Transcript
A (0:00)
Foreign. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the City Journal podcast. I am your host, Rafael Mingual, and I am so delighted to be joined again by one of my favorite colleagues, Heather McDonald. Welcome back, Heather.
B (0:17)
It's an honor to be with you, Rafael. Thank you for having me.
A (0:20)
I'm so excited to have you. Last time you were here, we talked a lot about criminal justice issues, policing. But I want to talk to you about your most recent book, When Race Trumps Merit. For those of you who don't know, it's right there in the background. It's an incredible read. You should absolutely get it. And you really dive into the problems with the kind of obsession with diversity and all of the problems that that leads to. And so I want to dive into that, and I want to start with the topic of affirmative action, which is one that's always interested me. It kind of helped bring me into some of these modern political debates when I was coming up as a teenager exploring some of these issues. And it got me to thinking about an interaction I had a couple years ago. I was sitting for a public conversation, semi deb with the former president of nyu, John Sexton, and we were discussing affirmative action. And he was taking the pro side, I was taking the con side. And his rationale was that there are distinct experiences that certain members of certain racial groups will have that they want to bring into the campus to enrich life on campus for everyone else who might not otherwise get exposed to people with those experiences. And that sounds really reasonable to a lot of people as a rationale for elevating race or ethnicity above, say, test scores when making decisions about who to admit into a university or college. And so I asked him, I said, well, just looking at me, knowing that I check these boxes, right, I'm, you know, Caribbean, Latino, of African descent. What can you tell me about my life experiences from having that? And of course, you know, he couldn't really answer the question. He waffled and, you know, sort of sidestepped. And I guess that's where I want to start. I mean, what is it that the sort of race obsessed get wrong in the context of affirmative action with respect to what they attach to race?
B (2:13)
Well, first of all, I try with myself to completely reject the term affirmative action because it is a misnomer. It deliberately sets up a misunderstanding. It arose in the 1960s when you really had the start of what were racial preferences. So it's really about racial preferences. But affirmative action included such relatively innocuous practices as doing more outreach, making sure that you're advertising for a job in a broader range of publications. And you're not just recruiting at Andover and Exeter, you know, great, you know, predominantly white prep schools for college or for jobs. And so I think there's probably a few people that are still misguided and hoodwinked by that term. What we're really talking about is lowering standards and giving preferences to one race or another. It is not just about making extra effort to recruit. So that having been said, the other aspect that is always underplayed in these debates is how great the skills gap is. You're right that there's a huge amount of stereotyping that's gone into the diversity rationale, which was developed by the Supreme Court in the Bakke decision where Justice Powell wrote the only decision that sort of got enough people sort of going on saying, well, actually you can't have a compensatory rationale for preferring blacks in racial admissions. That's not valid. And most people would have thought, well, I thought that's what this is all about is compensating for discrimination, for Jim Crow, for slavery. What he said is, no, the only valid rationale is diversity of the class. Exactly. What Sexton said is that this makes a more vibrant educational community. And in fact, it's more about helping whites than it is about helping blacks. But that does involve extraordinary group stereotyping. And yes, I know conservative blacks, I know liberal blacks, I know conservative whites, liberal whites. You can't necessarily predict the real problem in theory. If everything else was equal, okay, we'll have a thumb on the scale in favor of one group or another. We're not against diversity per se. What we're against is lowering standards. And the skills gap is so vast that in any institution to create anything resembling proportional representation of the so called underrepresented minorities, which is blacks, Hispanics, and there's a very small percentage of Native Americans, entails a dangerous, dangerous diminution of academic expectations. I'll just throw out one number or a few because again, I think most of the public has been kept in complete ignorance about what we're talking about here. The average black combined SAT score on a 1600 point scale, which is 800, is the perfect score on reading and verbal skills. 800 is the perfect score on math. So if you're Perfect, you get 1600. The average is around 1000. Black's combined score is 907. So on math they're less than 450 out of 800. That is really, really low. The Asian combined score is over 1200 66% of blacks in high school and 12th grade don't possess even basic 12th grade math skills, defined as doing arithmetic or being able to read a graph. And the number of blacks in the 12th grade who are actually advanced in math and is so small it doesn't even show up statistically on a national sample. So the problem is not only are you stereotyping, but worse, in any institution, you're bringing in people under a diversity rationale who are not competitively qualified, and that gets into the whole problem of mismatch. And in educational institutions, you're setting them up to fail, which is not doing them a favor.