HBD Books

The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character and Other Lies

By Steven Farron

405 pp. Steven Locks Press 2005

Affirmative action is extremely unpopular with American whites across the political spectrum.  Americans generally tend to take liberals at their word when they say that race shouldn’t matter and healthy people don’t support discriminating against themselves.  Mitigating this anger are misconceptions about the extent of AA and its cost to society.  As one friend who agreed with me about affirmative action asked, “Is this really the biggest problem out there?”  In The Affirmative Action Hoax, we see that programs to increase the amount of minorities in colleges and high status occupations cost billions and have done no less than destroy standards in higher education.   Standardized tests are dumbed down so everyone can pass them.  Standards are lowered for minorities, and so less capable whites also become capable of slipping by leading to universal incompetence.  The Affirmative Action Hoax is a shocking wake up call to those who think that the costs to society are negligible.

The Birth of Affirmative Action: Dealing with the Jewish Problem

Affirmative action didn’t begin with the civil rights movement.  It started a time in American history almost incomprehensible to our minds; when college administration and other elites were willing to twist facts, change the rules and lie to discriminate in favor of Americans of European descent.

In the old days college admission was very simple.  People took the view that the best way to determine qualifications wasn’t through trying to measure subjective qualities like “leadership” but through looking at more objective criteria like grades and especially standardized tests.  Grades depend on factors like difficulty of classes taken and teacher judgement so standardized tests, administered and graded uniformly, became the favored way for colleges to select students.  This common sense observation has been proven through empirical research in modern times; thousands of studies show that standardized tests like the SAT and LSAT are the best predictors of academic success.

The problem started when too many members of the wrong group started qualifying.  Poor, immigrant Jews with Yiddish accents were beating rich WASPs by and measure of academic ability.  While Jews have never been more than 2 or 3 percent of the American population, by 1919 they made up 20 percent of Harvard and Brown, 25 percent of the University of Pennsylvania and 40 percent of Columbia.

To solve this problem the modern college administrative bureaucracy was born.  Columbia opened the first Office of Undergraduate Admissions.  These kinds of jobs proliferated and by the early 1990s we had gotten to the point where Stanford had an admissions staff of close to 7,000, more than the number of students enrolled.  In 1919, Columbia put together the first ever college application, becoming the first institute of higher learning to inquire about things like athletic participation and musical ability.  Other elite universities followed their lead.  They met their goals.  By 1932 the proportion of Jews admitted to Columbia had more than halved to 17 percent.  As direct quotas were hard to justify more subjective criteria for admission was used in order to mask discrimination.

Many college presidents and university staff were honest enough, at least in private conversation, to say that the goals were to reduce the proportion of their student bodies that came from the wrong ethnic stock.  Up to the present day the goals would stay the same but the beneficiaries and victims would change.  The  justifications would too depending on political feasibility.  The 1978 Supreme Court case of Bakke Vs. Regents banned explicit quotas but allowed things such as the desire to create a diverse student body into account.  The decision was reaffirmed in 2003.

Affirmative Action Admissions

Colleges claim not to have quotas.  They just take other factors into account when it comes to admissions.  Since whites and Asians admitted to every college looked at have better grades and test scores than Hispanics and blacks we’re supposed to believe that by coincidence Hispanics and blacks are always better able to meet non-academic criteria in a game that wasn’t rigged from the start.

The extent to which NAMs (Non-Asian minorities) need affirmative action is quite striking.  In 2002 the average SAT score of whites whose parents had no more than a high school diploma was 985.  The score of a black who had a parent with a post-baccalaureate degree was 954.  The average math scores for whites and Asians whose parents earned less than $10,000 a year were 497 and 518 respectively.  For blacks living in homes earning over $100,000 a year it was 490.  That’s why prefacing any discussion of racial differences by saying “some blacks are smarter than some whites” does nothing but obscure their extent.  While black physicists might be smarter than white criminals, what’s more interesting and relevant for policy is that the lowest white social classes are smarter than the highest black ones and have the lowest incomes relative to their IQs.  In other words, poor whites are the truly “disadvantaged” and blacks the most privileged members of American society.

These facts explain why those who love diversity can’t be talked into using race-blind quotas based on social class.  Someone with a superficial knowledge of the issues involved can be forgiven for thinking that because NAMs are disproportionately represented at the bottom of society they would most benefit.  In reality, the kids of white construction workers would be taking the places of kids of black doctors.

If universities could find a criteria by which to compare students that would admit more blacks and Hispanics without having to use race they would use it.  They can’t so rely on hollow arguments about “diversity.”  More blacks and Hispanics are good because it increases the amount of blacks and Hispanics.

