Missing on Affirmative Action
Lazy and deceptive rhetoric hides realities in the debate.
By Madhuri Singh, University of Michigan
Thursday November 2, 2006
Turn on the radio or TV in Michigan right now, and you hear the same argument, so appealing in its simplicity, being repeated ad nauseam by anti-affirmative action opponents: it’s wrong to classify people based on their race; we need to start treating people equally.
The intuitive logic of this stance is apparent, and that’s why it so often works for conservatives. But, as the t-shirts sported by many University of Michigan students state, one must realize that race is a factor because racism is still a factor. It is impossible to “treat people equally” when their underlying circumstances are not equal—a problem affirmative action seeks to address. And affirmative action is not simply a race-based initiative; it affects women, the LGBT community, individuals with disabilities, and people from disadvantaged socioeconomic communities.
But millionaire anti-affirmative action activist Ward Connerly and others have been capitalizing on how simple it is to vilify affirmative action, particularly at universities, by ignoring the nuances of admissions policies. With his sponsorship, ballot initiatives to eliminate affirmative action have passed in both California and Washington State. In Michigan right now, Proposal 2 is a ballot initiative introduced by Connerly and Jennifer Gratz. Gratz was the white plaintiff in Gratz v. Bollinger, the 2003 Supreme Court case that, along with Grutter v. Bollinger, famously challenged the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions policies. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court upheld the use of race in admissions policies.
What is ironic about Proposal 2 is its official title; the ballot initiative is known as the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, though most civil rights advocates wouldn’t be caught dead backing it. Yet it is precisely this name and the misleading campaign to promote it that has allowed the initiative to garner so much support. According to the most recent poll data, Michigan appears to be leaning in favor of passing Proposition 2, with 49 percent likely to vote for the MCRI, and 42 percent likely to vote against it.
What is truly disappointing, however, is the way discussion of the MCRI is framed in the national media. Consider Tuesday’s article in The New York Times: the beginning highlights Jennifer Gratz’s personal feelings of victimization by the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies without noting that race is not the only aspect of affirmative action. The Times devotes seven paragraphs to Gratz’s personal angle on the issue and focuses a majority of the article on the admissions policies at Michigan, while failing to discuss the major policy implications of the MCRI.
Proposition 2 passing isn’t just about what will happen to admissions policies at the University of Michigan. It’s about the end of housing and lending programs that ensure women and minorities are treated fairly when applying for home loans and mortgages. It’s about state programs that help women achieve equal pay. It’s about the loss of foundation grants to institutions that demonstrate a diversity component. And it’s about the loss of education scholarships and financial aid that help women and minorities gain an equal foothold in society. One United Michigan, supported by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, put together a substantial fact sheet that debunks common myths about the MCRI and affirmative action.
The Supreme Court decision happened four years ago and though people love hearing about a white female “victim” of a selective university admissions process, that’s not the real issue here.
The Times had a chance to illuminate the serious policy implications of this controversial initiative. Instead, they gave Gratz a megaphone and framed the Michigan admissions policies as “racial preference.” Here’s Gratz in the second paragraph:
“We have a horrible history when it comes to race in this country,” said Ms. Gratz, 29, a white applicant who was wait-listed 11 years ago at the state’s flagship campus here. “But that doesn’t make it right to give preference to the son of a black doctor at the expense of a poor student whose parents didn’t go to college.”
