Affirmative Action III

 

I’m Sorry

I'm sorry, so sorry
Please accept my apology
But love was blind
And I was too blind to see

Oops I made a mistake, but IMHO so did the Supreme Court!

I took the position that Affirmative Action is always a good thing in a previous blog post,  https://dbeagan.blogspot.com/2022/08/affirmative-action.html, while the US Supreme Court overturned Affirmative Action in its 2024 opinion on college admissions.  IMHO, we were both guilty of being false. I was being a false positive. I was saying that Affirmative Action was always being used for good, and therefore the decision was wrong. The Supreme Court was saving that Affirmative Action is always bad, and IMHO that is a false negative. As it turns out MIT and other elite schools are finding that the racial constitution of the incoming freshman classes is less diverse racially, but is more diverse economically.  Huh?

There is a wealth inequality in the United States that has a racial component. On average Whites are wealthier than Blacks and Hispanics.  But that doesn’t mean that some Blacks and Hispanics aren’t wealthier than some Whites. What the elite colleges were apparently doing is admitting the wealthiest minorities. In that fashion they could be more racially diverse, but NOT more economically diverse. If they had used NO bias, the incoming class should be just like the overall society. By only admitting wealthy minorities, those colleges could be more diverse racially, while being not being economically diverse. The lack of Affirmative Action, as it was being used in admissions, just  might have highlighted the fact that colleges were being less diverse than the general population when it comes to wealth, even if they appeared to be closer to the general position for minority status. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., the goal is to judge on “the content of one’s character, not the color of one’s skin.”  

So is the goal of Affirmative Action wrong? IMHO, not in the least. 

Was the way in which it was being administered producing a false positive? Apparently.