Just don't call them quotas

Wisdom of the week

[Reprinted from Issues & Views January 27, 2003]

The late Justice Lewis Powell's much-praised opinion in the Bakke case said many worthy and thoughtful things. But the bottom line was that colleges and universities could keep on using racial quotas -- so long as they didn't call them racial quotas. The dishonesty that is incidental to other policies is central to affirmative action. Most of what is said in support of this policy is either wholly unsubstantiated or demonstrably false.

What about the notion that affirmative action has helped blacks rise out of poverty? The black poverty rate was cut in half before affirmative action -- and has barely changed since then. What about the notion that blacks would not be able to get into colleges and universities without affirmative action? After group preferences and quotas were banned in California's state universities, the number of black students in the University of California system has risen.

Fewer are attending Berkeley and more are attending other universities, whose normal admissions standards they meet. These students are now more likely to graduate, which is the whole point. Before, they were being used like movie extras to create a background -- until most either dropped out or flunked out.

What about the magic benefits of "diversity" -- a word repeated endlessly, without a speck of evidence of those benefits? If diversity is so essential, how does a nation like Japan, with a homogeneous population, manage to get its students educated (better than ours), its work done, and its people living in more harmony than we have?

The assumption that there is something strange about not having different groups "represented" in various occupations and institutions in proportion to their share of the population will not stand up to the slightest scrutiny. Massive scholarly studies of countries around the world have failed to turn up a single country in which the different racial or ethnic groups are proportionally represented in occupations or institutions -- except where governments have imposed quotas.

Affirmative action has been tried in many countries around the world and has existed in India and Sri Lanka, for example, longer than in the United States. Seldom has it helped the poor and more often it has benefited those who were already more fortunate. Affirmative action has a track record of polarization in many countries, including lethal mob violence in India and a decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. Do we need to continue down the road that these countries have traveled?

-- Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Hoover Institution, is the author of many books, including Preferential Policies: An International Perspective (Morrow), Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas (Free Press/Macmillan) and Migrations and Cultures: A World View (Basic Books).

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