Against Affirmative Action

An Answer that Never Works

A society with an increasing proportion of retirees and a decreasing proportion of working-age people needs to take advantage of every young person and get the most out of their ability to keep society functioning. There is no space in that community for racism or any other form of bigotry to be allowed to hold people back, limit their education, and reduce their ability to contribute

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On the other hand, In the name of public safety and everyone's best interest, we always want the best possible person in any given position. Especially for quick-reaction life and death decision-making positions — Air traffic controllers, pilots, surgeons, firefighters, soldiers, police officers, and other similar specialists — we must select people on merit and ability.

In an ideal world, everyone would be "above average" and have a perfect score on every exam. We don't live in that kind of world. Thomas Sowell and J. D. Vance both grew up in challenging environments and, after time in the Marine Corps, went on to get degrees from Ivy League schools and become well-known.

Sowell is a black man born 94 years ago in poverty in Gastonia, North Carolina. His mother couldn't cope with raising a young child and sent him to live with a great aunt in Harlem, New York. A friend told him about the library. Sowell was smart enough to be admitted to Stuyvesant High School, but his family life was too disruptive. He was in the Marines during the Korean War, but fortunately, he was never in Korea.

After service, he completed high school, started college at Howard University in Washington, D.C. but completed his degree in Economics magna cum laude at Harvard. His Columbia University master's degree and University of Chicago Doctorate are also in Economics. He taught Economics at Rutgers, Howard, Cornell, Brandeis, U.C.L.A., and Amherst. Starting in 1980, he became a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. That position requires no teaching and lets him write, research, and speak on subjects that interest him.

His website provides an impressive list of his books. His writings, especially his autobiography, A Personal Odyssey, recount his experiences.

Sowell has seen all levels of academic skill and effort given by and demanded of black students. He has spent much of his time trying to understand how the history of a group impacts their culture in terms of attitude toward various types of effort. Some of his writings on the subject include: Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study, Race and Culture: A World View, and The Quest for Cosmic Justice.

When you build a list of skills and sports, you will see that different regional, racial, or ethnic groups excel in various skills. Consider the following: farming, mechanical, working up high on buildings, jewelry, medicine, academics, politics, construction, haute cuisine, winemaking, and brewing beer. In sports, different groups and body types excel in basketball, football, baseball, gymnastics, etc.

Sowell was teaching at Cornell when Dr King was assassinated and black students took over buildings. He was not surprised by the trouble because he had seen the damage caused by "mismatching" students and schools. Years later, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas used Sowell's "mismatch" terminology in a concurring opinion striking down affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.

What is a mismatch, and why is it bad for black students and society?

Affirmative action harms other students. But it causes mismatches, which harm black students. The question is simple. Do we want more good black doctors, engineers, etc., or more black students in the photograph of the entering class of the super fancy schools?

The highest academic awards are magna cum laude and summa cum laude, with the latter being the highest. Let's think of a school's teaching as like water coming out of a hose at high speed. Students at these schools can cope with high-speed learning. They are brighter than most people. Assume that at Magna U the speed is 95 MPH, at Summa U it's 100 MPH. There are, of course, black students who fit in at Summa U. They are perfect matches.

Affirmative action is harmful to BIPOC students who are very smart but not quite bright enough for Summa U. Summa wants them as part of the entering class picture. The school doesn't want to seem bigoted. The question is, "Is it good for the students, society, or even Summa to bring in students who won't keep up?" If they come in, they often fail in the professional classes and drift into what I call "anger studies." We then get more writings on the race war and explaining that the U.S. is the root of all evil.

These people are much brighter than the average student and would be able to keep up at Magna U. They would have become professionals and contributed to a society that needs every possible skilled person. Had Summa not misplaced them, they would have had excellent careers benefiting society.

Affirmative action for some cannot be done without establishing a quota for others. In any target group of fixed size, a minimum number of spaces for some people leaves fewer spaces (a lower maximum) for everyone else. I was a child actor many years ago and portrayed a Jewish boy studying hard to try to get into a Russian high school despite a severe anti-Jewish quota.

The spaces taken by mismatched students do not produce the qualified professionals society needs. Also, even though excluded people get training elsewhere, they are not pushed as hard as they might be, and society loses.

Sowell's writings describe many problems throughout history and worldwide where shortcuts have been used instead of increased effort to try to match results. It never works