The distribution of the bell curve means that because of the difference in average intelligence between the races when it comes to law schools the proportion of qualified whites to qualified blacks is enormous.  That’s why a defender of affirmative action admits that if law schools simply went by undergraduate GPA and LSAT scores statistics from one year show that almost 4/5 of blacks, 2/3 of Puerto Ricans and 1/2 of Mexicans and Native Americans admitted to law school wouldn’t have been accepted.  Even Asians get a slight edge.  Of those  blacks who ended up going to law school only 8.9 percent belonged there.  At the top sixth of law schools 17.5 times more blacks were admitted than would’ve been based on UGPA and SAT.  That’s another reason why mentioning that there are smart blacks in discussions about affirmative action misses the point.  It’s not just that a few are getting a break; if you meet a high status black and you assume that he got his position at the expense of a more qualified white or Asian the vast majority of the time you’ll be right.  The further he’s gotten in life, the less likely he is to have earned it by merit.

The reader may be convinced that AA can get NAMs into law school but believe that AA grading can’t exist on a large scale.  And I’m sure I wasn’t alone in thinking that for more scientific fields like medicine the nature of what’s being studied precludes widespread racial favoritism.  I was wrong.

Affirmative Action Grading

Affirmative Action grading doesn’t have to be official policy or even conscious.  Ken Harber wrote an essay filled with grammatical and content errors and gave it to 92 white college students to grade.  They were given different biographies of the author and some indirectly revealed that he was black.  On a scale of 7, papers that the white students thought were written by a black person got a grade of 3.5 and papers they thought were written by a white person got 2.7.  On the essays supposedly written by a white some students wrote things like “when I read college work this bad I want to lay my head down on the table and cry.”  The comments written on the essays supposedly written by a black were overwhelmingly positive.  The mystery of how Michelle Obama could graduate from Princeton while not mastering basic English is solved.

AA isn’t limited to unscientific fields like law.  The president of Harvard personally intervened to give a medical degree to a black student who had failed the qualifying exam five times.  When a professor from Harvard Medical School came forward with evidence that they were giving degrees to unqualified blacks the National Medical Association said that his “innuendos are evidence of the inhumanity of some humans.”

White guilt is not just a cliché.  It has become the driving force behind what is taken for morality and charity in the contemporary US.  The American Society for Microbiology, American Chemical Society and Society of Neuroscientists all offer scholarships for minorities.  The competition for the hundred or so black engineers who graduate from historically black Howard University each year is so intense that the president of the school felt comfortable telling companies that they could increase their chances of landing black employees by donating to the university.  Businesses pay diversity consultants $2,000 to $10,000 a day to tell their workers things like standards for punctuality and grammar are racist.

And despite it all, minorities are still underrepresented in the highest paying professions.  If you start from the assumption that all races are equally intelligent and hard working, the official dogma accepted by conservatives and liberals alike, you’d think that it’s they who are discriminated against.  It’s the lie of inherent equality that leads to all the others.  Minorities have been given more than a fair shot at making it in America.  The relatively biologically gifted, like the Asians and Jews, have capitalized while others have not.  This drives those who see equality as an ideal insane.  As H.L. Mencken said “Injustice is relatively easy to bear, what stings is justice.”

Trying to Avoid Defending Whites: Faux Arguments Against Affirmative Action

One of the most insidious arguments against AA is that it really hurts minorities, who suffer from lowered expectations.  Blacks in positions of power and influence certainly don’t seem to lack self-esteem.  Republican affirmative action beneficiary Colin Powell told blacks who have the problem to “get one of those well-paying jobs (through affirmative action) to pay for all the therapy they’ll need to remove the stigma.”

If affirmative action was really about correcting inequalities we’d expect Asians to suffer more than relatively lower performing whites.  In 1992 1.55 as many Asians were admitted to law school then qualified by objective criteria compared to 0.8 whites.  When Berkeley was accused of discriminating against Asians, they were 21.2 percent of the entering class despite being 8.6 percent of California high school graduates.  Whites were 61.1 percent of California’s high school graduates but 32.6 percent of Berkeley freshman.  It seems that AA benefits Asians in professional school and at elite universities but elsewhere the evidence is more ambiguous.

As Farren writes, the reason that even conservative critics of affirmative action latch on to the argument that Asians are the main victims is the same reason that they need to act as if it hurts blacks.  Nobody wants to be caught dead defending white people.  This defends my theory that an underlying axiom of all political discussion is that whites are second class citizens. At least when Jews were victims of discrimination people weren’t ashamed to defend them.

Things Can Get Worse

Whites may assume that as America become more diverse racial preferences and classifications will become indefensible and obsolete.  There’s no reason to believe this.  Malaysia practices preferences for a 60% majority.  They feel no need to make up lies about standardized tests being biased or institutional discrimination to justify themselves.  Ethnic Malaysians have the numbers and power to help themselves, so they do.  This behavior is politics as usual and completely unremarkable for non-Western people.

But like America, the high IQ in Malaysia (in their case, the Chinese), rise to the top despite whatever obstacles are put in front of them.  There’s too much of a profit incentive to ever completely get rid of objective standards.  Things certainly can get worse but we’re a long way away from white Americans being totally helpless.