by Shelby Steele
Do you agree or disagree with this article?
That, I think, is the crux of the argument, and really the crux of the argument for affirmative action in general. Its advocates, like the writer of the first op-ed, presumes that any inequality of outcome must be a systemic flaw, and ignores the possibility that different groups have different preferences or abilities. This is flawed logic and the system is flawed as a result.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. The EEOC’s “four-fifths rule” says:
So yeah, inequality of outcome is presumed to mean discrimination. What’s worse is that there’s no accounting for sample size, it’s a strict ratio, not a standard deviation calculation. So if you have a tiny class, you’re going to run a much bigger chance of running up against that rule, thanks to the affirmative action pushers’ statistical illiteracy.
Fun fact: the SAT, and every AP test, fails the four-fifths rule. So if you’ve taken those tests, the EEOC implies you’ve participated in a discriminatory exercise.
I also like Steele’s point on how institutions seem much more interested in performing affirmative action than individuals are. To some extent this might be because of the cognitive biases of the academic elite, but it is also convenient for such stakeholders to have a clear numerical goal to shoot for, and congratulate themselves over.
The article makes several good points, but it starts off from a faulty premise. First, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been women (white women specifically). I find in particularly frustrating, and enlightening when people only focus on blacks when affirmative action programs are discussed. It’s enlightening because it betrays either historical ignorance, or a bias of some kind.
Second, I think it’s a little premature to expect an entire group of people who have been systematically discriminated against in the ways we have to preform as well across the board as groups who do not share that history. My uncle went to segregated schools in the south as a kid. Many states effectively disenfranchised Blacks well into the 1960’s. De facto segregation has been the norm since then, as have pernicious policies that have a racially disparate impact. Progress will not come easily, it will not come all at once, and will not come if we don’t make it a national priority.
One of the two main problems is that most in our society are increasingly committed to the idea that you get what you deserve, and that you are solely responsible for your lot in life. While I can appreciate how such an outlook feels right, a growing body of research suggests that external factors shape and limit our success far more than our actions do. IMO, that’s a large reason why the black community continues to lag so far behind.
The article also fails to mention that there are plenty of people attempting to address black underdevelopment. People like Geoffrey Canada and President Obama are two examples of people who worked to help.
Why don’t you just say what you mean. The notion that black prefer to be poor, undereducated, and looked down upon is laughable. What you seem to be hinting at (and please correct me if I’m wrong) is that we’re genetically inferior. This is something that comes up in damn near everyone of these threads. Someone usually tries disarm the audience with some illogical comment about the dominance of Black athletes, then eventually get around to stating their real point- that blacks are less intelligent, or less human, than everyone else. When called on their baseless statements, they obfuscate or express faith in the belief that time, and genetic testing will eventually prove them right.
Which gets to the second problem. Faith. It has simply been accepted as a matter of faith that black people are intellectually inferior, lazy, and incapable of competing with the rest of society. People have explicitly stated it on this board, just as their forebearers, who practiced more overt discrimination based, did. It’s a pervasive notion that, by itself, can and will continue to retard the progress of blacks in this county. While there is certainly a lot of blame that should be placed on the individual for logical and practical reasons, I think we continually discount and underestimate how much our behavior affects others.
The other religion that most of us prescribe to is this notion that we can measure amorphous things like intelligence, talent, and skills with such precision. While most of us can confidently state that one person is smarter, or more talented than another, it’s a fool’s errand to think you can state that one is 3.2% smarter, and therefore will be a better doctor 10 years from now. However, our society is increasingly dependent on such proclamations. We have a society ruled by numbers, and other surrogate endpoints that don’t really address the heart of the issues being investigated. Many of these obstacles are merely a justification for rationing a scarce commodity as opposed to a valid measurement of talent or competency. The problem is that we view them as the latter, and think that entitled to things because we are “better” than someone else.
That’s part of what happened in the New Haven firefighter case. They gave a test, which was later found to have more bias than other “appropriate” tests, that didn’t really seem to help decision makers discern who would be a better supervisor.
