It’s worth reading even just the bulleted points below.
From Roger Clegg’s article in Inside Higher Ed “Why Racial Preferences Remain Wrongheaded“:
So here’s my usual list of the costs of using racial preferences in university admissions.
- It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified students and sets a disturbing legal, political and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination.
- It creates resentment and is otherwise and inevitably divisive.
- It stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their classmates, teachers and themselves, as well as future employers, clients and patients.
- It mismatches African-Americans and Latinos with institutions, setting them up for failure, so that not only are those discriminated against hurt but also those supposedly benefited.
- It fosters a victim mind-set, removes the incentive for academic excellence and encourages separatism.
- It compromises the academic mission of the university and lowers the overall academic quality of the student body.
- It creates pressure to discriminate in grading and graduation.
- It breeds hypocrisy within the college and encourages a scofflaw attitude among administrators.
- It papers over the real social problem of why so many African-Americans and Latinos are academically uncompetitive.
- It gets states and colleges involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and how much blood is needed to establish group membership — an untenable legal regime as America becomes an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society, and as individual Americans are themselves more and more likely to be multiracial and multiethnic.
To elaborate on just one point, because of its current salience: telling African-Americans, in particular, that less is expected of them and, indeed, then requiring less of them is a sure way to reinforce racial stereotypes and to encourage identity politics and the self-segregation of a group that the selection process has guaranteed will be mismatched and marginalized. The unhappy consequences of this approach on a campus are, alas, all too visible. It is increasingly clear that racial preferences help no one — and hurt everyone.
HT: AEI