Happy Opposites Day
Third-graders have long known of "Opposites Day,"
the fictional day once a year when everything means its opposite. But it took
the deeper wisdom of adults to use this notion as a way of ending the bilious
debate over affirmative action. Three big states--Florida, Texas, and
California--have implemented a solution that has been heralded by conservatives
and liberals, by Ward Connerly and the New York Times . The key to
agreement over affirmative action, it turns out, is for everyone to say the
opposite of what they mean.
In California, Connerly led the successful
referendum campaign against affirmative action. Govs. Jeb Bush of Florida and
George W. Bush of Texas are Republicans who have campaigned against minority
preferences. All three states now forbid traditional affirmative action in
admissions to state universities. Instead, they use versions of what I'll call
a "high-school quota" plan. Texas guarantees admission to any senior graduating
in the top 10 percent of his or her high-school class. In Florida, it's anyone
graduating in the top 20 percent. In California, it's the top 4 percent.
The New York
Times explains that this is "a sensible way to increase minority
enrollments without relying on a strategy that takes race into account."
Guaranteed admission has restored minority enrollments at Texas' Austin campus,
for example, to levels not seen since 1996, when a federal court struck down
the state's affirmative action program. As , this whole scheme only works
because, nearly half a century after Brown vs. Board of Education ,
America's high schools are still severely segregated. If high schools were
integrated, taking the top 10 percent from each high school would produce the
same racial mix as taking the top 10 percent of state high-school graduates as
a whole. Since most blacks attend overwhelmingly black high schools, the result
is much closer to that of taking the top 10 percent of each race.
It's doubly crazy to argue on any day besides Opposites Day
that the high-school quota system has nothing to do with race. First, the
purpose is explicitly racial. The whole point is to increase minority
enrollment. That is why it was invented, and that is why the Bush brothers brag
about its success. Second, the mechanism--piggybacking on a racially skewed
arrangement (high schools)--would never pass muster with liberals or
conservatives not desperately eager to look the other way.
Most of the civil rights
litigation of the past few decades, in fact, is about this kind of piggybacking
discrimination rather than the explicit kind. When do traditional job
qualifications, such as a test or membership in a guild, amount to racial
discrimination? That sort of thing. You only have to imagine a state policy
applying the high-school quota system to, say, basketball scholarships--and
explicitly being praised by state officials as a way to increase the number of
white basketball players--to realize how empty the claims are that this
arrangement avoids the alleged evil of racial preference.
Conservatives have always claimed to want admissions
decisions based solely on so-called "merit-based" criteria such as SAT scores.
They think it immoral to give college places to minority students who wouldn't
be admitted under a merit-based policy, since this means taking away those
places from white students with higher grades and SATs. But admitting black
students who wouldn't be admitted under a merit-based policy is precisely what
high-school quotas do. Texas had a fully "merit"-based admissions policy
between 1996 and 1998. Sadly, very few minorities were admitted. Along came
high-school quotas and minority admissions returned to pre-1996 levels. Meaning
that the number of whites who were denied places they deserved on "merit" also
returned to the same level anti-preference conservatives had been complaining
about for 20 years.
Defenders of high-school
quotas might argue that I'm missing the point. That this system, unlike
traditional minority preferences, judges each student's performance in context.
It compares achievements with the environment in which they were achieved.
Moreover, it ensures that students from all backgrounds have an equal bite of
the apple. All are reasonable arguments. But weren't these the arguments for
affirmative action in the first place? That is, one idea behind affirmative
action was always that "merit" must be judged relative to environment, so as to
combat persistent historical inequalities.
Put differently, conservatives such as Bush were goaded
into action by the obvious unfairness of a state-subsidized university system
that more or less denies access to blacks and Hispanics. Naturally enough,
conservatives dare not make this dangerous idea too explicit. They cannot
afford to admit that they don't really want the results they fought for during
the 21 years since University of California Regents vs. Bakke . But at
heart, I suspect a large percentage of conservatives share the liberals'
discomfort with an all-white educational system paid for by the state. In other
words, George Bush and his supporters aren't unaware of what they're doing,
namely fighting--gasp!--for racial justice. They just can't admit it.
So liberals and conservatives agree to pretend that
affirmative action is dead, and that this marvelous new discovery--high-school
quotas--doesn't amount to the same thing. And they lived happily ever after.
Happy Opposites Day.
