For what it’s worth, despite having benefited from AA as a woman and a black person, I am ambivalent about AA. But I lean toward it more than away from it.
I have a coworker. A coworker who I really like working with. She started working here full time a couple of years ago.
Her qualifications are what I would called “bare minimum”.
She hasn’t demonstrated leadership qualities.
Her work ethic is just average.
She’s personable, but no more than anyone else.
She’d be the first to admit all of the above (which is why I like her)
How did she get her job? She’s friends with one of the executive directors. The director got her an internship after hearing about her long unemployment. When a full-time position opened up in her program for internal hire only, she stepped right into it. Didn’t even have to interview. In contrast, I had to sit through two interviews for my position. My interviews were so goddamned stressful they made my grad school prelims seem like a joke.
Do I begrudge her for making her contacts work for her? Not at all. Everyone understands that it’s not what you know, but who you know. And I see examples like this all around me.
Sure, there are people who view me as an undeserved, unqualified interloper by virtue of my skin color. But to those people, I would say that the system has all kinds of unfairness built into it. I don’t know why I deserve any more stigma than my coworker does. Or another coworker, who got his job because his daddy used to work here and everyone just loved his daddy. My skin color, gender, class and cultural background implicitly bar me from participating in the exclusive buddy-buddy network that operates here. Until this network becomes more diverse, AA will always be justifiable.
I understand the argument that AA makes it harder for talented minorities to prove themselves worthy to others, but the sad truth is that this burden was there long before AA. Being viewed as a taker/invader/outsider/incompetent nobody/undeserving uppity negro who has the audacity to go where they don’t belong…all of this is part of our country’s racist tradition. Given this, it’s naïve to think that getting rid of AA will cure of us of this stigma. AA is an excuse to prejudge black people as different, inferior, and undeserving, but it is not a cause.
If AA is taken away, I assure you it’ll be some other thing that people will ascribe to a black person’s success. For instance, despite all the hard work and talent needed to win two elections, Obama haters still attribute his victory to racist blacks and guilty liberal whites. To be fair, those who voted against Obama are tarred as racists as well, but that only underscores my point. Even when AA is not in play, a black person’s race is what many people will glom on to explain a certain outcome.
A black person going to a prestigious university? “Oh, he probably had some help from a bleeding-heart alumnus who wrote him some overly glowing recommendation letters and pulled some strings for him.” A black person taking a senior management position? “Well, the VP has been saying it’ll help business if we diversify our image, so that explains that.” A woman becoming a CEO of a major company? “She networked [or slept] her way to the top.”
The truth is, we’re not operating in a meritocracy and we never have been. And because of this, none of us really deserve the assumption that we’ve attained our respective positions solely due to our shining intellect, talent, and hard work. So why should black people be judged differently, with or without AA?
It does magnify a stigma, but there isn’t any way to get around it.
And for many jobs, there are so many qualities as important as a fundamental grasp of the kinds of things academic tests can select for that it may not make much difference.
For fields like medicine, where the average black physician has entrance scores way below those of whites and asians, there are still many areas in which those physicians can be acceptably capable. For fields like tech where some large employers like Apple, Google or Facebook might have screening exams to get the best candidates, a race-based AA double standard can be applied that admits a larger number of blacks than would a single standard. Even if a certain “stigma” might be assigned by a handful of coworkers, in the end these kinds of fields end up judging you by how you actually perform, I think.
For most mainline jobs, I don’t think some academic test is the most important qualifier. I think it’s ridiculous to have white policemen, for example, traipsing around a black neighborhood because they outperformed on an academic test. Longer discussion, but you get the idea.
“The IQ difference between people of West African and European descent is due to genetics” ishypothetical. Which is not to say it’s false, necessarily, just that there’s no direct evidence for it. If the Scarr study is replicated with more modern methods, then it would constitute evidence against it.