Let’s face it: race-based affirmative action appears to be on the way out. The American public doesn’t like it; the Supreme Court is slowly but surely deeming it unconstitutional; and many progressive politicians are shying away from it. Did you see the statement from President Obama criticizing Tuesday’s SCOTUS decision upholding a Michigan ban on race-based college admissions? No, neither did I. (White House spokesman Jay Carney said the President had no immediate comment.)
You can’t blame Obama. Politically, affirmative action is a loser—some polls show that Americans oppose it by a majority of more than two to one—and it’s hard to see future Democratic Presidential candidates promising to restore its former lustre. If the Democrats have a strategy for saving affirmative action, it involves appointing more liberal Justices to the Court and hoping that they reverse the work of Alito, Kennedy, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas (and, in the Michigan case, Breyer, too). Maybe this tactic will work for a while. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t seem sustainable.
Given the glaring facts that America remains a very unequal society, with strikingly low levels of social mobility, what’s needed is a set of policies that promote upward movement from the bottom, and, at the same time, has more appeal to Americans who find racial preferences objectionable. Fortunately, such an approach is readily available: race-blind affirmative action that helps poor and disadvantaged people get ahead regardless of their skin color and ethnic origin.
After the ruling in the Michigan case, education is the immediate focus of attention. Selective colleges could be encouraged (or obliged) to abolish legacy admissions, which serve to reduce social mobility. They could also commit to admitting high-school students that graduate at the top of their classes, whatever test scores they submit. Such a policy would reward merit and individual effort but also acknowledge the reality that schools in wealthy communities—white and black—tend to generate higher test scores even if their students aren’t innately smarter.
But education isn’t the only area where race-blind affirmative action can be applied. Public enterprises and private enterprises that receive tax dollars could be obliged to achieve economic diversity in hiring, which means they have to pay special attention to applicants whose families are in poverty or near poverty. We could step up efforts to spur job growth in poor areas, such as setting up enterprise zones and investing federal dollars in infrastructure and education projects. (Although it’s seldom described as such, setting up the Tennessee Valley Authority was a form of race-blind affirmative action.) Lots of approaches could be tried.
Shifting to a race-blind approach would improve the life prospects of Americans from poor minority communities, but it would also enhance the prospects of poor whites, many of whom are similarly disadvantaged. Although the poverty rate is higher among blacks than whites, there are nearly twice as many whites in poverty as there are blacks. Innovative research by Harvard’s Raj Chetty and others has shown that in some Southern cities, such as Atlanta, working-class blacks have very low rates of social mobility, but so do working-class whites.
Increasingly, the most profound dividing line in the United States is class rather than race. At top colleges, there are large numbers of minority students, but a good many of them come from upper-middle-class or rich backgrounds. It’s much rarer to find students, black or white, who come from poor families. Indeed, according to one recent study, just three per cent of the students at highly selective colleges come from households in the the bottom twenty per cent of the income distribution. And just ten per cent of the students at these colleges come from families in the bottom half of the income distribution.
Race-blind affirmative action isn’t a new idea, of course. That’s part of its appeal: at the state level, such tools have already been shown to work, both in enhancing opportunity and winning political support. The Texas Top Ten Percent Rule, which was introduced in 1998, guarantees students who finish at the top of their classes admission to state universities. Although the rule has attracted a lot of criticism from Texas Republicans and conservatives, they have only succeeded in scaling it back rather than abolishing it. And it has served as the model for similar reforms in California and Florida.
In an important study that was published in 2012, “A Better Affirmative Action,” Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who is a big proponent of race-blind measures, pointed to other ways in which states have used them to boost diversity and social mobility. In seven states, public universities have adopted class-based admissions policies, which take into account factors such as parental income and parental education level. Eight states have set up partnerships with local high schools to encourage students from low-income backgrounds to apply for college. “If college admissions officers want to be fair—truly meritocratic—they need to consider not a student’s raw academic credentials, but also what obstacles she had to overcome to achieve them,” Kahlenberg notes. “A 1200 SAT score surely means something more for a low-income, first-generation college applicant who attended terrible schools than it does for a student whose parents have graduate degrees and pay for the finest schooling.”
If affirmative-action efforts are to be truly blind, of course, they will have to be directed at poor whites as well as poor blacks. It’s not enough for élite colleges to step up their recruitment efforts in places like Baltimore, Newark, and Detroit. They will also have to go out and do more to find some bright but disadvantaged candidates from West Virginia, and the Florida Panhandle, and southeast Kentucky. If they try hard enough, they shouldn’t find it too difficult.
For too long, affirmative action has been stigmatized as a means of prioritizing one racial group at the expense of another. That’s why it’s so unpopular, but that isn’t what it’s really about. It’s about levelling the playing field, and giving everybody a fair shot regardless of where they came from, who their parents were, and what schools they attended. Given America’s tortured history, affirmative action inevitably became entwined with issues of race.
But in casting aside racial preferences, or any other policies designed to overcome the legacy of racial discrimination, we need to keep sight of the broader issue of equal opportunity for all. The United States, as we are constantly reminded these days, is, in some ways, coming to resemble a plutocracy or an oligarchy. To counteract the forces of inheritance and inequality, we need some policies designed to help the folks at or near the bottom. Race-blind affirmative action, properly designed, can be one of them.
Photograph by Enoch Lai.
