Reihan is much, much too kind. I don’t pay him enough — especially given the slings and arrows being hurled our way. He’s so kind, in fact, that I will take up the gauntlet thrown down by Jonah Goldberg and defend Reihan’s view that affirmative action at elite universities is essentially a “sideshow,” and one that’s useless to disadvantaged minorities, because it only “affect[s] the miniscule segment of the population that has the chance to attend any selective school.”
Goldberg retorts that “I don’t think you can call the fight for how our leading civilizing, culture-transferring and, yes, wealth conferring institutions pick and choose their students a ‘sideshow.'” Now, I’d be the last to disagree, for obvious reasons. But the point that Reihan is making, I think, is that for all intents and purposes, “our leading civilizing, culture-transferring” institutions pick and choose their black students from the exact same pool as their white students — i.e. the meritocratic haute-bourgeoisie. (This article, I suspect, could have been written about the black population at almost any top-flight school.) With rare exceptions, the people that affirmative action is supposed to benefit don’t see any returns from Michigan Law School et. al. giving minority applicants a few extra points on the ol’ application score sheet. All those extra points do is churn the waters of the upper-middle-class a little.
POINTLESS PREFERENCES: So the affirmative-action-at-elite-schools debate is a “sideshow,” because it has no serious impact on how race, and more importantly class, are lived in America. This suggests, first of all, that liberals should stop racing to the barricades every time somebody hints that racial preferences might not be a good idea — at least if they really want to reduce racial inequality, rather than just feel good about how diverse the Brown student body looks in its Yearbook photo shoots. But it also suggests that there might be more profitable ways for the Right to spend its time than railing against the injustice of Stanford Law daring to pick a black kid with a 3.6 GPA instead of a white kid with a 3.8. Sure, it’s unjust . . . but it’s also not that important. And pointing out how unimportant it is, and how ineffective such programs are, might be a better way to the hearts and minds of minority voters than just repeating the “color-blind society” mantra and waiting for Sandra Day O’Connor to retire.
— Ross Douthat
The Dish 