July 22, 2009

• affirmative action

  The other day I heard an interview with Pat Buchanan discussing the nomination and likely acceptance of Sonia Sotomayor as supreme court justice. He was railing at the system that nominated a Latino woman that he considered undeserving.  In his considered opinion Sonia Sotomayor was solely a product of affirmative action and emblematic of a systemic problem in America whereby a white males in particular are discriminated against in the name of fairness. In his opinion there were white male justices who were smarter and better scholars than Sotomayor who should have been chosen to serve on the Supreme Court. And in fact Sotomayor admitted to getting into Princeton thanks to affirmative action which in his opinion was also completely unfair. So she shouldn’t even have had the opportunity to go to that great school let alone do so well in that and her career that she might achieve a level of excellence enabling her to be considered for the highest court in the land.

  You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s the interview:

  Now you can easily find another segment where Rachel Maddow corrects many of the falsehoods Buchanan states in the interview. And that’s fine.  You should probably look it up and watch it. But for the purposes of this entry I don’t care.  Someone who feels descriminated against because of their race’s history and the color of their skin is unlikely to be convinced by the mere fact that slave labor did in fact contribute to the building of America or the fact that Sonia Sotomayor has a good legal record. That’s all ancient history. What they care about is that affirmative action right NOW is denying them jobs and opportunities that they might be more qualified for. They see Sonia Sotomayor as simply an example of a greater problem.

  It is to those who believe that, that I want to speak.

  Let’s start with the obvious example. College admissions. That’s the important one. The main example where many get the most upset. And is it hard to understand? Imagine a white male high school student who has a dream to attend a particular school only to find he has to work twice as hard to get in as a black female student trying to attend the same school. That would seem unfair on the surface. Two people, same academic records, one gets in, one doesn’t. Seemingly, the other variant characteristic is their racial heritage.

  But there’s a misunderstanding of perspective creating this concept of an inequity. It is not the case that schools are going through applications and tossing aside the ones that are from white students simply because they are white.  Nor is it the case that college admissions is a simple linear ranking system. Admissions departments don’t take all the student applications line them up in strict descending order from the ones who are “best” to the ones that are “worst” and then cut it off after they get the number they want to admit. That wouldn’t be the case even if affirmative action didn’t exist. That’s just not how they do it.

  Instead from what I recall of the admissions departments of the many schools I applied to they described the process as “holistic”. There was a lot of evasion and mumbo jumbo there but the basic principle that ends up coming to the fore is that they are for the most part working under a conception of a threshold system. They are looking for the subset of applicant students who meet the minimal capacity to succeed at the school. And then from that pool of applicants they are selecting the ones they want to attend.

  Interestingly that conception implies an immediate truth. That ALL of those who meet the threshold “deserve” to attend the school. They all have whatever weirdo characteristics the admissions officers believe make someone have the “right stuff” to do well at a particular school.  And in an ideal world, they all would be accepted to the school. Unfortunately, the world is not ideal. The number of slots is not sufficient to accept them all.

  What then happens is a winnowing. That winnowing would happen no matter what. Even if there was no affirmative action. Even if EVERY qualified candidate were white men. A good chunk of deserving people would not get into the school.  The only question then is, how do they select which of the subset is selected?

  Perhaps in an imperfect and yet perfectly fair world, the selection process would be fully random. But then someone who really is truly extraordinary would have to rely on a roll of the dice. Further more, the institution would be relying on a roll of the dice for their student body. It could get a student body with all kinds of random characteristics.

  Whether that’s fair or not it’s not rational to expect a school to make decisions on that basis. Instead, what happens is the school determines IT’S priorities. For private institutions that’s wholly their own business. For public/private institutions they are in part dependent on what the community in which they are situated wants.

  Is it any surprise then that one of those priorities happens to be cultural diversity?  Really. Schools want to attract more applicants and students want to go to a diverse school. Nobody wants to be the only black kid in the entire University anymore than they would want to be the only woman or the only man in a school. 