This scenario is a figment of Ms. Gratz’s imagination. Prior to the Supreme Court decision, the University of Michigan’s admissions policy was based on a point system. It may not have been perfect, but it wasn’t quite the racially-motivated system that most conservatives want you to believe. If you look closely, you see that the policy did not favor rich blacks over poor whites. You got the same advantage for being a racial minority as you got for a socio-economically disadvantageous background, but not for both. In other words, you only qualify for points under one of the following categories: race or socioeconomic status or identity (probably LGBT and gender). In this category are also: athletics, men in nursing, and (my personal favorite) Provost’s discretion. In other words, Daddy knowing the Provost gives a candidate just as many additional points as if he had been poor and white, poor and African-American, a male in nursing, or poor and Latino.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time the Times has glossed over the facts and given conservatives an opportunity to distort the affirmative action debate. In 2003, at the height of the Supreme Court cases, Bush was widely quoted denouncing the University of Michigan for using a quota system in its admissions policies. In a January 2003 article, the Times quoted Bush and, three paragraphs later, emphasized his use of the word quota:
I strongly support diversity of all kinds, including racial diversity in higher education," Mr. Bush said in a nationally televised address. "But the method used by the University of Michigan to achieve this important goal is fundamentally flawed. At their core, the Michigan policies amount to a quota system that unfairly rewards or penalizes prospective students based solely on their race."
In a sign of the careful political calibration of his words, the president repeatedly used the term " quotas" to describe Michigan ‘s admissions policy, a word that inevitably draws strong opposition in polls.
The Times gave a measly two sentences near the end of the article—compared to the first six paragraphs devoted to Bush’s claims—to Lee Bollinger, then President of the University of Michigan, to clarify that “Bush ‘is simply incorrect’ and that ‘these are not quotas.’”
Affirmative action is spun as being primarily about race-based quota admissions systems because it’s easy, and it gets people angry in a way that athletics or Daddy’s connections generally do not. But newspapers owe it to their readers to explain what the real implications of an anti-affirmative action ballot initiative means to individuals of all backgrounds whether they apply for a job, home-buying loan, or college.
--------
Comments
|
!
These are all very good points and it’s particularly important to rebut the suggestion that we must choose between race-based or socio-economic affirmative action. It makes me wonder if it isn’t time for genuine advocates of equal opportunity to go on the offensive about the “huge college admissions advantages enjoyed by some privileged white students,” as Daniel Golden has highlighted both in his Wall Street Journal columns and in his recent book, The Price of Admission. In it, Golden points out that many college admission preferences “amount to nothing less than affirmative action for rich white people.” Lyndon Johnson said it best at Howard University in 1965, “You do not take a man who for years has
— Indi - Nov 2, 03:16 PM - #been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a
race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still
justly believe you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough to
open the gates of opportunity.” Racism to this day “hobbles” many and neutrality in action does not preserve equality; rather it allows disadvantage to persist.
The fact that most “civil rights” activists won’t back Proposal 2 shows just how corrupt they have become. Equal treatment is the essence of civil rights and if you don’t believe me, feel free to look the word up in the dictionary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights. Racism is still a factor, but it works both ways. Even if all racism were white vs. black, “affirmative action” would still be wrong because it would punish the majority of whites for the crimes committed by a minority of whites. “Affirmative action” not only undermines equal justice but also individual rights as well. Imagine a bank robbery committed by an unknown white person. Since the perpetrator can not be found, the judge simply punishes the first white person found on the street. Does this sound fair? And yet it is the basis of the idea that we should punish random white persons for the racism of a few white persons.
It is time to proclaim that the “Emporer has no clothes”. It is poor inner-city education, not racism that is the major factor holding back minorities today. A child could apprehend this fact (as a child did in the children’s story of the same name). It is only the “sophistication” of political correctness that keeps adults from acknowledging this simple fact. If we are to help those who are disadvantaged because of a poor education, let us help all persons who attended the failing school district whether they are white, black or hispanic. Education, not race matters.
— George Roberts - Nov 2, 06:09 PM - #alumni preferences just like preferences are vile, evil, sick , demented and depraved. No tax money for private universities that support alumni legacy preferences. No tax money for medical reserach at Harvard, columbia and Johns Hopkins for supporting loathsome alumni preferences. NO tax money for members of the American Council of Education and Association of Independent Colleges and Universities for supporting alumni legacy preferences. Vent your anger at these abominations called the Ivy League , the American Council of Education and Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and their faculties.
