WASHINGTON — In the angst-tinged aftermath of last week’s Supreme Court affirmative action rulings, we would do well to separate two important questions.
The first — whether there is racial disparity — is easy, and the clear answer is yes. In almost every aspect of American life — employment, housing, wealth, as well as graduate and undergraduate college admissions — blacks lag behind whites.
The other question is: Why?
The answer isn’t as easy as affirmative action advocates (and I include myself in the category) sometimes make it out to be. We usually begin with the assumption that the deck is stacked against minorities and without some intervening mechanism, white-run institutions will revert to their "natural" preference for whites.
The assumption is validated over and over — by every careful test of applicants for jobs or apartments and by our ordinary experience. That is why it makes sense to us that — at least for a time — a subtle thumb on the scale might serve the interest of justice. We need a mechanism to keep people from reverting to form.
But the case of undergraduate admissions seems different. Here, we have screeners who want minorities admitted. The whole court case was whether admissions officers at the University of Michigan went too far to see to it that minorities — blacks especially — were admitted.
How reasonable can it be to conclude that, because the court has made it more difficult for them to do what they clearly would like to do, they will now revert to form and discriminate against black applicants?
Yet most of us expect that, as a result of the court’s ruling, there will be a decline in minority admissions at the University of Michigan and, by extension, at other highly competitive public universities subject to last week’s ruling.
And the question is: Why? Why, if admissions officers want black kids in and have demonstrated their willingness to do anything legal to get them in, do we expect their numbers to decline? Since it can’t be racism on the part of the screeners, what can it be?
Our usual answer is that it has to do with earlier denial of opportunity — less adequate elementary and secondary education in poor neighborhoods, relative economic and political powerlessness and, finally, the lasting psychic injuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Our children deserve a break today because they have inherited through us the debilitations of white bigotry.
I’m reminded of psychologist Abraham Maslow’s brilliant insight that if the only tool in your kit is a hammer, all problems tend to look like nails. I’d amend that to say that if your only explanation for racial disparity is racial bias, all difference looks like racism.
We used to think the problem was economics. But when the University of Texas tried to use poverty as a proxy for race (after a federal circuit court ruling outlawed the university’s affirmative action plan), it found that the chief result was that more poor white kids were being admitted.
Moreover, black affluence doesn’t seem to make the difference we always imagined it would. Harvard University’s Ronald Ferguson has surveyed 34,000 middle- and high-school youngsters in 15 affluent and racially mixed communities around the nation and he has found a consistent achievement gap: whites averaging B-plus, blacks C-plus.
As the professor told Michael Winerip of The New York Times, economic differences could account for no more than half the gap. What might account for the rest?
Twenty-two percent of the black households surveyed had no computer, compared to just 3 percent of whites. Forty percent of black households owned 100 or more books; 80 percent of the white families did. Fifty-three percent of the black children live in homes from which at least one parent is absent, but only 15 percent of white kids.
There’s more — a good deal more. And yet at the end, Ferguson, who is black, does what figure skaters used to call the "compulsories." "Politically," Winerip wrote, "he believes the damage from two centuries of slavery plus legalized segregation will not be undone in a generation, not even in suburbia. On a personal level, he has studied the data for ways to narrow the gap."
The work of Ronald Ferguson suggests to me that the fight over undergraduate affirmative action is a diversion. There are serious problems facing black children, and, at the risk of seeming to blame the victims, there are serious things black parents can do about them.
But our toolboxes will have to include more than just the hammer of racial accusation.
William Raspberry can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or willrasp@washpost.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
