There is little doubt that ethnic minorities face barriers in a primarily white culture. It could not be any other way when your traditions and history are different from the norm, but the idea that these barriers are the same and regardless of the unique challenges any group faces, they should all simply take one for the team is unsustainable.
Two weeks ago the Supreme Court officially ended the era of affirmative action, striking down race-based admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Though the decision affected only the tiny sliver of the population in a position to attend such elite institutions regardless of ethnicity, the media reacted on both sides of the political divide as if we were witnessing a revolution in action. Conservatives largely hailed the ruling, with National Review calling it a “Victory for America.” Progressives, on the other hand, largely saw the end of America as we know it up to and including the end of science. Seriously, Scientific American ran with the headline, “The Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision Harms Science, Education, and Health.” In their opinion, lives are literally at stake because the racial composition of elite colleges will shift slightly in favor of people of Asian descent as opposed to African. “Race-based affirmative action improves lives, as abundant scientific research shows, but the U.S. Supreme Court once again ignored evidence and decided to put an end to the use of the policy in college admissions.” Typical of much of the criticism, the claim was made that the court either ignored “evidence” or history, as if their job wasn’t simply to focus on the equal application of the law. To a large extent, the Court’s own dissenting Justices took the same approach. “Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to the health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens,” Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson wrote. “They were created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations.” This is undoubtedly true, but of course the real questions, beyond the legality of a program that divvies people up by race, are whether affirmative action did anything meaningful to mitigate these gaps and whether there were side effects of race-based policy that were corrosive to our culture.
The meaningful question is relatively easy to answer, at least if you listen to progressives: We’ve had some form of affirmative action for over 40 years and the very same problems persist. Pick a field, any field, from entertainment to technology, and – with the possible exception of the NBA and the NFL – we are told on a near daily basis that black Americans are underrepresented. I am not aware of a single facet of American life including Major League Baseball where progressives admit any progress at all, to the point where social commentators have coined the phrase “progressaphobia” to describe the pathology that compels supposedly intelligent people to insist we’re still living in the Jim Crow, if not the slavery era. Putting this another way, when was the last time any of these critics told us that affirmative action was working in the first place? Instead, the general consensus among progressives is that much, much more is required and, perhaps needless to say, the only solution is to embrace the full panoply of big government policies. For example, the left-leaning Brookings Institution ignored affirmative action entirely when they declared that “closing the racial wealth gap requires heavy, progressive taxation of wealth.” They did this even as they found time to mention reparations and other “expenditure-based” programs, suggesting affirmative action was very low on their list of priorities. “There is a vital and vibrant conversation in America today about reparations programs and other expenditure-based approaches to close the racial wealth gap. These investments are a moral imperative and an urgent economic necessity.” More, of course, is required including a “transformative national investment in Black households and communities, [and] a program of heavy and highly progressive taxation aimed at the very wealthiest Americans. A comprehensive agenda to close the racial wealth gap would likely include reforms to income and estate taxation, plus new taxes on wealth and inheritance, buttressed by a substantial investment in enforcement.” To the extent that affirmative action helped, it seemed to me primarily as a pyrrhic victory for reverse discrimination, almost as if progressives simply liked the idea that somebody, somewhere was getting screwed. As Ibram X. Kendi described it, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”
Here we arrive at the answer to the next question: Affirmative action is discrimination plain and simple. There is no way to square the circle that some are more equal than others, and some are being made to suffer purely because of their race so others can benefit, also purely because of their race. Ironically, those suffering the most under the affirmative action regime were also minorities, who through the magic of intersectionality we are told also suffer under the yoke of white supremacy. In this case, it was Asian Americans who were summarily rejected from elite colleges such as Harvard to make room for more black Americans. By the progressive’s own logic, how is a program that disadvantages those already disadvantaged possibly provide benefits worth the costs? After all, the entire foundation of intersectionality is that the struggle against racism and discrimination at the hands of the white man is shared by all races. This is doubly true when you consider what affirmative action amounted to in practice. The reality of America’s dynamic racial makeup was reduced to simply a handful of categories: Black, Asian/Pacific Islander, White, Hispanic, or Native American. Whether you were from a Caribbean island, Africa proper, or any of the myriad places black people live in the modern world, you were simply black in the eyes of the admissions office. Whether you were from India, China, Japan, or Korea, you were simply Asian, despite that the populations included account for some 40% of all the people in the entire world. These overly broad racial and ethnic categories wiped out any semblance of real diversity and included those whose families had been here for generations and those who recently migrated. If modern day gaps were created in the distant past, how does admitting an immigrant black over a native born Asian do anything to address the issue? There is substantial evidence that was actually occurring. Some estimate the number of West Indian and African immigrants admitted to Harvard at two thirds of total black admissions. Further, most of those admitted are not poor kids from urban areas suffering from an acute wealth gap. As early as 2004, Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (famous from the Obama era incident with the Boston Police) told the London Observer, “The black kids who come to Harvard or Yale are middle class. Nobody else gets through,” while putting the number of immigrant blacks at an astounding 75%. A survey of black students across 28 colleges that same year found that 41% of black students were immigrants, compared to a US population that was only 9% immigrant at the time.
