No other nation has a racial mixture quite like the United States. It provides a continuous source of faction and friction, the inevitable result of past subjugation and the equally inevitable demands by the subjugated for their rights.
America is so concerned with race that decision-makers routinely use the laudable goal of racial equality to justify employing unequal criteria to evaluate everything from job hiring to college admissions to construction bids. They call this program of unequal treatment “affirmative action.”
Affirmative action constitutes American society’s most significant attempt to alleviate four centuries of slavery, segregation, lynching, poll taxes, brutal child murders, rape and fear perpetrated on behalf of a morally indefensible system of racial supremacy.
Affirmative action began in the 1960s and gained momentum throughout the rest of the 20th century until it reached today’s level of quiet acceptance.
The term itself bears some evaluation. It sounds great. Not only does it imply action, but it includes the positive-sounding word “affirmative.” Of course, the term “affirmative action” gives no hint of what it actually means, so let’s call it what it is: Race-based preferences.
Certainly, blacks could still use some help from society. On average, black Americans have dramatically lower incomes and lower levels of educational attainment, home ownership and employment than society at large, according to federal statistics. They also have higher rates of teen pregnancy, violent crime victimization, HIV infection and a lower life expectancy.
However, the black students who gain admission to good colleges aren’t the ones affected by the poverty that generates the above statistics. This is what John McWhorter, a black professor at the University of California at Berkeley, called the ” … deathless lie: That most black students come from disadvantaged circumstances.” Most black students at good colleges, in fact, come from solidly middle-class backgrounds.
As McWhorter wrote in The American Enterprise magazine, in the last year that Berkeley employed race-based admissions preferences, more than 65 percent of the students came from households earning at least $40,000 per year. Similarly, a 1989 study found that among 28 selective universities, only 14 percent of the black students came from households earning $22,000 per year or less. Clearly, race-based preferences aren’t helping poor blacks.
Nothing can make up for what black Americans went through, and we should stop trying to erase the memory of their oppression by helping people who never suffered from it. No student on campus today won their freedom through the Emancipation Proclamation or suffered the humiliation of poll taxes and the three-fifths compromise.
While racism has faded dramatically from the public and private scene, the class structure has only strengthened. In 1973, the wealthiest 20 percent of households accounted for 44 percent of total U.S. income, according to The Associated Press and U.S. Census Bureau. In 2002, their share rose to 50 percent, while the poorest 20 percent of American households lost ground.
President Bush’s policies have further solidified America’s class structure. His signature tax cuts, especially the elimination of the estate tax, have overwhelmingly favored the wealthiest Americans. While the wealthy enjoy their tax cuts, the poor struggle with high unemployment, and the administration does nothing to help the millions of poor Americans who lack health insurance. Given the historical trend, one can expect income inequality, and other measures of the class gap to continue to worsen.
The class gap deeply marks higher education, which should act as a leveling influence but more often perpetuates familial privileges. This is a problem of class, not race, and race-based preferences are a poor tool to address it. A white kid who grows up in an Albany trailer park has drastically less hope of getting a good education than a black kid from upper-class Lake Oswego. It’s time to stop pretending that the color of one’s skin is the primary barrier to getting a quality education; it’s money.
The University, the federal government and especially the state legislature need to do more to help poor students break out of their circumstances. Race-based preferences aren’t getting the job done.
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