The “problem” is that these two large cohorts do not have the same average potential–the same genetic substrate. (Nor do many other groups) And therefore the outcomes are never going to be equalized simply through equal opportunity. We won’t see the NBA dominated by whites and the STEM PhDs dominated by blacks. Period.
I see no chance this truth will be accepted, except tacitly. It is simply anathema to admit it publicly, and it is contrary to our innate altruism and desire for fairness. And so assorted alternate explanations will continue for some time…perhaps until elucidation of the genome renders the opposing viewpoint moot.
When we can come to a place where we admit this truth, we can begin actually addressing unequal outcomes so that we can get to a just, diverse and well-represented society.
AA is not a distraction; race-based AA is the only mechanism by which we will get to diverse representation until intermarriage among all cohorts becomes so much the norm that the gene pool differences are normalized. It is for this reason I support race-based AA. For the immediate future it’s more important to have reasonable diversity wherever possible than some sort of absolute “fairness.” Being born to a set of genes is not an accomplishment–it’s the luck of the draw. As such, it’s reasonable to try and normalize disadvantages which are not the fault of the individual.
What happened in the New Haven case is that, once again (for the x-thousandth time) cohorts given the exact same opportunity had disparate outcomes based on racial groupings. The lesson is not whether or not the test was testing for the correct thing, but whether or not two cohorts with the same opportunity had disparate results. No racial bias was presented other than the backward conclusion that such bias must have existed because the outcome was so skewed.
Now you may assert that this has nothing to do with raw, immutable, maximum potential. I assert that similar proof cases in thousands upon thousands upon thousands of exam sets come up with the same general rank order, and we are simply loathe to admit the obvious. But I recognize the sensitivity of this assertion and I apologize in advance for offending you with it.
Take a section of black culture that is failing. Measure stuff like divorce rate, how many kids they have, the importance they place on education, work, honesty, staying away from drugs and legal troubles…blah blah blah
Now take a bunch of poor white trash rednecks (which are nearly the majority around here). Study them as above and select out the ones that measure similiarly to the failing group of black culture.
I’d be dollars to doughnuts that both groups are damn close to being equally unsucessful at “getting ahead” in life 5,10,20 years down the road.
Or in other words, most blacks are failing (or more accurately the ones that ARE failing) , because as one famous black columist boldly proclaimed about 8 years ago IIRC “black culture sucks”, with rampant racism being a distant second IMO.
I think the bias in this case would be that:
…it’s his chosen career field.
He isn’t arguing that they should have gotten over it already. What he is arguing is that they should at this point be having a debate about personal responsibility for their own condition. Two different things.
Agreed, but the problem with the white culture is different in that they are just looked at as dumb rednecks, as opposed to having a legitimate grievance that makes them dumb rednecks. If you took a representational sample of white people, and not a cherry picked one you’d find that the problem isn’t the same. The reason people point at blacks is because they are disproportionately having these problems.
So, you’re saying that the exams couldn’t have hidden, unintentional bias built in? There are two other possibilities. One, somehow tiny differences in median intelligence across populations cause gigantic differences in test results. Second, perhaps the black firefighters are self-selected for being stupid somehow.
Statistical tests are there to detect cases of subtle bias, which definitely was rampant and probably still is. The problem these address aren’t blatant bias, but cases like managers always picking the man for the promotion because he won’t ever take maternity leave.
true… but the point IS that the reason for the failing isnt mostly because of genetic inferiority or rampant racism…its a shitty mindset. Its up to the black folks with that mindset to fix it (dont ask me how to do that).
Note that this is ALL opinion without any data to back it up.
And where affirmative action should go in the near future is to give opportunities based on socioeconomic status rather than skin color. The smart child of rednecks growing up in a low income rural area is going to need help far more than Obama’s kids. But we’ll still need tests.
BTW, I’d say a lot of the promise of the civil rights era got fulfilled rather nicely, considering who is in the White House. I always saw the promise as equal opportunity, and if we’re not there yet we’re a hell of a lot closer, in both North and South, than we were in 1959.
Right, and this article is a suggestion for how to fix it.
