Who gets the help?
Posted on Thu, Mar. 27, 2003
By Don Erler Special to the Star-Telegram
Many captains of industry, military leaders and public servants (including Colin Powell) think that selected minorities should get preferential treatment in hiring decisions and college admissions. Legal philosopher George Anastaplo agrees. Reacting to my critique of his speech to law school Republicans on Abraham Lincoln's birthday, he called last Friday from his office at Loyola University Law School in Chicago to persuade me to reconsider my opposition to this form of affirmative action.
Overt racial preferences are more "efficient" than mechanical methods of ensuring ethnic diversity, he argued. For example, Texas' automatic admission of the top 10 percent of high school graduates to state universities tends to admit minorities from predominantly inner-city high schools, which are often inferior to more demanding suburban schools in which few minorities finish near the top. I responded that, although efficiency is lovely, Texas' inefficient system has the distinct advantage of being racially neutral. After all, the Constitution is "colorblind." "It might be colorblind," Anastaplo conceded, "but the Constitution does not require us to be blind to reality."
Blacks have lower incomes and life expectancies than whites, and higher participation in our criminal justice system. America is ill-served when a minority group feels permanently second class. Who can disagree? Yet Newsweek reported two months ago that its poll found 73 percent of whites and 56 percent of blacks opposing racial preferences. And February's Scripps-Howard Texas Poll showed opposition to using race as a factor in college admissions among all ethnic groups: 86, 77 and 70 percent, respectively, of whites, Hispanics and blacks.
Such widespread opposition to racial preferences, even among the most likely beneficiaries, reflects a deeply held American belief in equality of opportunity rather than results. Indeed, most of us understand that James McWhorter's conclusion in his book Losing the Race is probably correct: Racial preferences have actually reduced incentives for black scholastic achievement, thereby harming those they were intended to help. Shaker Heights, Ohio, for example, is an affluent and thoroughly integrated community, with approximately equal numbers of black and white families. But the top fifth of high school graduates is 90 percent white, while the bottom fifth is 90 percent black.
In his study of this community, John U. Ogbu concluded that black students in Shaker Heights have different priorities, spending far more time than their white counterparts playing sports, watching TV, listening to music and hanging out with friends. But so what? Even if much of black inequality is the result of voluntary activities, should we the people not try to improve the situation?
We do so for AIDS and other activity-affected medical conditions. Dr. Benjamin Carson, a professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, thinks we can help minorities using race-neutral methods. He wrote last month in The Wall Street Journal that universities routinely give special admissions consideration for "parental education, socioeconomic status, obstacles overcome," among other subjective factors.
Helping "those who need it most" will, because "the largest percentage of people from disadvantaged backgrounds happen to be blacks and Hispanics," give those groups a disproportionate advantage -- but "not from a presumption that their skin color requires it." As the Supreme Court takes up this contentious issue again next week, both legal philosophers and active jurists might consider the good doctor's prescription to be healthful for our body politic.
Don Erler is president of General Building Maintenance. donerler@sbcglobal.net
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