Letters to a Young Conservative (10 page)

Don’t affirmative action policies fight discrimination?
No. Consider two virtually identical scenarios. A white guy and a black guy apply for a position. The black guy is better qualified; the white guy gets the position. That’s racial discrimination. Here is the second scenario. A white guy and a black guy apply for a position. The white guy is better qualified; the black guy gets the position. That’s affirmative action. Now, in what sense is the second result a remedy for the first? It is not. All I see are
two instances
of racial discrimination.

Isn’t discrimination a problem in college admissions?
No. I do not deny that discrimination by universities is an historical reality. It used to be a problem. But not any longer. Where are the bigots in the admissions offices who are keeping blacks and Hispanics out? Such bigotry is not even alleged. Let me go further, Chris: There is no evidence to show that black or Hispanic students who have been preferentially admitted over the past few decades have been victims of discrimination. Moreover, there is no evidence to show that white or Asian American students who have been turned away—despite having stronger grades, test scores, and extracurricular talents—have discriminated against anyone.

What about charges that the standardized tests are racially biased?
This charge is completely false. Consider the math section of the test. A typical question goes like this: “If a train can go 90 miles in an hour, how far can it go in 40 minutes?” No one can argue with a straight face that equations are racially biased, or that algebra is rigged against Hispanics. Yet the same gap in performance between racial groups that we see on the verbal section of the test is also present on the math section. Numerous studies have confirmed that the test accurately measures differences in academic skills.

Do these standardized tests predict college performance?
Yes. Tests are in the business of prediction. No test can predict future performance with complete accuracy. Standardized tests, however, have repeatedly been shown to be the best predictors of college performance.
The reason is pretty obvious when you consider the alternative criteria used by admissions officers. Recommendations are essentially meaningless. “Not since Jesus Christ has there been a person who has shown such potential to change the course of history as young Wilbur.” Grades depend entirely on where you went to high school. Most high school teachers grade on a curve. So a 3.8 grade average from a mediocre school may not mean as much as a 3.4 grade average from a really good school. The great benefit of a standardized test is that everyone takes the same test, therefore it is possible to compare students’ performances on one scale.

Don’t colleges give preference to athletes and alumni children?
Yes, but athletic ability is a talent. It is part of the broad package of abilities that colleges can and should consider in admitting students. Virtually no institutions admit applicants on academic merit alone. If you are a champion violinist, if you have studied yoga in the Himalayas, if you do community service—these things count in your favor. So why should admissions officers not take into consideration your talents as a good quarterback or an outstanding lacrosse player? Alumni preferences are much harder to justify. They are basically a fundraising mechanism: The alumni are a major source of funding, and one way that colleges maintain their continuing allegiance is by admitting their children and grandchildren. When this issue came up in a recent debate, I said to my opponent, “I agree with you that alumni preferences are unfair. So why don’t we join together
in condemning both alumni preferences and racial preferences?” At this suggestion, he became very nervous and refused my invitation. I realized that he wasn’t really against alumni preferences; his point was that since nepotism is already in place, why not allow minority applicants to benefit from it? In a rapid turnaround, our civil rights leaders have gone from attacking nepotism and embracing merit, which was the Martin Luther King approach, to embracing nepotism and attacking merit, which is the Jesse Jackson approach.

Isn’t it a problem when minorities are under-represented at selective colleges?
That depends on what is causing the under-representation. Consider the example from the National Basketball Association. African Americans represent 12 percent of the population, yet more than 75 percent of professional NBA players are black. Is this a problem? Why aren’t people demanding to see more Jews and Koreans on the courts? The reason is that people recognize that merit is producing the disparate outcome. If teams pick the best passers, dribblers, and shooters, then it doesn’t really matter that one group is over-represented and other groups are under-represented because merit, not discrimination, determines the result. Similarly, if a larger percentage of white and Asian American students are getting into Berkeley on merit, that is a result we should be willing to live with.

Why not raise the floor for under-represented groups?
Because college admissions is a zero-sum game. Every seat that is given to a black or Hispanic student with weaker
qualifications must be taken away from an Asian American or white student with stronger qualifications. In short, there is no way to raise the floor without lowering the ceiling. It’s an algebraic impossibility. Therefore, much as we’d like to see more black and Hispanic faces at top schools, this result should not be achieved by unjustly rejecting better-qualified Asian Americans and whites.

Can’t you support any form of affirmative action?
In my previous work I have written in favor of affirmative action based not on race but on socioeconomic status. If a student who comes from a disadvantaged background and goes to a lousy school nevertheless scores in the 90th percentile on the SAT, he or she may have more college potential than another student who comes from a privileged background and scores in the 95th percentile. So colleges can and should take socioeconomic circumstances into account. Remember, too, that more blacks and Hispanics would be eligible for socioeconomic affirmative action, since blacks and Hispanics disproportionately come from the ranks of the poor.

How does affirmative action hurt blacks?
African Americans face two serious problems in America today. The first is “rumors of inferiority.” Many people don’t like Koreans or Pakistanis, but hardly anyone considers these people inferior. With blacks, however, there remains a widespread suspicion that they might be intellectually inferior. Far from dispelling this suspicion, affirmative action strengthens it. Affirmative action conveys the
message to society that “this group is incapable of making it on its own merits.” Racial preferences are a sort of Special Olympics for African Americans. Such preferences devalue black achievement, and they intensify doubts about black capacity.