In other words, affirmative action wasn’t even helping those who progressives insist need to be helped. Instead, it was hindering Asian minorities to provide benefits to primarily immigrants and middle or upper class blacks, but for some reason, all of the commentary lambasting the decision has stripped those aspects away, insisting without any evidence, that the program benefited the poor and disadvantaged. Even if it did, that would not necessarily make it a good thing. Everything comes with a cost, and as everyone has seen over the past decade or so, dividing people by race and granting special treatment because of race comes with a cost that is high indeed. It need not be repeated that the United States has not always lived up to its ideals, but there is a reason why the Founding documents refer to all men having been created as equals, and why the Fourteenth Amendment fully enshrined that principle into law. “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” There is no doubt that Asians were denied equal protection, but for some reason, largely driven by intersectionality, they were simply supposed to accept it as the price for being successful at school. The numbers underlying this price are staggering. If you consider white SAT scores as the baseline for admissions, Asians were penalized 140 points, Hispanics were granted an additional 130, and blacks a whopping 310, meaning the difference in average SAT score to attend an elite college between an Asian and a Black was 450 points, near a third of the total on the entire test. Who in their right mind would accept this king of rigging against their own families and say or do nothing?
Incredibly, that is precisely what some black commentators expected. We know this because of the reactions afterwards, which veered into attacks on Asians for standing up for their rights. Soledad O’Brien attacked one of the families involved in the initial lawsuit against Harvard by posting on Twitter, “Congrats on screwing over other people of color, ma’am! (Particularly those whose efforts in civil rights paved the way for your family to come to America.” This is an interesting take given that Asian immigration began in the late 1800s with the construction of the railroads. The influx of Asians around the turn of the 20th century was so large it prompted a Yellow Scare in California, long before the Civil Rights movement. Meanwhile, Jemele Hill noted, “Can’t wait until she reads that you gladly carried the water for white supremacy and stabbed folks in the back whose people fought diligently for Asian American rights in America.” Another odd take given they are actively fighting against Asian rights, and Asians in general were far from the primary focus of the Civil Rights movement. It was only after intellectuals, politicians, and public prognosticators realized combining minority ethnic groups into a single monolithic group could conceivably benefit the cause that intersectionality became a topic of discourse in the 1970s. Taken together, these statements reveal how completely insane the idea of intersectionality truly is. There is little doubt that ethnic minorities face barriers in a primarily white culture. It could not be any other way when your traditions and history are different from the norm, but the idea that these barriers are the same and regardless of the unique challenges any group faces, they should all simply take one for the team is unsustainable. People, in general, look out for their own self interest. Asians have different interests than blacks, and they chose not to sacrifice them at the altar of progressive politics, thereby destroying the entire intersectionality façade. They have done us all service: A country only keeps together when the various groups comprising it believe they are all being treated fairly. Openly announcing that you are not treating one group fairly to favor another is inherently corrosive. That corrosion, at least legally, is no more.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 