Well-meaning social policy based on a faulty premise will backfire.
Here’s the faulty premise: Given equal opportunity, SIRE (Self-Identified Race/Ethnic) groups will perform about the same. Fisher v U Texas Austin is illustrative of the problem that institutions (and businesses) face if they do not use race as a stand-alone criterion. At every level of opportunity–[family income or parental education, for example](Standardized Tests: The Interpretation of Racial and Ethnic Gaps 3)–performance differences among SIRE groups are large and persistent, and always with the same rank order. Poor whites (and asians) will outperform poor blacks in quantitative disciplines by enormous margins, and the same will hold true for wealthy SIRE groups.*
Here’s the backfire: When “race” is removed as a stand-alone criterion, the best black candidates are lost if they came from relatively privileged backgrounds. And since higher ability correlates with income, what happens with the loss of a “race-alone” criterion is that the most qualified black candidates (who come from the most privileged backgrounds) would not be granted admission because they would be outperformed by whites and asians from the same socioeconomic peer group.
In two AA SDMB threads here and here,most of the discussion is based on a default assumption that University race-based AA is needed to include disadvantaged (black and hispanic) students. But this is not the problem Universities face. U of T Austin can get around that issue with its Top 8% rule.
The problem Universities face is that they need to ignore socioeconomic status in order to be assured of getting the top tier black candidates. If their best black candidates come from privileged backgrounds, a University needs to be able to accept them over poverty-stricken white and asian candidates, and the only way to do this is to ignore all factors except race. That is, race alone becomes a “proficiency” test which, if passed, garners admission.
For a number of years I sat on a Medical School Admissions Committee, and the mechanism by which we made sure we extended opportunity to black candidates was to consider their applications entirely separate from all others. If we wanted (and we did) to have a SIRE-diverse class, we had to consider race as a stand-alone criterion. How else to handle the markedly lower scores of blacks who had had equivalent educational opportunity for the prior four years? How else to offer admission to a black professional’s daughter who, although her scores and grades might be marginal compared with white or asian peers, might still be able to become a decent physician with some extra help?
I am concerned that the default assumption that all SIRE groups will perform equally when exposed to the same level of opportunity will slowly drive our society back to one which is generally tiered the way it always has been. When the default assumption is that all SIRE groups have about the same basic potential, the default expectation is that equalizing opportunity will smooth out SIRE-based tiering. This is as faulty a premise in academics as it would be for the NBA. The current attacks on race-based AA use this faulty premise to argue against the only remedy for SIRE-based tiering: race as a stand-alone criterion for admission (or job) consideration.
No one wants to go public at the SCOTUS (or any other) level with any data showing that disparate outcomes remain even when opportunity is normalized. Anyone doing so would be sound-bit into an unemployed “racist” the following day. Yet we have found ways to include women as firefighters without falling apart or demonizing them. We are made differently; as groups we have access to different gene pools, and as along as we insist on self-describing into the current SIRE groups, average outcomes will reflect those differences. Big deal.
We should leave the race-baiting where it usually resides: the lowest intellectual tiers of all groups. If we want to build a better society, we should make accommodations for all and race-based affirmative action policies are the only way to prevent tiering of society into SIRE-based haves and have-nots.
*For those not inclined to click through links to get to the pithy summary:
“Black children from the wealthiest families have mean SAT scores lower than white children from families below the poverty line.
Black children of parents with graduate degrees have lower SAT scores than white children of parents with a high-school diploma or less.”
), it does correlate reasonably well with access to whatever opportunity it is that money buys. After 1996 the SAT College Board stopped disaggregating this sort of data. That was probably a wise choice; they were already in hot water about whether or not their test was hurting minority candidates, and adding data points which further hurt them was probably not very helpful to their future.