— alan kalabaw - Nov 2, 08:40 PM - #alumni preferences just like preferences are vile, evil, sick , demented and depraved. No tax money for private universities that support alumni legacy preferences. No tax money for medical reserach at Harvard, columbia and Johns Hopkins for supporting loathsome alumni preferences. NO tax money for members of the American Council of Education and Association of Independent Colleges and Universities for supporting alumni legacy preferences. Vent your anger at these abominations called the Ivy League , the American Council of Education and Association of Independent Colleges and Universities and their faculties.
— alan kalabaw - Nov 2, 08:40 PM - #The author says that affirmative action is needed in order to combat discrimination, yet it should be apparent that giving preferences to one group over another based on their race is discrimination in itself. It is wholly illogical to fight racism with race-based policies. The goal should be to move away from the use of race, and not fueling the fire of racism by injecting our government and practices with these meaningless categorizations. Using flawed means will invariably lead to a flawed ends, and so, affirmative action does nothing to solve the problem.
When one stops to think, America, the so-called Land of the Free, has yet to implement true racial equality in its entirety. We went directly from segregation and Jim Crows laws in the south to the opposite end of the spectrum in affirmative action programs. Instead of discriminating against the minority, we discriminate against the majority, with a Robin Hood-like sense of justice and self-congratulatory complacency. Unfortunately, these good feelings are about the only positive thing to come out of preference policies. A look over the last 30+ years of these policies shows little results, especially compared the huge strides minorities made without them. Even supporters of affirmative action admit that it is a flawed system. Banning affirmative action is a reasonable solution. It would not be doing nothing about the problem—it would be giving true equality a chance for once. Minorities have climbed the socioeconomic ladder on their own countless of times throughout history, without the aid of preferences. We do not need to put the fate of a people into the government’s hands; give the power to the people.
— Joshua Booker - Nov 2, 09:19 PM - #It is easy enough to determine, in administering a sex-based affirmative action program, whether a person seeking to avail herself of the benefits of the program is, in fact, a woman. But, where race-based affirmative action is concerned, pray tell me how you propose to ensure that the benefits flow only to the members of the races that the programs are designed to protect. I.e., will you simply accept the self-declaration of a person? If the self-declaration of a person is inconsonant with what the program administrator observes, what should be done? I don’t understand how race-based programs can be administered fairly without coming up with a test for who is or is not a member of a certain race, and such tests are an anathema.
— Chris Reynolds - Nov 3, 03:20 PM - #Great article—thaks for keeping those of us in other states updated.
— Linda Ferland - Nov 4, 07:08 PM - #Superb Article. You should submit it to the New York Times and Michigan newspapers. It must most that with all this oppressive of Affirmative Affirmative thousands of White students manage to get in Michigan colleges each year in fact most are White. In the Supreme court 1238 White got in with lower test scores than the plaintiffs, but that fact was ignored. They must have gotten the White pass. If it up to me there
Its interesting to note that White college enrollment has dropped in California since the passage of 209. One unintended consequences of eliminating Affirmative Action in California and in Louisiana after hurricane Katrina. was an acceleration in illegal immigration. Why because wealthy well connected White contractors opted to hire lower wage illegals, instead of Americans citizens of any color. The Bush administration opposed Affirmative Action in Michigan, but supports no bid contracts for Halliburton,
And no qualification appointments like Michael D. Brown. .
President John F. Kennedy coined the phrase Affirmative Action when he chose to appoint a Negro test pilot to the astronaut program. Despite his high qualifications and performance, there were those that could not stand the idea of Black astronaut. He was dropped from the program the day after Kennedy was assassinated.
— Mr. Unite Us - Nov 5, 12:42 AM - #I don’t get it. What does affirmative action policies being eliminated have to do with an increase in illegal immigration?
— Aimee - Nov 9, 01:12 AM - #