  Further more they want to create a certain kind of learning environment for the students. Diversity certainly increases student exposure to certain kinds of lifestyles, certain backgrounds and certain experiences. If a school is taking its job seriously of training up generations of well rounded knowledgeable individuals, then ensuring that that training does not occur in a monolithic cultural environment is essential. If a school only has students with similar backgrounds and similar ways of thinking then the students who graduate from that school will end up thinking the same way too.

  Undoubtedly there are other concerns the school uses besides diversity when picking the subset. It’s probably quite a tedious project. Likelihood of a particular student to get accepted somewhere else probably plays a part. Profit motives also probably plays a part. I mean schools need to stay in business. If a child is the child of a large donor that’s going to make them more likely to get in. Likewise if for whatever reason the school thinks this student or that student is more likely to be a high earner AFTER they graduate they will probably be more likely to get one of the precious acceptance slots. Similarly there’s also a needed degree of academic diversity required. Schools need a pool of accepted interested in each major or field they offer so as to ensure that classrooms are not empty or overfilled. They probably have an interest in showing up high on the college ranking lists so they have to accept a certain number of students with high SAT scores even if they think the test is pointless. The may even have a desire to choose students on each side of the political spectrum to ensure that both conservative and liberal voices are heard in the campus environment.

  And there could be any number of other considerations they might take into account. We just don’t know. Maybe they use all of these things I’ve said and maybe they use none of them and wholly different aspects.

  The point is, none of these criteria or whatever criteria they use are likely to be FAIR. It’s going to be the school’s choice based on what it wants to do and what it wants to accomplish. And that means a lot of people will be left out. And that includes black and latino men and women as well. Simply the fact that you worked your ass off in school is simply going to be no guarantee that you’ll get into the college you want. Affirmative action is just one of a whole plethora of likely unfair selection mechanisms that exist in a society.

  Actually in the case of college admissions to certain extent this is a good thing. And not just because it promotes diversity and helps eradicate a historical injustice. But also because a perfectly linear system would be even MORE unfair for everyone. Can you imagine a system that uses a basic formula based on gpa, sat scores, ap classes, and with points given to various extracurricular activities? It would be trivial for those who are in the know to game such a system to position their kids higher in the queue. Get kids into just the right activities that provide the most points and have them attend the schools that are weighted the highest or at which it is easiest to get the highest gpa. And contrary to what the company that produces it wants you to believe the SAT absolutely can be studied for to enhance your score. Basically that would create a bias toward the wealthy and most knowledgeable *parents* and not based on student ability at all. Such biases already exist but this would certainly exacerbate them.

  A threshold system is better. It ensures that no matter what the attendees are qualified. It just does away with the conception or the need to pit every student directly against the others to determine who is “best”. It acknowledges that people are in fact quite radically different and unique. When dealing with the numerous extraordinary students in the world the concept of being “better” losing all meaning. Is the kid who played in a professional orchestra while getting a perfect gpa better than the kid who held three jobs to support his or her family while getting a 3.9? Who can say for sure? The whole idea is absurd.

  Indeed the perfect example of why affirmative action is not such a horribly unfair system exists in Sonia Sotomayor herself.  I mean think about it, if we are saying that a linear system is or ought to exist for college admissions and Sonia Sotomayor should not have been accepted because her achievement level in High School wasn’t high enough, what are we really saying about such a system? That a woman who graduated at the top of her class at Princeton ought not to have been good enough to even attend that school? That a woman so capable that she worked her way all the way up to be in consideration of the highest court in the land should have been left out in favor of others who had higher GPAs? How does that make sense? If the system IS linear with the exception that Sonia Sotamayor was simply allowed to leap frog positions because of affirmative action, that would imply quite obviously that such a system is plainly broken. It is clearly wholly incapable of choosing the best students in the first place. Because a system that worked. One that did pick the best of the best and the brightest of the brightest would have put Sonia Sotomayor at or near the very TOP of the queue regardless of what some silly little high school statistics said about her. Because that’s what her actual performance indicates she’s more than capable of.

  Which brings me to the next example Buchanan brings up of affirmative action. Namely the choice of supreme court justice itself. He suggests that Obama used “affirmative action” to pick Sonia Sotomayor even when she was wholly undeserving to even be in consideration for the nation’s highest court. 

