Is It Time To End Affirmative Action?

Etymologically, the word symposium means a convivial meeting, usually involving food, drink, and intellectual conversation. The Intelligence Squared U.S. debate series, made possible by philanthropist Robert Rosenkrantz, may yet restore this classical sensibility to public discourse. Last night was the 12th debate of the series, hosted at Asia Society and Museum, and if conviviality was evidenced in the buzzing pre-debate cocktail hour, civility and intellect prevailed during the Oxford-style main event.

Which is not to say things didn’t get heated.

Somehow, no political or cultural topic provokes in Americans the unease that accompanies discussions of race and policy. People don’t whisper in neutral terms when hashing it out over, say, the Iraq War, or healthcare. For all the civil progress and legislative change, racial differences persist insidiously as the core tension in the heart of our republic. No subject could benefit more from a thoughtful airing in such a forum.

The proposition before the house was “It’s time to end affirmative action,” a declaration provocative in both how much it says and how little it elaborates. The debaters, however, addressed racial preference only as it plays out in university admissions. Supporting the proposition were John McWhorter, linguist, author, and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute; Terence J. Pell, president of the Center for Individual rights (CIR); and Joseph C. Phillips, actor and writer. Those opposed were Khin Mai Aung, staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF); Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, law professor at UCLA and Columbia, and executive director of the African American Policy Forum; and Tim Wise, writer and educator. Whether consciously in the spirit of meta-sensitivity or not, IQ2 pulled together an ethnically diverse cast of luminaries, and this conferred a sense of real-world immediacy upon the proceedings.

NPR’s Robert Siegel moderated, and in so doing served as a reminder that to moderate is an active verb. A debate can be called civil not because there’s a lack of fury, but rather there’s an avoidance of the ad hominem and a respect for the structure of the format. The debaters kept the cheap shots to a minimum, and Mr. Seigel moved things along admirably.

Before the debate began the audience voted electronically on the proposition. Results were: 34% for, 44% against, and 22% undecided. A second round of voting was held after the debate.

First up was Joseph Phillips in defense of the proposition. He delivered a personal attack on the idea and practice of racial preference in school admissions. I’ll reproduce a portion of Phillip’s opening remarks so as to convey the effectiveness of his approach.

My wife was at a birthday party with our children...The mothers are grouped and they’re talking about their children, where they go to school and it comes to light, that my oldest boy attends a magnet program, uh, for highly gifted students. Without missing a beat one of the other mothers says, well, you know, now, with this Supreme Court decision they won’t be able to accept, uh, kids in these programs for diversity. Well, my wife was kinder than I would have been. After she picked her jaw up off the floor she explained to the woman, look. He’s not in this program because he checked some box. You can’t get in this program unless you score 99.9 percent on the test. And he’s making straight A’s. In this program. And what is more ironic, is that the woman she was talking to, is a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District. That. . .is the evil of racial preferences. That is the real-life impact of racial preferences. Teachers who lack faith in the academic abilities of their students, and children, who no matter how hard they work, no mater how broad their gifts, are stained with stained with preference.

I was reminded of Clarence Thomas, who said he keeps his Yale Law diploma in his basement with a 15-cent cigar sticker on it because it had been so devalued by affirmative action. “That degree meant one thing for whites and another thing for blacks,” he said.

Phillips’ “Stained with preference” drew some solemn nods in the audience. He would stay the personal ideology course for the rest of the debate, and it was an affective move amid all the enumeration of study results.

Although Phillips has the acting credits to his name, Time Wise was the participant who best grasped the theater aspect of public debate. He spoke with pulpit ferocity and peppered his exhortation with sarcasm. Wise’s fundamental point was that racial preference is not something that originated in the 1960s in order to help people of color. He said:

Because in fact whether we wish to acknowledge it or not and of course we don’t, the entire history of this country is the history of affirmative action for white folks like myself. And unless we begin by discussing that affirmative action, and the impact that it has had we engage in a discussion that is both ethically and practically irresponsible.

I don’t disagree. But as John McWhorter was later to point out, white insults to meritocracy hardly demand black emulation.

Wise delivered something of a low blow when he claimed that the CIR, and by association, Terence Pell “advocates abolishing anti-discrimination law altogether, as it regards the private sector.” (In time, Pell got around to denying the charge, but the point was harped on repeatedly by his opposing team.) The night’s biggest laugh came when Wise said, “It is whites and only whites I would suggest who can get C’s all the way through school, brag about their mediocrity publicly, mangle the English language, and go on to become President of the United States.” A hacky zinger that took all the snap out of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s scripted stab at the same joke later on. Wise eventually got around to the substantive, saying that 200 different studies demonstrate that affirmative action hires “perform equal to, if not better than, their white male counterparts.”

