Why Class-Based Affirmative Action Would Accomplish the Same Goals as Race-Based Affirmative Action, but Without the Huge Downsides.

Thanks for your comment on this.

As far as “unconscious bias,” I have a recent article that directly addresses this very issue in the context of race, which I’ll link to here:

White Racism and Black Trash:

The argument is nuanced, but the summary point, in case you don’t have time to delve into the whole piece I linked to, is that the main reason for this kind of racism and unconscious bias is that the underlying stereotypes tend to be statistically true. This notion of what is known in the sociological literature as “stereotype accuracy” is, as I state in the article, solidly supported by research, with the work of Lee Jussim of Rutgers University, some of which he discusses here, being a good place to start. To use your gender example, the reason people think men are likely to be leaders is that men are more likely to be leaders in the world in which we live. Our brains are pretty much programmed by evolution to make decently accurate generalizations on the basis of what we’ve experienced. If, in nature, an ancestor of ours once nearly got mauled by a tiger, the next time he saw a tiger, he probably wasn’t going to be waiting around to figure out if this particular tiger was a “nice” one; rather, he’d have run and/or hid as quickly as possible. Those who didn’t have that instinct got killed and didn’t pass on their genes. Well, for better or for worse, the same thing happens when we see a black guy dressed in a certain “thuggish” way walking towards us on a dark street. This guy might be a perfect gentleman, appearances notwithstanding. But our evolutionary programming makes our heart beat faster and tells us to cross the street.

So the question is what is the solution. You can drum into non-black people’s heads (and many non-“thuggish” black people’s heads as well) the idea that they shouldn’t be crossing the street in these circumstances, but that’s an uphill battle in such circumstances. Most of us would rather be safe racists than dead upstanding citizens. The solution is to fix the reality that leads to the problem in the first place, which is the reality that black people (13% of the U.S. population) account for nearly 40% of violent crimes and over 50% of homicides in America. That’s what we should be working on, and working on that entails many complex problems, like addressing disproportionate black poverty, the plague of fatherless black families that are strongly associated with every negative socioeconomic outcome, the downward socioeconomic pull of much mainstream black culture, etc.

Now let me turn to affirmative action. There’s an argument to be made here that affirmative action is just one method to do exactly what I was just saying, viz., counter these kinds of negative stereotypes we have about black people by giving them a leg up in the process of university admissions, with the result that those black people who, for instance, get into great colleges as a result are going to end up contributing to the formation of a new black middle and upper class strata, which will be helpful to the image of blacks in general. Although that’s not exactly the argument you’re making — I think you’re arguing that affirmative action is a way of balancing the scales a bit to counter the disadvantages blacks experience in other aspects of society due to racism and unconscious bias — the point I’m making is probably closely related to what you’re saying and looks to the future a bit more in the need to shape a new generation of black Americans who aren’t going to be subjected to the same prejudices.

And I have some sympathy with that argument. But ultimately I come out against it for the following reason: race-based affirmative action is deploying a nuclear strike with untold collateral damage radiating (pun intended) out in all directions where a more targeted tactical strike would do the job far better. The collateral damage is this:

• There is, first, the stigma of affirmative action: others, especially whites and Asians, will often see blacks admitted via affirmative action as not deserving of their spots and as taking away the spots of more deserving others. Then you get stuff like the current lawsuit by Asian Americans against Harvard University based on Harvard’s affirmative action program that did unsavory things like downgrade otherwise high-scoring and qualified Asian applicants on the basis that they were “bad” in the personality category.
• There is, second, the problem that blacks admitted via affirmative action programs for which they are not qualified will often underperform. This doesn’t do anything good for their confidence or for the impression that others around them will come to form of them. In other words, if the goal of affirmative action is to counter prejudices and biases, it may be inadvertently accomplishing the exact opposite by exposing whites, Asians and others to blacks who seem to be not as qualified or “smart” as they are. That’s going to reinforce negative stereotypes, obviously. Many of these black beneficiaries of affirmative action would do much better at slightly less competitive programs where they could be at the top of the class rather than at the bottom.
• Third and finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the huge problem of blowback. Affirmative action, whatever its benefits, is a nasty business that strikes many people (correctly, in my view) as morally wrong. It is doing the exact opposite of the Civil Rights ideal of treating people equally and as individuals, regardless of race, and, instead, it is taking all white college applicants — none of whom had anything to do with slavery, Jim Crow or anything else in that category — and all Asian college applicants — many of whom are just children of poor immigrants themselves — and disadvantaging them on the basis of race, while taking all black people — some of whom might be wealthy suburbanites or international students who had nothing to do with American history — and advantaging them on the basis of their race. And impoverished white people look at this obvious injustice going on and legitimately think, “What the heck?” At Yale, where I went as an undergrad, virtually all the black people I knew fell into one of two categories: (i) wealthy international students from places like Nigeria or the Caribbean; or (ii) wealthy suburban black people from places like Boca Raton, Florida. In all my time at Yale, I did not meet a single poor urban black kid. Not one! The same is true of my time at Harvard Law School afterwards. So what’s the point of a program like that? We’re not even helping the people who actually need it. In the meantime, we’re angering all these white and Asian people who feel (justly) like this is just wrong. And we’re also reinforcing in everyone’s minds the general permissibility of race-based thinking and categorizations. You can’t create positive racial categorizations without, simultaneously, creating negative racial categories in reality and in people’s minds.

So those are the problems. They are huge problems in view. They lead to more net racism in our society rather than less, in the end.

By contrast, the kind of income-and-assets-based affirmative action program I’d favor would have these benefits:

• It would still disproportionately favor black people because black people tend to be disproportionately poor in America, so that it would accomplish much the same thing as race-based affirmative action.
• It would favor the actual black people who are poor and disadvantaged and need the help rather than the kinds of wealthy blacks that are currently the program’s principal beneficiaries. This is a big step forward, of course.
• Because poor whites and poor Asians would likewise be beneficiaries, the program wouldn’t create the same blowback and net increase in racism and categorical racial thinking. We’d be able to say, legitimately, that such affirmative action is just a way of increasing equality of opportunity for everyone in our society.
• By giving a leg up to poor people from every demographic, it wouldn’t create the same “stigma”; it wouldn’t be quite as easy for people to think, “Oh, all those black kids are here just because of affirmative action.”

So this is part of why I’d support the class-based approach over the race-based approach in a heartbeat. I think it would serve your purpose of countering negative biases about blacks in our society because, again, the principal beneficiaries of a class-based program, in terms of proportions of the population, would still be blacks. But it would accomplish that goal without all those awful negative side effects.