There is much To be said on both sides of the affirmative action debate. But one of the most troubling things about that debate has long been the fundamental dishonesty-or, at best, obfuscation-resorted to by many advocates of racial and sexual preferences.
President Bill Clinton’s long-awaited July 19 speech on affirmative action is a case in point. Through sly semantic sleight of hand, the president sought systematically to deny or obscure what every honest student of affirmative action preferences knows: In a great many (and perhaps most) cases, such preferences discriminate on the basis of race or sex against whites or males, in favor of minorities or women who are no better-and often demonstrably less-qualified in terms of relevant skills and experience.
To illustrate, it’s worth deconstructing one sentence from the president’s speech in some detail: "There are people who honestly believe that affirmative action always amounts to group preferences over individual merit; that affirmative action always leads to reverse discrimination; that ultimately, therefore, it demeans those who benefit from it and discriminates against those who are not helped by it."
The president went on to say that such criticisms were wrong. He was correct in a narrow literal sense, but only because somebody stuck the word "always" into his speech text to save the quoted assertion from logical indefensibility.
Clinton’s clear purpose here, however, was not to make the trivial claim that affirmative action does not always involve elevating "group preferences over individual merit" or "discriminat[ion] against those who are not helped": It was to imply that such phenomena are relatively rare and abusive exceptions, not the rule.
If words are to be given their ordinary meanings, the president’s implication was false, almost by definition.
When minorities or women win jobs, promotions, contracts, places in universities, and other opportunities solely on the basis of merit, there is no affirmative action preference. Conversely, most of the affirmative action programs defended by the president operate by allocating opportunities based on race or sex ("group preferences") at the expense of whites (and sometimes Asian-Americans) or males who otherwise would have won out based on selection criteria like skills, experience, and educational attainment ("individual merit").
Take, for example, the Piscataway, N.J., school district’s decision, which the Clinton Justice Department is defending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, to lay off a white teacher instead of a black teacher with virtually identical seniority and qualifications. The while teacher would ordinarily have had a 50-50 chance to keep her job, based on a coin flip. But she was denied that opportunity because the school district wanted to maintain "diversity" in its business department, and white was the wrong color.
ORWELLIAN SEMANTIC DODGES
Reasonable people disagree as to whether the school district’s decision is defensible. But could President Clinton look the white teacher in the eye and deny that her layoff involved racial discrimination? Only by resorting to a species of sophistry that civil rights groups have practiced for many years: In his speech, the president rationalized his facially untenable suggestion that his brand of affirmative action involves no "reverse discrimination" by implicitly amending the ordinary meaning of those words.
What most people mean by "reverse discrimination" is the practice of treating whites or males worse, on account of their race or sex, than similarly situated and similarly (or less) qualified blacks or females. That’s precisely what affirmative action preferences do, in every case.
But in the president’s lexicon, only "the unjustified preference of the unqualified over the qualified" amounts to reverse discrimination. He does not mention-and clearly approves-the far more common place preference of "qualified" minorities over equally or better-qualified whites, a practice systematically engaged in by (among others) many federal procurement programs and every elite university in the country.
The president’s implicit redefinition of terms like "discrimination" is typical of the Orwellian semantic dodges long resorted to by advocates of preferences. First, they redefined "quota" to make its meaning so narrow- a rigid numerical target that mandates the hiring of utterly unqualified candidates-that a quota is harder to find than a unicorn. Then they redefined "qualified" to make its meaning so broad as to encompass almost everybody, while tarring as "discriminatory" any measure of qualification that fails to produce racially proportionate results.
And now some preference mavens are on the attack against the term "preference" itself, which they call an unfairly pejorative-apparently because it’s all too accurate-description of what many affirmative action programs do.
"The purpose of affirmative action," President Clinton said at another point in his speech, "is to , . ." finally address the systemic exclusion of individuals of talent on the basis of their gender or race from opportunities to develop, perform, achieve, and contribute." He added that government contract set-aside programs had helped firms that "had been excluded from the old-boy networks" to get "a chance to compete, a chance they would not otherwise have had."
How does this inspiring vision square with, say, the racial preference that the Clinton Justice Department most recently defended in the Supreme Court, in Adarand Constructors v. Peñal The government had dictated the award of a guardrail subcontract on a federal highway project in Colorado to a small Hispanic-owned company instead of a small white-owned company that had made a lower bid. There was not a shred of evidence that the Hispanic-owned company had ever been "excluded" or subjected to discrimination of any kind. The only exclusion apparent in the record was that of the small white-owned company from the federal system of preferences available to small companies owned by minorities and women-who are presumed under federal law to be "socially and economically disadvantaged."
The president also suggested that preferences were warranted by such inequalities as the fact that "[t]he unemployment rate for African-Americans remains about twice that of whites," which he attributed to ongoing "systematic discrimination."
But ongoing discrimination is clearly not the main reason for high unemployment among blacks, and affirmative action won’t make much of a dent in it. Even if there were no discrimination, factors like relatively low educational achievement would make it hard for many blacks to compete for jobs in an economy in which education is ever more important.
I don’t mean to suggest that all forms of affirmative action involve racial or sexual preferences and discriminate against whites or males. There’s nothing discriminatory, for example, about accepting a poor student of any race instead of an affluent one with higher SAT scores, based on reasonable judgments that the poor student’s SAT scores were depressed by her disadvantaged background, that she is therefore likely to do better in college than the scores would indicate, and that she seems a better bet than the affluent student to seize the opportunity to excel.
Even some preferences that do in a sense discriminate against white males, like the hiring of black police officers to help patrol black neighborhoods instead of whites with higher test scores, may nonetheless be morally and constitutionally warranted by the peculiar demands of the job.
Such examples are not, however, representative of the aggressive use of preferences in pursuit of racial diversity for its own sake that is advocated by civil rights groups and blessed by President Clinton, despite the grave doubt that such programs can withstand the "strict scrutiny" mandated by the Adarand decision.
The president asserted that this aggressive brand of affirmative action "has worked" to open opportunities to minorities arid women. So it has. But it is also a zero-sum game: Every time-every time-an affirmative action program operates to award an opportunity to a minority or a woman who would have lost out in a race-blind, sex-blind process, it "works" by denying that opportunity to a white or a male with equal or better qualifications. As many people are hurt by preferences as are helped.
Of course, principled arguments can be made for even such clear reverse discrimination. They go something like this: Many minorities and women are still held back by pervasive patterns of racial and sexual bias that favor white males but are too subtle to be obvious or easily proven; government-mandated discrimination against white males is a necessarily crude way of balancing the scales. Such reverse discrimination against better-qualified whites and males is also necessary to provide diversity in the more affluent tiers of our society, and to open up enough opportunities to provide a sense of progress, inclusion, and hope for black people who still bear the adverse effects of the blatant, officially sanctioned discrimination that prevailed throughout most of our nation’s history.
But instead of acknowledging the hard trade-offs involved. President Clinton and other advocates of preferences wave the costs away by misrepresenting the facts and playing games with words. When it comes to truthfulness, the critics of affirmative action (or the better ones) have the high ground.
Why is this so"? It appears that the president and most other advocates of affirmative action have concluded that candor about how preferences actually operate will not sell politically or legally.
I’m not an affirmative action abolitionist. But the sophistry of the advocates may make me one. For if a policy cannot be sustained by honest advocacy, then perhaps it should not be sustained at all.