Affirmative Action: Back to the Future

with John McWhorter and Jason Riley

The Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action has been in effect for almost two years now, and we’re still asking the big question: what’s next? Sandra Day O’Connor, in her 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger opinion, argued that affirmative action ought to be kept on the books, but not forever. She wrote, “The Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” She gives no specific reason for setting the countdown at 25 years, but one could interpret her imposition of a time limit to mean that, if affirmative action does what its defenders argue it does, it should create the conditions of its own obsolescence.

Some argue that affirmative action accomplished that goal a long time ago. Some argue it’s still needed. And some, like my guest Jason Riley, argue that it never delivered on its promise, because it was enacted in a form its designers never intended. Jason’s new book, The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed, points to the huge gains in wealth, employment, and academic success made by blacks in the decades before affirmative action, and the diminishing returns of the decades since. We were on our way up, but affirmative action was a stumbling block disguised as a springboard. If we did it once, we can do it again.

Perhaps, then, what comes after affirmative action is what came before it. Its future will be its past. Perhaps removing artificial achievement inflation will lead to newly galvanized cohorts of blacks students and young professionals who take up the challenge of outperforming expectations, just as their great- and great-great-grandparents did. They’re coming into a world and an economy that’s very, very different from that of the mid-twentieth century, but for all we know, those difference may accrue to the benefit of young African Americans, should they receive the proper training and guidance.

A question that remains for me is how we regard the many, many black students and professionals who entered higher education and the job market under the auspices of affirmative action. The worst outcome would be to treat them as somehow deficient or discredited simply by virtue of having benefited from the policy. After all, nobody gave them a choice. There’s no checkbox on a college application that asks, “Would you like to receive the benefits of affirmative action?” Plenty of people who didn’t need it got it anyway. And plenty of people who did need it early on have gone on to become just as skilled and competent as those who didn’t receive it.

It falls to those of us who have argued (for decades!) against affirmative action to treat its legacy judiciously. If we write off past affirmative action beneficiaries—and we rarely know who benefited and who didn’t—we’ll simply reify the very condescension toward black people that’s one of the features of affirmative action I hate most. The end of affirmative action, in the best case scenario, would help to reawaken the centrality of individual merit in our society. That means evaluating individuals based on their records and their accomplishments rather than their identities. We can’t change the past, but we can learn from it, take the best of what it offers, and refit it to meet the future. I was an affirmative action beneficiary, too. Just try and sweep me into the dustbin of history.

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JOHN MCWHORTER: So Jason, suppose you encountered the objection that affirmative action made something happen faster that otherwise wouldn't have, that we had reached a kind of a glass ceiling and affirmative action allowed the waters to flood. Which is the way I think a lot of people think of it. I think most people know there was a black middle class before 1965, but they think that there has been a whole lot more of a black middle class since, and more than there would've been if there had been no affirmative action. That's what I'm imagining would be in many people's minds.

JASON RILEY: The data just doesn't show that. I cited the data on college completion. But it's also poverty, the rate at which blacks are leaving poverty. The narrative is that affirmative action lifted black people out of poverty. But you saw a 40 percentage point drop in black poverty between 1940 and 1960. That's not only before affirmative action policies or DEI policies or what have you, it's before the Civil Rights Act of '64. It's before the Voting Rights Act of '65. It's before the blacks had any significant political power, in terms of running large cities with large black populations, the way they would later have in the 1970s and '80s. So blacks lifted themselves out of poverty, by and large, before these policies.

Now, the black poverty rate continued to fall after 1960. So the first decade of affirmative action in the 1970s, it fell more, by I think another 12 or 13 points. It was falling at nowhere near the rate it was falling previously. So the idea that you could attribute the fall in the era of affirmative action to affirmative action suggests you're ignoring these preexisting trends, which showed a much more significant drop.

JOHN MCWHORTER: What about racial preferences having made there be ... I'm just giving you the kind of pushback I'm imagining people might.

JASON RILEY: I see what you're getting at. Let's use another example. What about in universities?

JOHN MCWHORTER: In universities, yeah. Let's use the Michelle Obamas.

JASON RILEY: Let's use the university example. So we know that even before the Supreme Court ruled, you had nine or ten states that had already passed bans on racial preferences. So we don't have to guess at what would happen. We have some natural experiments out there. And they were large, diverse states: California, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Michigan.

California's a great example. The ban passes in the mid-'90s. You see a reduction in black enrollment at the most selective schools, like Berkeley. But you see an increase in enrollment throughout the University of California system. Not only do you see an increase in black enrollment, you see an increase in black graduation rates. You see an increase in black GPAs. You see an increase in graduation rates in the more difficult disciplines of math and science and engineering and so forth.

So a policy that had been put in place to increase the ranks of black middle class in practice has resulted in fewer black doctors and lawyers and engineers and architects than we would've had in the absence of the policy. And that's what I would point to. That's the sort of data I would point to for people who say that affirmative action has been a net good. There's a lot of evidence that it has not been a net good for black people.

GLENN LOURY: I gotta ask you, Jason, how you distinguish. Affirmative action, in your telling, is a pretty broad category. It's not only racial preferences and college admissions. It's the whole mobilized effort at the policy level to redress the racial disparities. And I wonder how you distinguish between preferences and other kinds of civil rights initiatives, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and so on. Is your indictment of the overstated importance of affirmative action meant to also raise questions about the relative significance for black economic prosperity of civil rights advocacy more broadly?

JASON RILEY: No, it's not an indictment of that, and I make a distinction there. I think that affirmative action, racial preferences, have been a distortion of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We have the legislative record there. We know what was intended by the authors of that legislation and the people who voted for it. We know that it was about making choices, policy choices, without regard to race. We know that what we call today the administrative state, but basically federal bureaucrats and various federal commissions at the time, rewrote that language to say the complete opposite of what the people who wrote the legislation intended to say. And then we know that the courts indulged this jujitsu in their rulings over the decade.

So no, this is not an indictment of what was intended by the Civil Rights Act of '64. This is an indictment of how that language has been manipulated to say in some cases the complete opposite, that race must be taken into account. They've interpreted legislation to say that race must be taken into account.

Because you can get into these semantic arguments over what affirmative action means. We should make sure people understand what it used to mean back in the 1960s, which was simply outreach to groups that had been overlooked in the past, and helping those groups rise to existing standards. That was affirmative action. Not lowering standards for those groups, which is what it's become.

I'm talking about what it has become, not what was originally intended or how it was intended, how the phrase was originally used. And there are people who try and play verbal games by saying, “Oh, I'm not opposed to affirmative actions, it's just outreach to underrepresented groups.” I'm not opposed to that either. Most Americans aren't opposed to that.

JOHN MCWHORTER: Who would be?

JASON RILEY: You get a sense of this. The polling data shows that the more accurately affirmative action is defined in the question, the poorer it polls.

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