great deal. Socioeconomic status is far from a perfect proxy for advantage — given the choice between being born into a poor family with loving parents and being Logan Roy’s fifth child, I’d definitely choose the former — but it’s probably the best measure we have.
Not surprisingly, policies that don’t target the main thing that’s actually the problem have failed to address the main thing that’s actually the problem. Writing in The Economist in 2018, Richard Kahlenberg of The Century Foundation found that 71% of Black and Latino students at Harvard come from wealthy backgrounds. Many Black students are not American descendants of slaves; Henry Louis Gates once estimated that students with purely Black, American roots make up about a third of Harvard’s Black students. A 2007 study found that more than 40 percent of Black Ivy League students come from immigrant families; that number is almost certainly higher today. There are all numerous measures that show that affirmative action is not doing much to make top universities any less elite — here are two:
Of course, if you find those charts too antiseptic, and prefer more impassioned analysis from someone who has worked in college admissions, here’s Freddie deBoer in a post titled “Why the Fuck Do You Trust Harvard?”:
“The whole selection process for elite schools is to skim a band of truly gifted students from the top, then admit a bunch of kids with identical resumes whose parents will collectively buy the crew team a new boathouse, and then you find a kid whose parents moved to the states from Nigeria two years before he was born and whose family owns a mining company and you call that affirmative action.”
“You’ve been worked, you’ve been took. You’re doing the bidding of some of the wealthiest, most elitist, most despicable institutions on earth. You think Harvard gives a single merciful fuck about poor Black teenagers? Are you out of your goddamned minds?”
Well put! And as a side note: It’s nice to see someone on Substack who can hang with me, profanity-wise.
The line about the boathouse brings up something that maybe doesn’t even need to be said: I think that colleges should also do away with legacy admissions. I haven’t always been an absolutist on this question; I used to think that if an applicant was very close to admission on the merits, and admitting them would secure a large donation that would make life better for other students, then special consideration should be given. And, of course, the dumber the kid, the heftier the “dimwit tax”; a garden variety dullard might gain entry with a boathouse-sized donation, while Jared Kushner would require a donation roughly the size of Germany’s GDP. But I’ve come to believe that even that tradeoff isn’t worth it; the abject unfairness of the situation is so corrosive that I think schools should scrap legacy admissions altogether and absorb whatever hit might accrue to their endowment.
Luckily, college admission happens at a moment in a students’ life when extensive data about their family’s wealth exists and tells us something about how much of an advantage that student has enjoyed. Schools already collect this data for scholarship purposes, and, it should be noted, most schools already factor socio-economic status into admissions (I’m arguing that this consideration should mostly or entirely replace racial considerations). One common objection to focusing on socio-economic status is that Black people often live in neighborhoods with more poverty than white people of equal means, and though I find studies like this one a bit ishy (the definition of “neighborhood” matters a lot, and if a person with substantial economic means makes a decision about which neighborhood is right for them, then I’m not sure they count as “disadvantaged”), I’m comfortable with some sort of geography-based adjustment to account for the fact that the only thing that the Bronx and Westchester County have in common is that they share a Trader Joe’s.
Economic-based considerations have several advantages over race-based considerations. Importantly, they don’t require the Texas-sized dose of race-based discrimination that we’re inflicting on Asian applicants — and, to a much lesser extent, white applicants — which the courts are about to find unconstitutional. Economic considerations are likely to be seen as more just because basically everyone understands that growing up on Compton or Appalachia can be tough, while it’s less obvious what disadvantage is suffered by a one-quarter-Black person whose Dad is an international banker and whose mom is an extremely famous supermodel, which is an example I’m using because that is a real person I used to know. Of course, it’s also worth noting that, precisely because race and economics in this country are so intertwined, economic-based policies are likely to produce racially diverse student bodies. In his Economist article, Kahlenberg describes a simulation using data from actual Harvard applicants that imagines no legacy preferences, no racial preferences (it’s easy if youuuuuu tryyyyy), and gives socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants half the boost Harvard gives to recruited athletes. The result was that the share of underrepresented minority students actually increased from 28% to 30% and the proportion of first generation college students increased from 7% to 25%. And the results likely would have been even more dramatic if Kahlenberg had access to data about wealth, not just income.
I’ve written pretty extensively about how I think affirmative action policies are, for the most part, well-intentioned efforts that have failed to evolve with the times and have become counterproductive. I think they increase the salience of race and have serious negative consequences, of which the undeniable discrimination against Asian Americans is one. They’re also extremely unpopular among Americans of all races. If I’m being frank, I think they’re a gigantic albatross around Democrats’ necks; I think large swaths of the progressive agenda are being sacrificed for a policy that doesn’t work remotely as intended.
Improving opportunity and class mobility is a major project. Much of my writing focuses on things like supporting working families and reducing housing costs because I think those policies help break down society’s baked-in disadvantages. To some extent, I think the progressive attachment to affirmative action reflects frustration with a lack of progress on bigger issues; disparities are still rampant, so we forcibly engineer something that we can pretend is equality. But that’s like trying to eat plastic fruit; the thing isn’t real and simply acting like it is won’t work.
Affirmative action in universities as we know it will die soon. But as Al Bundy once said: “I welcome death.” A better policy is out there. We can promote class mobility, improve fairness, and give disadvantaged students better access to elite spaces. And we can do it without enacting a level of discrimination against Asian Americans that, quite frankly, would probably make Ty Cobb blush.
I just started reading Jeff Mauer. I consider myself a staunch conservative, and I was directed to him by either Jonah Goldberg or David French from the Dispatch, the thinking Conservative publication - knuckle draggers need not purchase a subscription.
Jeff has fast become my third favorite liberal, my Daughter and future Son-in-Law are #1 and #2. I am convinced that if we just think about actual real world problems and real world solutions with open minds, we can bridge the divide between the idiots on the Left and the idiots on the Right.
It's obvious to me that kids from the lower socio-economic classes are the folks that could most benefit from a "hand up", not the kids born on Third base. Good stuff here! Thank you.
We have a shortage of people who can swing a hammer, weld, or wire an electrical panel. We have a glut of people who can find something problematic in a Twinkie.
An electrician can make $100k easy. Someone with a sociology degree working for a non-profit will probably get $20 an hour. Oh, and they also have a hundred grand worth of student debt they'll never pay off.
IMO bringing back shop class in high school (free!) will do more to pull up the lower class than adding a bunch of worthless BAs will.