Vision Circle

A Closer Look

(reprinted from Cobb)

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.

Logic vs Sentiment

Much is being made of Sandra Day O'Connor's swing vote upholding the U of M's Law School admissions policy. What's irking me is probably irking you as well. That is, the suggestion that there is no logic in her decision. Then people (like Kinsley and Sullivan) rant on illogically to 'prove' their points.

I've said a few things on the subject here. But over here would be a good place to observe things that [white] conservatives are supposed to think about the way things have been adjudicated.

Bakke redux

I saw the following quote in reference to the SCOTUS ruling today on Affirmative Action in college admissions:

"The Constitution protects the rights of individuals, not racial groups,"

This is the common conservative interpretation.

It's wrong.

Check out the 13th Amendment.

Effective Resonance

Colorblindness cripples. How much it does so becomes apparent when its principles are applied without nuance. The plaintiffs who argued their case before the Supreme Court this week sounded to me to be of the persuasion that there should absolutely be no regard to color. This is a problem.

I'm not close enough to the law to understand what the Constitution directs historically with regard to its ability to percieve race but I do have a principle I think which ought to be applied. I call the idea 'effective resonance'.

The reasoning behind it has to do with the notion that all racist acts are not equal either in intent or effect. The state does have a compelling interest in insuring that society does not exclude groups but I don't see that it is useful in policing all instances of racist discriminations. For this reason I have come up with three classes of racist offense. These of course are informal and don't stand up to legalistic definitions but you should get the picture:

Class Three - Background Noise

This will include all such insults, slights and disrespect as is generally expected to be found everywhere in this nation. Examples include but are not limited to being ignored by cabbies, flying confederate flags, nazi propaganda, being mistaken for the help, being shown costume jewelry, being asked one's opinion of, or to account for the opinions of the Fungibles, and most nigger calls.

Class Two - Political Intransigence


Class Two racism involves denials of public accomodation or private standing which are not criminal, yet grossly unfair and unjust. Such acts would include imposition of glass cielings, racial profiling, white flight, medical misdiagnosis, educational tracking, false arrest, false imprisonment, racist vois dire, racist jury nullification, denials of service with plausible deniability, any institutional individual or institutional racism which must be tried in civil courts and all such active bigotry one associates with hate groups which fall short of incitement.

Class One - Crime


Theft, criminal defamation, cross burnings (now), hate crimes, murder, rape & all that stuff for which America has never made any extraordinary effort to repair.

The matter of Effective Resonance adds a second dimension to this classification. I consider it an important context because it takes into account the ability of a group to withstand the inevitable turmoil of ethnic, religious or racial animus. I believe this to be something that changes over time and that the law should be sensitive to that robustness or lack thereof.

Let us consider several well known examples from the not too distant past. In the first case consider the significance of the restrictions place against blacks from sitting in the front of the bus. In the course of human events, this is little more than humiliating. And yet in the case of Rosa Parks, the willingness to defy this racist rule was quite courageous. That is because at the time such rules exemplified the extraordinary control whites had over blacks.

One could hardly imagine it necessary today to escort black highschool children into a white school with federal troops. Yet this precaution, dare I say this remedy, was entirely appropriate for the integration of Little Rock highschool 2 generations ago.

What has changed greatly since those days is the power of black American individuals to move freely in society. This derives not soley from the change in the law, but because of the collective power of the group to work around such difficulties. Today the law is fairer and the power of individual blacks to absorb such pains as sitting in the back of the bus or not accept police escorts is greater.

What I am suggesting is that for the same reasons Class Three racist offenses have not been outlawed and criminalized is not because they are not racist, but because despite the fact that they are racist and offensive black mobility in society is not restricted inordinately. Blacks as a group and those interested in black success is too strong.

On the other hand, could we say the same thing for Arabs and Muslims in post 9/11 America? No. Today they are more vulnerable.

When we look at racial discriminations we should consider the robustness of the context of the group in question as well as the severity of the act itself. This is an important distinction that many critics of Affirmative Action make when they say it is not as necessary today as it was 20 years ago. Despite the fact that individual blacks may be just as underprivileged today as the very first Affirmative Action beneficiaries does nothing to diminsh its stigma today. One cannot escape the fact that individuals are judged in the context of the benefit to their group, in fact the entire question of Affirmative Action is one of social justice. Is America made weaker or stronger because of it?

If the legitimacy of positive discriminations for individuals of a group owes something to the status of that group, likewise the severity with which we judge negative discriminations should be considered in light of the status of the group to which the discriminated individual belongs. The aim after all is to keep all groups in the mainstream of American life with special regard to their race, gender and creed.

Loury Weighs In

Glenn Loury has opined on Affirmative Action in an editorial series in the NYT. The Supreme Court hears the Michigan case next Tuesday. He makes a very common sense point which should be obvious; colorblindness is not. Rather, colorblindness is a kind of self-congratulatory denial.

Despite its superficial appeal, colorblindness is a false ideal. No understanding of the American social order that ignores racial categories is possible, because these socially constructed categories are embedded in the consciousness of all of us. Because we use race to articulate our self-understandings, we must sometimes be mindful of race as we conduct our public affairs.

If indeed one suggests that it is morally superior to be colorblind, it begs the question, why be colorblind? The inevitable answer is that seeing race is, in itself, considered a poisoned skill. But is it? If one recognizes a difference, is that recognition automatically prejudicial? I have often asked the question of whitefolks who considered themselves to be colorblind, whether or not they also consider themselves white. Almost all of them did. How does one reconcile the two facts? How can you be a color and know that has meaning to yourself and yet deny that others might attach meaning as well? One question I neglected to ask, but points towards the same dilemma is whether or not whitefolks consider their colorblindness to be exactly the same of that of others.

Loury is wise to put such existential questions at the heart of the debate on Affirmative Action.

Taking race into account, in university admissions or in other aspects of life, does not require abandoning a commitment to individualism. One can hold that race is irrelevant to a person's moral worth — that people, not groups, are the bearers of rights — and still affirm that to deal effectively with individuals, we must consider the categories of thought in which they understand themselves.