Racial Blind Spots

The affirmative action path not taken.

John Hood from the October 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

Nor does Anderson correctly interpret the economic data he does include in The Pursuit of Fairness, such as a decline during the 1950s in black self-employment and black-owned businesses. He treats this as evidence of the worsening condition of blacks before the advent of the civil rights movement. Actually, it shows the effects of an increasing willingness of white businesses to sell to and employ blacks, who were becoming less likely to be confined to segregated businesses for their economic opportunities.

Anderson's book is useful if you need a blow-by-blow account of congressional legislation, presidential directives, or Supreme Court decisions about affirmative action during the last 60 years. But it does little to elucidate the real public policy implications of government intervention in this area, and it advances the paternalistic notion that until the enlightened feds came along blacks remained little more than passive victims of social forces entirely beyond their control or ability to resist.

The economist Thomas Sowell's name appears in Anderson's book only twice, and in each case the reference is a fleeting one containing nary a word about Sowell's prodigious studies of the real consequences of affirmative action policies in the U.S. and around the world. As it happens, Sowell has a new book out too, with the not-so-creative title Affirmative Action Around the World. It is a brilliant analysis, chock-full of pathbreaking research and penetrating insights. I'm sure it will be read widely by folks interested in this critical and controversial issue. Someday it may even be read by practicing historians.

"The empirical evidence is clear that most blacks got themselves out of poverty in the decades preceding the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and the beginning of affirmative action in the 1970s," Sowell writes. "Yet the political misrepresentation of what happened--by leaders and friends of blacks--has been so pervasive that this achievement has been completely submerged in the public consciousness. Instead of gaining the respect that other groups have gained by lifting themselves out of poverty, blacks are widely seen...as owing their advancement to government beneficence."

Sowell's new book offers much more to chew on than Anderson's, primarily by refusing to confine his account of affirmative action policy to the United States. Race is said to be "the American dilemma," most often by Americans. In fact, it vexes policy makers around the globe. In many places, preferential policies have produced not equality and comity but frustration and violence, as was the case in Sri Lanka, a formerly peaceful country where wrongheaded policies instituted in the mid-20th century stoked animosities that erupted into decades of deadly civil war. Meanwhile, minority groups with little political clout or formal civil rights, such as the Chinese in Malaysia or Lebanese in Africa, often outperform native populations on economic and social measures.

Indeed, as Sowell observes (and Anderson again ignores), the impressive accomplishments of Chinese, Japanese, West Indian, and other minorities in the United States during the 20th century make no sense if you assume that progress requires political power or that nonwhites can't do well on "white" tests or in "white" culture. Sowell's account may be inconsistent with how politicians and civil rights veterans tell the story--we came, we saw, we legislated--but it has the virtue of fitting the available facts.

So does Sowell's perception of what to do now, given that the U.S. Supreme Court has in recent college admissions cases signaled a willingness to let public universities take race into account for reasons of "diversity" but also an unwillingness to countenance an explicit or permanent commitment to preferences. Elsewhere, though not in Affirmative Action Around the World, Sowell argues both for a negative agenda (dismantling preferences over time, perhaps starting with college admissions, contracting, and other policies that clearly benefit the relatively well-off among favored groups) and a positive agenda of expanding opportunity through school choice, deregulation, and tax reduction.

In a free society, we get to form our own beliefs about race, ethnicity, sex, ability, and opportunities. Equally important, we get to learn from the mistakes of others. Imagine how much better it would have been if, years ago, some colleges had freely chosen to use race-conscious policies to redress past discrimination, or pursue "diversity" for its own sake, while other colleges had chosen a colorblind commitment to academic rigor. Viewing the results of such experimentation today, we'd all be able to draw our own conclusions and act accordingly. Instead, policy makers have yanked America from one pole to the other and back again. It has been exhausting, but not particularly edifying.

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