And Justice for All (Page 3)

So what do Americans really think of affirmative action? It depends on how you pose the question. In 2003, Anderson reports, "opinion polls found that Americans approved 2 to 1 of 'programs designed to increase the number of black and minority students'; the same people disapproved 3 to 1 of 'giving preferential treatment' to minorities and that included a majority of minority respondents." At the end of two generations' debate about racial and social justice, it would seem, Americans emphatically approve of affirmative action programs, even as they passionately oppose any race or gender "preferences" that would make affirmative action programs work.

Thomas Sowell, a prominent black conservative sociologist at the Hoover Institution, has been arguing against affirmative action for more than thirty years, and in Affirmative Action Around the World, a couple of Sowell's arguments are incontrovertible. He's right, for example, that "no historic sufferings of blacks in the United States can justify preferential benefits to white women or to recently arrived immigrants from Asia or Latin America who happen to be non-white, but whose ancestors obviously never suffered any discrimination in the United States." He cites the federal largesse showered upon the Fanjul family of Cuban émigrés, who possess "a fortune exceeding $500 million" (but then so does Anderson, in the course of acknowledging that affirmative action, like any system, can be gamed by unscrupulous players). And Sowell is right that the implementation of affirmative action in the United States since the mid-1960s has gone well beyond the race-neutral language of the Civil Rights Act and LBJ's executive order 11246.

But Sowell is not content with merely plausible arguments; he wants to insist, by way of surveys of India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Nigeria, that "quotas and preferences" can lead to mass murder and civil war, as when Sri Lankan Sinhalese attempted to marginalize the dominant Sri Lankan Tamils by means of punitive quotas, and Tamils fought back with protests and guerrilla war, or when Malays instituted such a draconian set of "racial preferences" as to provoke an exodus of high-skilled Chinese from Malaysia. At times Sowell has the honesty to admit that he has no idea whether these "affirmative action" programs are the cause of all the civil unrest he documents: "If it is difficult to isolate the effects of preferences and quotas, as such, on Nigeria's troubled history, it is much clearer that the group polarization which preceded and produced the preferences and quotas has been deadly in its effects." But this is like saying that it's not clear whether we should attribute "race-related violence" in the United States to affirmative action or to slavery and segregation: While it's difficult to isolate the impact of affirmative action on America's troubled history, there's no denying that the group polarization that preceded and produced affirmative action--segregation, Jim Crow, lynching--has been deadly in its effects.

Yet when Sowell finally gets to discussing the United States, it turns out that affirmative-action-inspired mass murder and civil war are the least of our worries. Never mind that the quota systems of Nigeria and Malaysia have never been enacted here; never mind that while India has extended its terribly amorphous category of "backward classes," the United States has backed away from controversial practices like set-asides and race-norming. For Sowell, affirmative action in America is literally a question of life and death, as illustrated by the case of Patrick Chavis, a black man admitted to the medical school of the University of California, Davis, the same school that rejected Allan Bakke. For years, the liberal affirmative action establishment touted Chavis, as Sowell notes: "The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights made the usual comparison between Chavis and Bakke--to Chavis' advantage--in 1997, just two weeks before the Medical Board of California suspended Chavis' license to practice medicine in the wake of a suspicious death of one of his patients."

For Sowell, Chavis clinches the argument: "the role of academic institutions is not to play God in judging individual souls. It is, among other things, to see that people like Patrick Chavis do not end up with scalpels in their hands and 'M.D.' after their names to lure unsuspecting patients to their deaths." And Chavis is "not an isolated example"; on the contrary, Chavises have infected the system at every level, corrupting American meritocracy and placing us all at risk:

In other fields as well, it is the ignored third parties who have the biggest stake in what institutions of higher learning do and how well they do it. Applicants for engineering schools do not have nearly as large a stake as those millions of other people whose lives depend on the quality of the engineering that goes into the bridges they drive across or the planes they fly in or the equipment they work with.

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