My Thoughts on the Affirmative Action Debate (Response to Aara and Shaira but was too long to post as a comment) - Josh Morganstein

 Hi Aara and Shaira, 

Great blog posts. Your discussion of affirmative action reminded me of the part of the Harris reading where she says: “Whiteness as property continues to perpetuate racial subordination through the courts’ definitions of group identity and through the courts’ discourse and doctrine on affirmative action” (Harris 1758). It also made me think of Harris’s claim that “affirmative action is required on both moral and legal grounds to de-legitimate the property interest in whiteness” (1779). Harris makes a compelling case for affirmative action in principle: if the value of whiteness can be quantified, then affirmative action can be justified to remedy not only past injustice but the current hierarchy of value vis-á-vis social identity. However, I am struggling to apply the theoretical argument for affirmative action (as articulated by Harris and Aara) to prove why the United States should keep/implement affirmative action (from a practical perspective). 

Even if one grants that affirmative action is righteous in principle, any race-based affirmative action policy still suffers from the disadvantage of being a poor public policy. Obviously, this statement is up for debate, but I would challenge those who disagree with it to point to scholarly literature from the policy sciences backing affirmative action (rather than legal/philosophical arguments for affirmative action or opinion pieces published in news outlets). The more one looks at critical evaluation of race-based affirmative action from a policymaker's perspective, rather than an academic's perspective, the more quickly its flaws are revealed. From a policy design perspective, race-based affirmative action can quickly become ineffective and counterproductive, because its inclusion and exclusion errors are extraordinarily high (especially in comparison to other social welfare policies). 

For policy designers of social welfare programs, targeting is the primary concern. Policymakers have to work hard to maximize the accuracy of targeting, which they do by limiting exclusion errors (those who should benefit from your policy but don’t) and inclusion errors (those who benefit from your policy but shouldn’t). Affirmative action, by virtue of being a crudely constructed group-based exercise, features very high inclusion errors. Even if it primarily targets deserving individuals, inevitably a swath of individuals who profit from race-based affirmative action will not be the intended subjects (perhaps they are already quite wealthy, or their family came to the United States after segregation had already been ended). One can easily make the argument that they still deserve to benefit from affirmative action because they still face disadvantages based on race, but that objection misses the point. The disadvantages those individuals face do not compare in magnitude to those whose ancestors were enslaved, or those who must face obstacles related to both racism and poverty. A race-based affirmative action policy (whether employed by a university or government program) makes no distinction as to the level of injustice. Furthermore, the disadvantages faced by these individuals (from a purely historical race-based perspective) can also hardly compare to the plight of many Asian Americans (as mentioned in Shaira’s blog post) who are routinely discriminated against in affirmative action programs. 

The larger issue with affirmative action targeting is the existence of exclusion errors. If the true goal of social welfare policy is to maximize equality of opportunity (as affirmative action purports to do), it is foolish to implement race-based affirmative action rather than class-based affirmative action. Aara admittedly addresses this point, saying that poor white communities are not poor because of “racial subjugation.” But again, if the goal is to maximize equality of opportunity (to use Harris, read: distributive concerns), why does the form of oppression matter, rather than the magnitude of the oppression? If the goal is to rectify historical injustice (to use Harris, read: corrective/compensatory concerns), then why disadvantage Asians through affirmative action? If the point of an affirmative action policy is some combination of both aims, as I suspect it is, then a class-based affirmative action program is far superior (as measured by how well it achieves those aims). Indeed, because race impacts class, black Americans will by and large be the beneficiaries of a class-based affirmative action program (but the inclusion and exclusion errors will be reduced drastically).

Far from radical, class-based affirmative action coupled with strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws such as the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act was proposed by Martin Luther King in his 1964 book “Why We Can’t Wait." In it, he argues for A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged of all races. From a policy perspective, class-based affirmative action makes far more sense, given that (as Richard Kahlenberg noted for the Economist in 2018) “being economically disadvantaged in America poses seven times as large an obstacle to high student achievement as does race.” Kahlenberg argues that class-based (rather than race-based) affirmative action in Harvard Admissions, for example, would not only increase the share of underrepresented minority students  (from 28% to 30%) but also the proportion of first-generation college students (from 7% to 25%).

Race is undeniably important, and race relations have been a central factor in shaping the course of U.S. history. As Harris compellingly argues, there may indeed be quantifiable benefits of whiteness. But that does not mean that the opposition to affirmative action must be grounded in "the illusion that the original or current distribution of power, property, and resources is the result of 'right' or 'merit'" (Harris 1781). It also certainly does not mean we should embrace a flawed policy, especially when better options are available.