Next up was John McWhorter, who cited research directly countering Wise’s claim. For example, he mentioned a study of black students at 163 law schools. As he put it, “because so very many of them were admitted not according to the qualifications that they submitted . . .over half of them were in the bottom 10 percent of their class.” He also questioned the current idea of diversity as it’s now celebrated. McWhorter found that black students tend to be uncomfortable with the idea that they’re thought of as cultural representatives on university campuses. He also mentioned that research doesn’t demonstrate that diversity has any positive effect on education. I think this has to do quite a bit with a phenomenon that Allan Bloom explored in The Closing of The American Mind. When all differences are accepted as good a priori, the need to investigate such differences disappears. If every college student already knows that everyone different from he or she is wonderful what’s their to learn? Education would benefit from diversity if students weren’t made to understand beforehand that everyone they encounter is necessarily worthy of praise.

Khin Mai Aung jumped right into the diversity issue. She’d witnessed children of different ethnicities in her Brooklyn neighborhood mix with each other more readily than their respective parents. Aung asserted that the children’s readiness to engage was the result of mixed classrooms. I’m not sure that’s true. I think children simply haven’t picked up the ambient prejudices that people eventually internalize in life. I don’t know that forcing kids together in a classroom has anything to do with it. Aung ran through a litany of the benefits of diversity, from education to commercial robustness. The problem here is, and it seemed, frankly, to plague her side of the house, that no one is arguing against diversity. What she failed to do is demonstrate why affirmative action is the best, or even a sound, course of rectification.

Terence Pell narrowed his argument to studies of black science students. In a factual, lapidary dissertation he cited the work of Dartmouth psychologist Rogers Elliot. Elliot found “that the absolute value of a student’s math SAT and high school grades is less important than the relative distance between one’s credentials and those of his or her classmates.” It turns out, according to this data, that black students are much more likely to go forward in scientific graduate programs and careers if they have similar credentials to those of their classmates. This was the most damning study cited all evening. It plumply refutes the supposed benefits of racial selection and demonstrates how affirmative action policies stymie the progress of the very students intended as beneficiaries.

“Hi. I’m Kim and I’m a beneficiary of affirmative action,” began Kimberlé Crenshaw. She, like her teammates, focused on the historical and present-day conditions that put Americans of color at a disadvantage. Once again, no one there disputed that institutionalized prejudice is a fact of American culture. Crenshaw did, however, raise a point so hidden in plain site as to warrant its own discussion. “White women are the single largest group to benefit from these [affirmative action] programs.” How unfortunate it is that the question of affirmative action is so tightly linked to issues of race. Crenshaw makes it clear that we need to reframe some of the questions around this issue.

Mr. Siegel asked the debaters questions throughout the evening, and debaters put questions to each other after opening statements. Because this took place in Manhattan and not amid the bucolic lawns of Oxford there was some unplanned audience involvement, and things got particularly testy when Phillips was challenged on his sense of Colin Powell’s take on affirmative action. It seems, based on this that Phillips characterized Powell’s views as more anti-affirmative action than they actually are.

McWhorter was the only debater to raise the issue of standards within black communities, and it’s a critical one. He mentioned the “tendency among black teens to say it is white to do well in school.” This is characteristic of what McWhorter calls, in his book Winning The Race, Beyond The Crisis in Black America, "therapeutic alienation". He feels addressing this directly is more helpful than is lowering the expectations of black students. He also offered a bold take on the current meaning of the word segregation. McWhorter feels the word has come to imply “that the only way black people can really excel is if white people are around.”

The random well-meaning American assumes through a kind of simple analysis that affirmative action levels the playing field. Yet prodigious studies on the topic demonstrate credibly that the policies, on average, handicap the students in these programs. In his closing statement, Terence Pell suggested, “the challenges to equality don’t come from the political extremes. They come from the political middle.” The soft menace of the well-meaning is not so soft. While race-preferential schools continue to award 15-cent diplomas, the crucial issues affecting black communities are ignored.

John McWhorter summed up the weakness of the against team’s arguments in his closing statement.

There is evidence pro and con for this, and I don’t see on the other side any engagement with the con . . .To be honest, I’ve studied their stuff. I know the pro. There are other arguments written by cogent people, many of them not conservatives, these people don’t see those arguments as worthy of engagement. There case, therefore, is incomplete. I think you should vote for us.

And yet, here are the end vote results. 39% for, 55% against, and 6% undecided. A clear victory for the against folks. But also an impressive feat for Intelligence Squared: 16% of the original undecided had made up their minds. I won’t fret about the results. After all, the minority is a proud place in which to find oneself.