  Again he misses the forest for the trees. He seems to think that picking a supreme court justice is just like he thinks college admissions are, a completely linear system. That there is a one “best” choice for supreme court justice and that’s the person Obama should have picked.

  But anyone actually going through the process of picking the supreme court justice would know that there’s a whole pool of qualified applicants, men, and women, black, white, asian, latino, etc.  It’s just like making any other hard hiring choice. Lots of people deserve it. But only one person can get it. The President and his staff used his own judgment to winnow that pool down to just a few and ultimately to just one final nominee. But it cannot be said of any of those he considered that they were unworthy or undeserving.

  Now why did he happen to pick Sonia Sotomayor? Well that’s something you’d have to ask him. But it’s not a huge stretch to think that political motives did go into the decision. Because she was a latino woman and Obama probably was concerned both with the makeup of the court and with his future election bid.  But it’s ALSO probably the case that Obama had other things in mind which we can only guess at by looking at what kind of background Sonia Sotomayor has. Like it’s highly likely he wanted someone with a lot of judicial and legal experience, since Sonia Sotomayor has tons, more than most supreme court nominees. He probably wanted someone with a working class background who could thus be said to be connected to and understand regular people’s plights because that’s what Sonia Sotomayor has, a background fairly similar to his own. Lastly we might surmise that he wanted someone who understood that we really do bring to the table our own biases and preconceptions no matter how hard we try not to and that a good justice must acknowledge them and face them and try to take that into account when making a decision. We can surmise that from the fact that in speech after speech Sonia Sotomayor has been very clear in emphasizing those very points. It’s also hard to imagine just a general similarity in their political positions didn’t influence the decision process or a general sense of whether the President liked Sonia Sotomayor as a person.

  And are any of those reasons wrong? No. Are they unfair to all the other qualified applicants? Yes. In a sense. In that very sense that life itself isn’t fair. It’s irrational for anyone to expect the President to make a random selection from all qualified applicants. People always act in their own interests. But that DOESN’T MEAN Sonia Sotomayor doesn’t deserve it. From what we know of her background we can most definitely say that she most certainly DOES deserve to be a Supreme Court Justice.

  I am black. I was accepted to every college and university to which I applied including Princeton, Brown, and Swarthmore College.  I graduated at the top of my rather large high school class with a perfect gpa, my SAT scores were nearly perfect, and I got a 5 on every AP test I was allowed to take.  I also like to think I wrote pretty damn good admissions essays but who knows. But I didn’t have a lot of extracurricular activities and those that I had were rather cheesy academic type things that I barely applied myself to. My only awards and recognitions were academic. And I had to stretch to find other things to put on my application to make it look good and to make me seem more balanced.

  Do I think my being black probably made it easier for me to get accepted? Yes, probably. Do I think I might have gotten a couple of rejection letters had the process been a random selection of all qualified applicants or had affirmative action otherwise not existed? Yes, there’s a good chance of that. Do I think that there were some other applicants who probably deserved those acceptance slots as much as I did who didn’t get them? Undoubtedly. Were some of them, a large number of them in fact, white and in particular white males? I’m sure of it. There are lots of people who probably should have gotten in but either for lack of trying or the capriciousness of the system didn’t.

  But do I think for one second that I didn’t deserve to attend those schools? Do I think that maybe I wasn’t good enough to succeed at them or that they made a mistake in accepting me due to some absurd desire to make quotas? 

  NO.

  I totally deserved it. I earned my spot. That someone else may have deserved it too doesn’t in any way diminish my own RIGHT to it.

  And that’s the same thing for Sonia Sotomayor. We can talk about the theoretical background and the social and moral merits of affirmative action until we are blue in the face, and I’m happy to do so here or elsewhere, but none of that will ever change the fact that Sonia Sotomayor is as fully deserving to serve on the Supreme Court as anyone who has ever served.

  Anyone who uses affirmative action to suggest otherwise simply doesn’t know what they are talking about.

  • 6:34 pm
  • 3 Comments