Cobb: One Level Closer

June 25, 2003

One Level Closer

At this point my understanding of the SC decision on Affirmative Action is fairly straightforward. The Court likes 'individualized' decisions which take race into account, as exemplified by the U of M's Law School admissions process, but strikes down more numerically oriented processes which automatically fix some numerical value to racial identity in a preferential manner. This was the point system used by the undergraduate school.

My reaction is mixed. The most important aspect of the decisions was that they didn't break Bakke which essentially said, no quotas but race can be taken into account. Although I like the principle of not weighing race by numbers, I'm a numerical kind of guy.

One of the old standards for Affirmative Action was 'community representation' which was rather numerical but squishy. One of the reasons I mentioned Caspar, Wyoming was to express the common sense notion that if there are not 8% blacks at the local college there nobody really expects a loud complaint. But if there were not 8% blacks at Emory University in Atlanta, GA people would rightly smell a rat. I always liked the idea of the institution as a semi-permeable membrane. The inside should more or less resemble the outside, not be a fortress, even a fortress of meritocracy. While the rule for inclusion cannot be mathematical, people are still going to count noses and they are still going to compare the inside with the outside.

When it comes to university, I like the idea of 'critical mass' much more than I do 'diversity', but I do so strictly within the limits of the cultural value of a mixed race campus. I don't believe that any Supreme Court ruling should have been necessary in that regard and that universities should have been able to work within Bakke indefinitely. I acknowledge the political axe of 'colorblindness' as well as those who see any racial discrimination as racist regardless of intent to exclude. They forced the issue.

My prime objective in supporting Affirmative Action, aside from defending the political rights of African Americans to demand any concession they damn well please after bearing the burdens they have for this nation, is to reinforce the idea of racial integration as a practical matter. In that context, there is very little that I expect from integration at the college level. Integration is much more important in housing and in work, but I'll take it where I can get it. Nevertheless at college it is more important at the undergraduate level than at the level of professional schools. So the failure of the point system is a disappointment for me.

For the same reasons I think 'diversity' at university is squishy, clumsy and sometimes dead wrong, I think a point system is good and the idea of undergraduate meritocracy highly suspect. That is to say, I find the baked-in essentiality of racial identity in 18 year old freshmen to be fairly lacking in substance. People go to college to learn, to be molded and shaped. Certainly people bring a fair amount of 'baggage / authentical goodness' to the table as freshmen, but how seriously are we to take this? How many college freshmen have a good sense of the literature of their ethnicity and understand squarely their place within it? That seems to me to be something that becomes more defined at college, not something fixed before and unchanging during college. Thus the premise of diversity, that these essential qualities must be deliberately managed and finessed to deliver a finer outcome rings hollow for college. This is where the reasoning of diversity as a justification for Affirmative Action has gone awry. It has forced black students to actively represent something racial, rather than just acknowledge the general disadvantages attending black communities despite the strength of those students' ambitions.

It's important for me to say that I see race at the undergraduate level as a proxy for the economic and educational deprivations latent in the legacy of Jim Crow. It's not that college students are these racially charged ions which need the strong force of diversity to bind them into cohesive molecules of society. Rather that their achievements are all tainted by the structural advantages and disadvantages of separate and unequal neighborhoods. If one substituted zipcodes for race and awarded points that would be just fine with me.

It is precisely for that reason that I am not particularly irked at a point system such as U of M's now illegal method. I think one can be 20 points of 'athlete' and that counts as much as 20 points of 'asian' or 20 points of 'legacy' at the age of 18. That these are all positive discriminations gives these characteristics the benefit of a doubt. Fine. But now that the automatic granting of points is no good I am just as well suited to accept an essay on any such topic (pick two from "My Ethnicity", "My Athleticism", "My Religion", "My Dad's Old Boy Network"..etc) and assign points to the quality of the essay. There's nothing particularly mechanized about that.

But, that still won't stop people from counting noses. Which means in the end, people will still fret and sue if the college seems too black. Of course next time they will start investigating the essays and we Americans will really be showing our collective ass.

I still stand to say that America is standing at a stilted racial equilibrium. Integration is not complete. The semi-permeable membranes of America's institutions are still not balancing their supply of opportunity with the demand by those on the outside. This decision against point systems, while strictly sensible, has slowed down the process at the undergraduate level in one of the few places integration still takes place. I would have rather seen it go the other way, especially considering the numerical nature of the GRE, GMAT etc and the premise of professional certification. (And the certification arguments on meritocracy are fascinating in their own right). There are many reasons for that chief among them is that I would prefer the kind of society that depends far less on exceptional racial tokens, and more on neighbors. Be that as it may, I can abide the decisions as I see them. Of course, I will look closer again.

Posted by mbowen at June 25, 2003 10:11 PM

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