The second problem facing African Americans is cultural breakdown: high crime rates, broken families, illegitimacy, and so on. These cultural problems are in my view the main reasons blacks do poorly on many measures of academic achievement and economic performance. The way to improve black performance is to address this cultural breakdown. Racial preferences are a distraction from this challenge. They create the illusion that blacks are performing poorly due to racism. By rigging the race in favor of blacks, affirmative action policies prevent African Americans, and society in general, from doing the hard and necessary work of building African American cultural skills so that blacks can compete effectively with whites and other groups.

If affirmative action hurts blacks, why do blacks support it?
The reason is that affirmative action provides short-term gains. Imagine the situation of a liberal who approaches me and says, “Dinesh, you are a victim of hundreds of years of British imperialism. I am going to pay you $3,000 a month to compensate for this historical crime.” Now imagine that the liberal’s offer is challenged by a conservative who says to me, “Dinesh, don’t take the money. You don’t really need it. You have had a good education and can compete on your own merits. Also, the subsidy may
prove to be a disincentive for you to become self-reliant.” I would thank the conservative for his troubles and take the liberal’s money!

What about the success stories of affirmative action?
They do exist. I recently spoke at Deerfield Academy, where a black student said to me, “I didn’t have the academic credentials to get into Deerfield. I was admitted on a special program for minority students. But now I have an A-grade average. I am vice president of my class. I am on the track team. Am I not a success story of affirmative action?” I told him, “Yes, you are. But here you are at one of the best prep schools in the country. Do you want another preference to get into Princeton? And another one to get into Yale Law School? And another one to get a job? And another one to get a promotion? And another one to get a government contract? That’s not right, my friend. You have been given a break and you have taken advantage of it; now you should be willing to compete on your own merits, and may the force be with you.”

Dear Chris,

You say in your letter that you are more worried about the feminists than about the black activists. I am not, for the reason given several years ago by, of all people, Gerald Ford. Ford said there would never be a war between the sexes because there is too much fraternizing with the enemy. Gender conflict simply does not pose the same dangers of social balkanization that are produced by racial conflict. Let me try, nevertheless, to meet your request and give you an account of what’s wrong with modern feminism.

The feminists at elite universities are, by and large, an angry bunch. This seems odd, because they are paid very well and are living very well. These feminists communicate their anger in very nice lounges over expensive meals and fancy cocktails. Their “martini rage” is directed against such things as “institutional discrimination.”
Why aren’t more women teaching math and physics? Why aren’t more female thinkers being assigned in the philosophy and literature departments? Why do women earn seventy cents for each dollar earned by men?

The answer to these questions is obvious, yet one is not supposed to say it. Let me give the answer obliquely by turning to a writer whom feminists greatly admire. In her book
A Room of One’s Own,
Virginia Woolf raised a provocative question: Why is there no female Shakespeare? What if Shakespeare had had a sister, Woolf speculates, would she have become a writer and won the same fame as her brother William? Woolf answers that there is no female Shakespeare because women have historically not been given rooms of their own—that is to say, the opportunities and resources and leisure—in which to write.

Woolf may have provided a satisfactory explanation for the absence of a female Shakespeare, but underlying this explanation is a hard truth: There is no female Shakespeare! This means that literature courses, if they are based on merit, are going to be heavily weighted toward male authors. And what is true of literature is even more true of philosophy and science.

What about the earnings discrepancy? The seventy cents figure that feminists have publicized is accurate enough, but it carries the presumption that women are earning 70 percent of what men earn for doing the same job. In fact, this is not true. Where is the evidence that
the U.S. government or U.S. companies systematically pay men more than women to perform identical jobs? It does not exist. The statistic means that on average women earn less than men. But should we be surprised that female executive assistants make less money than male executives? Reasons for the male-female earnings difference could be that women choose different fields than men, that women sometimes drop out of the workforce to raise children, and so on.

But there is another factor that could help to explain why, at the most advanced levels of academic and economic performance, men tend to do better than women. This factor is intelligence. I am not suggesting that men have higher IQs than women. On the contrary: Countless studies have shown that men and women have the same average IQ of 100. Upon closer examination, however, we see that IQ is distributed differently among women than among men.

Male and female IQ can be plotted on a bell curve. The mean score for the two groups is the same, but the bell curves look different. The female bell curve is taller and narrower; the male bell curve is shorter and flatter. This means that female performance tends to congregate around the mean, whereas among men, there are many more geniuses—and many more dummies. I believe this finding is confirmed by experience. Men tend to win the literature prizes and the Westinghouse Science Awards, but men are also over-represented among the truly dumb. When I walk into a social gathering, I
am pretty sure that the most exceptional person there is going to be a man and that the biggest idiot there is also going to be a man.

Another indication of male over-representation at the lower end of the bell curve can be seen in crime rates. A large body of research shows that criminals are, in general, very dumb people. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of criminals are men. Incidentally, John Gotti, the Mafia don, was tested at school and had an IQ of 109. How, then, did he become the most powerful figure in the Mafia? Because an IQ of 109 puts him in the genius category for the criminal class!

All this brings me to the feminist mistake. Women and men once had separate domains. The female domain was the private world of home and family, and the male domain was the public world of work and politics. Each world had its own value, and the two could not be rightly compared; indeed, in some respects the female world could be considered more consequential. As one male wag said to his wife, “You decide what we eat for dinner, which church we attend, and where we go for vacation, and what our children should study, and I decide whether we are for Mr. Dewey or Mr. Truman.”

Then something happened that pushed women into the male sphere, and career women aspired to compete effectively with men for the most lucrative rewards of the male sphere. According to feminists, the large-scale movement of women into the workforce was the consequence of the great feminist revolution that stormed the
barricades of the patriarchy and won a glorious victory, although the battle is ongoing. This is a lovely fairy tale, but when exactly did the battle occur? How many people were killed? Why did the entrenched patriarchy put up so little resistance?