Left-wing Questions About Affirmative Action

Via the great site Arts & Letters Daily comes this extremely interesting review essay about affirmative action in The Nation.

While taking a long, critical look at The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action, by Terry H. Anderson; Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study by Thomas Sowell; and Affirmative Action Is Dead; Long Live Affirmative Action, by Faye J. Crosby, Michael Berube skewers many of the basic right- and left-wing pieties on the topic and instead poses a series of curious paradoxes, including this one:

In the workplace, affirmative action has been checkered by fraud and confounded by the indeterminacy of racial identities--and yet it's so popular as to constitute business as usual for American big business, as evidenced by the sixty-eight Fortune 500 corporations, twenty-nine former high-ranking military leaders and twenty-eight broadcast media companies and organizations that filed amicus briefs in support of the University of Michigan's affirmative action programs in the recent Supreme Court cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger (2003).

He also recovers the context that gave birth to affirmative action, one often glossed by conservative and libertarian diatribes against quotas and the like:

In 1964, in Holly Bluff, Mississippi, school officials spent $190 for every white student and $1.26 (note the decimal point) for every black one. As [Terry H.] Anderson sums up, the pace of black hiring in the 1950s meant that "minorities could not expect jobs proportionate to their percentage of the population…among business managers and owners until 2730." As Satchel Paige might have said, don't look back--some glacier might be gaining on you.

That was the world in which the 1964 Civil Rights Act intervened; that was the world changed by JFK's creation of the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, Congress's passage of the Voting Rights Act and LBJ's executive order 11246, which dictated that "the contractor will take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin."

And he ends on this evenhanded note:

As Scott Jaschik reported last summer in the Boston Globe, "The University of Michigan released enrollment figures for next fall showing that the number of black students in its freshman class would be declining by as much as 13 percent. That same day, Texas A&M University--a school that refuses to consider race or ethnicity in admissions--announced its own numbers for the fall. Enrollment would be going up--dramatically--for all minority groups, including a whopping 57 percent increase for black students."

While I hardly agree with everything Berube says, he's written an interesting and honest take on the matter. It's online here.

A while back in Reason, Richard Epstein asked, "can affirmative action be reconciled with liberal individualism?" His answer--as interesting (oh, hell, more interesting) than anything in The Nation--is online here.