Winners & Losers

Affirmative Action In Action

by Patrick J. Shanahan
06/01/03

In a free society a natural filtering occurs in matters of jobs, housing, education, etc. as people seek to find the “slot” that best benefits them and which, by extension, best benefits society. This filtering is a result of conscious and unconscious individual and institutional choices, and whenever the ability to make those choices is disrupted by arbitrary discrimination, society as a whole is just a little less efficient and its people a little less happy.

Attempts to remedy past discrimination through “Affirmative Action” may proceed from the best of motives, but it warps individual choices and clogs this natural filtering mechanism just as much as did the more overtly wrong discrimination of Jim Crow. Whenever choices get out of balance it results in a situation in which a few people “win” (i.e. benefit) and a whole bunch more “lose.” What most people don’t realize is that the people most likely to lose are exactly those whom the program is designed to help.

The Jayson Blaire fiasco at the New York Times highlights one class of people who are likely to “win.” Conmen and hucksters (of the preferred ethnicity) must feel like they have been handed the keys to the kingdom with Affirmative Action. All they need to do is “play the game” and they can end up almost anywhere, with wealth, fame and perks - all without doing much actual work. It is unfair to say that Affirmative Action “causes” situations like this, but it sure makes it easy for conmen to prosper.

Another class of winners are minority superstars. Top minority talent is in incredibly high demand under an Affirmative Action setup. If schools and employers need to fill a certain number of minority “slots,” they would much rather fill them with the types of folks who are bound to perform. That way they are not likely to have to fire or flunk them and face charges of discrimination. Much like free agents in sports, these folks command top dollar and move from job to job ever spiraling upward through the ranks. I have seen this happen personally. The irony, of course, is that these folks don’t need the putative assistance of Affirmative Action to succeed. It just helps them get there a little bit faster. The only risk Affirmative Action poses for these stars is that they will begin to lose the cause and effect link between their performance and their positions. They may begin to develop a sense of entitlement.

The other set of winners in Affirmative Action are the bureaucrats in government, business and non-profit agencies. Since the logic of Affirmative Action can never be resolved (there will never be a day when someone doesn’t need a leg up) their livelihoods are secure as long as affirmative action is accepted as a reigning orthodoxy.

Losers under Affirmative Action are not necessarily the ones you may suspect. The first and largest group who lose are exactly the people the programs are designed to help. Because it proceeds from the ridiculous premise that the only thing standing between, for example, a young black man and success is opportunity, Affirmative Action deliberately and routinely puts its supposed beneficiaries in places that they cannot succeed. Where they do not have the tools or the experience to succeed. It explicitly sets them up to fail.

The most compelling example of this is in higher education. The logic of Affirmative Action demands that many of the selected groups be placed in academic institutions for which they are ill prepared and unable to succeed. The natural filtering mechanism of matching skills and schools is disrupted. The end result of this is graduation rates for the “favored” minorities that are significantly below that of their peers, and/or a dilution of academic standards in order to avoid failing them. I suppose that those who make it through may be in a better position than they may have been otherwise, but those who don’t make it are essentially branded as failures. Had they been matched with schools that fit their skills, they would have been allowed to succeed. The left has never had a problem in breaking a few eggs in pursuit of “social justice,” it’s just a little irksome that the eggs they are breaking are those whom they are supposedly helping. The same logic applies in the working world.

Part of me feels a little sympathy for Jayson Blair. He was put in a situation where all he could do is fail. Because he was a huckster, he was able to string it out and then fail in a blazing ball of controversy. But tens of thousands of sober and hard working Affirmative Action recruits are left to quietly crumble when their skill sets don’t match up to the job requirements.

The most unwarranted losers under Affirmative Action are over-represented minorities. The classic example is folks of Asian descent. Through collective hard work, discipline and a cultural emphasis on academic success, they are a stunning success story. Sons and daughters of illiterate immigrants from Vietnam and China, along with more established Japanese and Chinese Americans, are flooding better universities everywhere, threatening to destroy the dream of schools that “look like America.” Affirmative Action to include minorities without the skills to succeed equals Affirmative Action to exclude minorities who do have those skills. To filter out Asian-Americans so that more African-Americans can fill there slots is downright perverse

The last group of losers under Affirmative Action - and the ones we should spend the least time fretting about - are white males. Not because we don’t care, but because the impact is smallest for white males. Despite the occasional, highly publicized case in which a white guy is passed over in favor of an Affirmative Action recruit, the arithmetic of the population is such that white males - and females - generally are able to filter themselves quite nicely. The smaller the group, the greater the negative impacts of Affirmative Action. The larger the group, the lesser the impact.

This filtering process is a fundamental part of the American Experience. We see it in the familiar pattern of illiterate immigrants whose sons go to high school, whose sons in turn go to college whose sons in turn end up running the country. American blacks were largely denied the right to so much as to participate in this process until the middle of the 20th Century. At that point they began as a group to move slowly through the familiar social patterns of immigrant advancement. The Civil Rights movement of the 50s and 60s was a result of this process, as black Americans began to pick up economic and political steam. In unexpected ways, the success of the that movement stopped the process cold in its track. Affirmative Action was one of the outcomes that was the most to blame. It not only sought to bypass the filtering process, it created an expectation in the minds of many that the process itself was bogus.

That perception has done more to stunt black social progress than Bull Connor, George Wallace and David Duke combined.