The Injustice of Affirmative Action

Affirmative Action has been extremely valuable for Blacks, women and other so-called minorities.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, "The court-imposed desegregation agreement that governs San Francisco schools limits each ethnic group to no more than 40 percent of student enrollment...." However, at San Francisco's prestigious Lowell High, Chinese Americans comprised 42.9 percent of Lowell's 2,800 students, thereby violating court-ordered "desegregation". Even then, "[b]ecause so many Chinese American students qualify for enrollment at Lowell, dozens are turned away so that less-qualified students of other ethnicities may enroll."

This policy has not only unfairly excluded many Chinese students; it has also destroyed inter-racial friendships. Take the case of Karen who is white, and Jenny who is Chinese. Both girls were friends until Karen was admitted into Lowell in preference to Jenny who had better grades. "She found out I got into Lowell, and she really got mad," said Karen. "We were kind of close last year. Now I feel there's this, like, gap between us. I don't talk to her any more, and she doesn't call me."

Patrick, another Chinese student rejected from Lowell, was turned away from three other high schools as well, not because his grades were poor, but again because the other high schools also had "too many" Chinese Americans. "We've worked so hard to get good grades, and now we can't go to a decent academic high school that is safe and will prepare us for a four-year university," his mother said. "Patrick told me, 'If only I weren't Chinese I could get in.' It broke my heart."

As Ayn Rand observes: "If a young man is barred from a school . . . because the quota for his particular race has been filled, he is barred by reason of his race. Telling him that those admitted are his 'representatives,' is adding insult to injury. To demand such quotas in the name of fighting racial discrimination, is an obscene mockery. . . . The quota doctrine assumes that all members of a given physiological group are identical and interchangeable -- not merely in the eyes of other people, but in their own eyes and minds. Assuming a total merging of the self with the group, the doctrine holds that it makes no difference to a man whether he or his 'representative' is admitted to a school. . . .

It did make a difference, however, to parents representing more than 5,500 Chinese American students who have been denied admission to the schools of their choice because of race. The parents sued San Francisco schools in a class-action lawsuit in federal court, claiming that what passes for "desegregation" actually amounts to "state-sponsored segregation". Indeed, according to Title IV, Section 401 (b) of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

"Desegregation" means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but "desegregation" shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance. [Emphasis added]

Far from promoting desegregation, the school quotas at Lowell High discriminate against Chinese students by requiring them to score higher on admissions tests than students of other ethnic groups. Although the test requirements have recently been adjusted downward in response to pressure from Chinese parents, the requirements are still discriminatory. Whereas blacks and Latinos need score only 53 points to gain admission to Lowell High, and whites, only 58; Chinese students must score 62 out of a possible 69. The parents claimed in their suit that such racial discrimination violates their rights to equal protection under the 14th Amendment. This case is all too reminiscent of Brown Versus Board of Education in which racial discrimination was also contested under the 14th Amendment. The difference is that the victims in Topeka, Kansas in 1954 were African Americans, whereas the victims in San Francisco, California in 1997 are Chinese Americans.

Unfortunately, the judge who heard the parents' case, U.S. District Court Judge William Orrick, is the same judge who signed the original consent decree in 1983 requiring race-based admissions. So it is not surprising that he would reject the parents' petition, and reaffirm his original ruling. A judge who is not color blind cannot be expected to wear the blindfold of justice.

Amy Chang of the Asian American Legal Foundation responded to Judge Orrick's decision as follows: "The San Francisco school district, the state, and the NAACP have put themselves in the same position as George Wallace in the early 1960s -- they are saying quotas then, quotas now, and quotas forever. The Chinese American community is fighting for the right of all children to attend school free of racial discrimination. We see Judge Orrick's action yesterday as the continuation of the same forms of discrimination suffered by Chinese and other Asian immigrants a hundred years ago."

Since we have now come full circle from our racist past, let us recall the words of Justice John Harlan, which are as telling today against the new racism as they were in 1904 against the old-fashioned kind. In dissenting from a Supreme Court decision, Harlan asks: "Have we become so inoculated with the prejudice of race that an American government, professedly based on the principles of freedom, and charged with the protection of all citizens alike, can make distinctions between such citizens in the matter of their voluntary meeting for innocent purposes simply because of their respective
races?"

If it can -- if the government can mandate racial quotas in schools -- then what is to stop it from mandating housing quotas in neighborhoods? If parents can be forced to bus their children to other parts of the city for the sake of racial balance, then what argument can there be against the forced resettlement of families to different neighborhoods to achieve the same ethnocratic goal? What claim can there be against the state dictating every aspect of its citizens' lives -- sacrificing every freedom they ever had -- in homage to affirmative action and ethnic diversity?! Indeed, the ominous practice of "affirmative marketing" -- whereby realtors have been forced to market properties exclusively to whites in black neighborhoods -- is making this scenario a virtual reality. In 1988 when realtors in Chicago refused to market properties in a black neighborhood exclusively to whites, they were sued by the South Suburban Housing Center and lost. Under the so-called Fair Housing Act -- the modern-day equivalent of the Jim Crow laws -- realtors can be prosecuted for refusing to discriminate against blacks.

