In his New York Times column,
Ross Douthat looks at affirmative action in 2028 -- the year
Sandra Day O'Connor promised us we wouldn't need affirmative
action anymore. (What? That sounds more like a policy judgment
that should be made by an accountable elected official than a
reading of the law by a judge? Well, grow some empathy!)
Douthat's analysis is spot-on, but two points that he tiptoes up
to deserve to be made explicit. The first is the role of class.
There's a certain irony in white liberals employed at elite
institutions at which women and minorities are frequently
underrepresented
railing against "white skin privilege." Most of them got to
work at these institutions after graduating from fine colleges,
to which they were admitted after performing well on the SATs and
AP exams -- two exams that would surely fail any "disparate
impact" test. But that's okay because that's
meritocracy. White skin privilege is when a bunch of boring
blue-collar "fire buffs" who study fire
manuals and stuff pass tests to qualify for jobs that some
politically connected minister would prefer to see his buddies
get.
The second point that deserves amplification is affirmative
action as a "source of permanent grievance among America's
shrinking white population" that "corrodes the racial attitudes
of its victims." If Ricci-style racial preferences
continue after the United States becomes a minority-majority
country, it will fuel the growth and political viability of white
racialist politics. (Something like the British National Party
could happen here.) When American Renaissance-style
white nationalists make the argument that whites should organize
politically along racial bloc lines just like everybody else,
most whites roll their eyes because the beneficiaries of racial
preferences are more obvious than the victims. But a few more
decades of mass immigration plus affirmative action could change
that.
White nationalism would be very bad because, among other things,
when the former majority population of your country sees itself
as a distinct identity-politics group, you no longer have a
country. You are then reduced to a squabbling bunch of
identity-politics groups. For people who are rightly concerned
about the moral evils of racism, this possibility seems like
something more worthwhile to worry about than Richard Nixon's
"Southern Strategy," which got a bunch of white people who
supported George Wallace -- an actual segregationist -- to
instead vote for a Republican who helped create affirmative
action.