I’d take that as a step forward, but at the risk of sidetracking the thread, I’d like to point out a long-term complication of that system.
Given the following facts:
- Intelligence is strongly genetically determined (it’s estimated 50-70% of IQ variance is hereditary).
- To a greater and greater extent, people marry others of similar intelligence. Whereas in the past the CEO married his secretary, he now stands a good chance of marrying another executive or a woman in a similarly cognitively demanding field. Similarly intelligent women today go to college, and are less likely to marry a high-earning but uneducated blue-collar worker, as they might in the past.
- For all except the very top of the IQ distribution, intelligence is positively correlated with earnings.
We can conclude that after several generations, assortative mating and the positive effect of intelligence on earnings will lead to the rich, as a class, actually being smarter than the poor, as a class. This might be considered bad for a variety of reasons (for example class rigidity can lead to social tensions), but while the conclusion is unpleasant, this outcome seems likely given current social trends and enough generations.
Now what that means is that even wealth-based affirmative action may not be correct in claiming that there is no difference between the two groups you’re comparing. In this case you might be willing to defend it, saying its inequalities are important in creating social “churn.” However in this case, as in current affirmative action, we would need to give up the pretense that we are being fair to the participants in any real sense.
The point of the article seems to be that Affirmative Action isn’t actually about making life better for the groups it’s supposed to be helping, but about making the leaders of society feel good about themselves for “doing something”. To get sidetracked into another discussion of “why are black people under-performing compared to white people in the USA” (to the extent that they actually are - I’m not an expert in this area) seems to be to miss the point. That’s a discussion to have when you’re trying to work out what to replace Affirmative Action with. But if, as he claims, it isn’t being shown to have any effect, or even to have a negative effect, then surely the sensible thing to do is to scrap it just on those grounds alone.
I can see why decision-makers like programs like AA. It’s a top-down system, and easy to understand and implement. Most tellingly, it seems to usually be implemented in such a way that it’s not going to affect the decision-makers themselves. Nobody, as far as I know, has tried to implement Affirmative Action principles among, say, elected representatives (although that’s probably the area which would make the most sense) - it seems to be in the low to middle areas of organizations that it’s most concentrated
For me brickbacon’s post really hit the nail on the head. I agree with the article’s central point–that the fact that many racial minorities, including Blacks, are “underdeveloped” in terms of the rubrics that the article lays out. This, I agree, should be where our efforts should be placed in order to close the achievement gap; there needs to be aid and assistance so that we can change the culture of underdevelopment to one of success. Thus, we need much more attention and support to programs that help poor families, single-parents, etc…whatever can be shown to promote a better home environment for those children.
However, I think the article simplifies such a complex problem to a point where it is entering this subtly racist perspective. To quote, “Today’s ‘black’ problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination”. This has the implication that racial discrimination has nearly no effect on the success or failure, which I think is laughable.
So you are claiming that a black sociology professor is being subtly racist then?
I don’t think he is saying that discrimination has no part in it, I think he is saying that it’s not up to external groups to keep the black man down at this point, it is up to the black community and more importantly the individual.
What’s interesting is the subtle implication of racial discrimination. It implies that the person is powerless to fight the problem that holds them back. IMO his point of view is far more empowering because it puts the responsibility for success or failure in the hands of the individual. Rather than saying, “External factors have made you some kind of eunuch.” It says, “You like everyone else in this world have the power over your own destiny.”
Every time someone shouts down that message, what they are subtly implying is, “No, you really are hamstrung by your circumstances, there really are external forces keeping you from succeeding, you do not have the power to uplift yourself without paternalistic assistance.”, crying racial discrimination subtly sends the message, “You really are inferior, but only because whitey has power over you.”
How could you implement affirmative action principles on elected representatives? Weight the votes of discriminated against groups?
10 percent of the population is black? 10 percent of the reps better be black.
No need to make things complicated here 
If it doesn’t work out, sue the voters for being racist, the whole lot of them.
I have an idea that this is or was done by gender in at least one Scandinavian country (Iceland maybe?) - at least 40% of the reps had to be female.