And, lest it be thought that affirmative action is beneficial to blacks in other respects, the policy carries with it the unfortunate stigma that its beneficiaries are unqualified window dressing. Shelby Steele elaborates: "In any workplace, racial preferences will always create two-tiered populations composed of preferreds and unpreferreds. This division makes automatic a perception of enhanced competence for the unpreferreds and of questionable competence for the preferreds -- the former earned his way, even though others were given preference, while the latter made it by color as much as by competence. Racial preferences implicitly mark whites with an exaggerated superiority just as they mark blacks with an exaggerated inferiority. They not only reinforce America's oldest racial myth but, for blacks, they have the effect of stigmatizing the already stigmatized." (The Content of Our Character, St. Martin's Press, New York, p. 121.

In other words, to impose affirmative action on private employers not only discriminates against whites and Asians, but also patronizes blacks, because it suggests that a black person can only succeed if he is given a job he does not deserve and could not have earned in competition with other qualified applicants. Employment that is openly racist tarnishes the reputation of its beneficiaries, for even if they were the best qualified and would have been hired anyway, their success is less a reflection of their qualifications than of their pigmentation.

Consider the quota system imposed upon the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1989. In a city 70 percent black, Detroit's symphony orchestra was overwhelmingly white. Therefore, black legislators threatened to withhold $1.3 million in state funding and to picket concerts unless more black musicians were hired by the orchestra. It was not that the underrepresentation of black musicians was due to any form of racial bias, as auditions had for years been held "blind", meaning that musicians would audition behind a screen to eliminate any possibility of prejudice. Nevertheless, the orchestra was pressured by black legislators into abandoning this race-neutral policy in favor of one in which black musicians would be hired strictly on the basis of race without any audition whatsoever.

Ironically, it was not the white musicians who were most outraged by this policy of reverse racism, but black musicians who had been hired by orchestras across the country purely on the basis of talent. In fact, two black musicians have since refused to play for the Detroit Symphony, because they recognized that their reputations would be tainted by its affirmative action policy. The black conductor of the Oregon Symphony also refused to work for the Detroit Symphony, stating: "[Y]ou fight for years to make race irrelevant, and now they are making race an issue".

Terry Eastland reports on a Hispanic student who scored high enough to be admitted to the University of Texas School of Law under the normal standards set for white applicants. However, because the school allowed minorities to be admitted with lower scores, the student said that he felt he needed a shirt indicating that he made it on his own, so people would know that his achievement was genuine.

A black medical student of my acquaintance expressed similar sentiments. This young man, who was a straight-A student, could have gained admission into U.C. San Francisco's School of Medicine in the absence of affirmative action. Yet, because of the school's preferential admissions policy, he knew that people would think that his admission was due to racial preference, and would not respect him for having earned his way into medical school. Needless to say, affirmative action was, for him, a liability rather than an asset.

In his book Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, Stephen Carter, a black professor at Yale Law School, says that he is forced to live in a box with a label that reads: "WARNING! AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BABY! DO NOT ASSUME THAT THIS INDIVIDUAL IS QUALIFIED!"

But even if there were no stigma attached to affirmative action, the policy would still be against the interests of its alleged beneficiaries, because it prohibits the best workers from being hired, a policy which translates into reduced productivity in the workplace and a lower standard of living. The injustice of racial discrimination has economic spillover effects that are harmful even to those who supposedly benefit from it.

As if that weren't bad enough, the policy is a blatant exercise in hypocrisy, as it violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in which Section 703 (a) states:

"It shall be an unlawful employment practice for any employer: (1) to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex or national origin . . . ."

Finally, affirmative action violates individual rights, the right of an employer to hire the best person for the job regardless of the applicant's race, ethnicity or gender, as well as the right of the applicant to work for him.

Human beings are not mere pawns of governmental social policy, but are autonomous moral agents who have the right to determine their own lives and actions. The much vaunted right of self-determination so frequently invoked on behalf of sovereign states does not in fact reside in the will of the majority or in the mandates of civil authority, but rather in the choices of each individual human being. It is the proper function of government to protect that right, not usurp it in pursuit of its own social agendas. Just as we have become racists in our quest to redress racism, so our support for "civil rights" has led us to betray the most important civil right of all: self-ownership and its corollary, freedom of choice.