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Sometimes doctrines just vanish, once they appear as naked as the proverbial emperor in his new clothes.<\/p>\n
Something like that seems now to be happening with affirmative action. Despite all the justifications for its continuance, polling shows the public still strongly disagrees with the idea of using racial criteria for admissions and hiring.<\/p>\n
Its dwindling supporters typically include those who directly benefit from it, or who are not adversely affected by it. Arguments for the continuance of affirmative action are half-hearted and may explain why some supporters descend into name-calling directed at those who dare question its premises.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court, by a 6\u20132 majority, recently upheld the decision by Michigan voters that their state would neither favor nor discriminate against applicants to the state\u2019s public universities on the basis of race.<\/p>\n
Recently, a group of liberal Asian-American state lawmakers in California \u2014 a state that is over 60 percent non-white \u2014 successfully blocked a proposed return to racial considerations in college admissions.<\/p>\n
Asian-American students are now disproportionately represented in the flagship University of California system at nearly three times their percentages in the state\u2019s general population.\u00a0<\/b>If race were reintroduced as a consideration for admission, Asian-Americans would have\u00a0their numbers radically reduced in the California system in favor of other ethnic-minority students, regardless of their impressive ethnically blind grades and test scores.<\/p>\n
Expect more such pushback.<\/p>\n
In the 1950s, when the country was largely biracial \u2014 about 88 percent so-called white and 10 percent African American \u2014 and when the civil-rights movement sought to erase historical institutionalized bias in the South against blacks, affirmative action seemed to be well intentioned and helpful.<\/p>\n
But more than a half-century later, and in a vastly different multiracial America, affirmative action has been re-engineered as something perpetual and haphazardly applicable to a variety of ethnicities.<\/p>\n
Class divisions are mostly ignored in admissions and hiring criteria, but in today\u2019s diverse society, they often pose greater obstacles than race. The children of one-percenters such as Beyonc\u00e9 and Jay-Z will have doors opened to them that are not open to those in Pennsylvania who, according to President Obama, \u201ccling to guns or religion.<\/p>\n
Race itself also is increasingly a problematic concept in 21st-century America. The more we talk about Latinos, blacks, Asians, and others as if they were easily distinguishable groups, the less Americans fit into such neat rubrics. In an age of intermarriage, assimilation, and global immigration, almost every American family has been redefined by members who are one-half this or one-quarter that.<\/p>\n
Yet if verifiable hyphenation is to be our touchstone to career or academic identity, how do we certify minority status in an increasingly intermarried and multiracial society where there soon will be, as in California, no majority ethnic group? Are we to wear DNA badges to certify the exact percentages of our racial pedigrees \u2014 to prevent another Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill from gaming the system?<\/p>\n
Affirmative action once was defended as redress for the odious sins of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. But almost 150 years after the end of slavery, and a half-century after the establishment of civil-rights legislation, it is hard to calibrate the interplay between race, relative past oppression, and the need for compensatory action.<\/p>\n
In a zero-sum, multiracial society, how do we best appreciate past suffering? How do we compare the Jewish\u00a0American whose grandparents were wiped out in the Holocaust with the grandchildren of those Japanese who were interned during World War II?<\/p>\n
If compensation is not historically based, what then are the criteria that calibrate ongoing victimization? Would a European-Argentinian immigrant with a Hispanic name be better qualified for affirmative action than a Bosnian Muslim refugee?<\/p>\n
Affirmative action was also predicated on America\u2019s history of discrimination. It was never intended to apply to those who had recently arrived in America without proof of past discrimination in this country.<\/p>\n
Who among the newly arrived immigrants from South Korea, Oaxaca, the Punjab, or Nigeria becomes eligible for affirmative action, and who does not \u2014 and on what reasoning are their claims of hardship more valid than those of poor fourth-generation Americans of any ethnic background?<\/p>\n
There is also not always consistency in the application of affirmative action. Late-night talk-show hosts are not proportionally racially diverse. Neither are Silicon Valley CEOs, the directorship of the Sierra Club, or employees of the U.S. Postal Service or the NBA.<\/p>\n
The public is confused about why we might consider ethnic criteria in hiring in the college anthropology department, but not so much when selecting transatlantic airline pilots, neurosurgeons, or nuclear-plant designers.<\/p>\n
Should gender considerations be used to encourage more males on campuses? Female bachelor\u2019s-degree recipients now far outnumber their male counterparts and are skewing notions of gender equality.<\/p>\n
Given these complexities and contradictions, the public, the Supreme Court, and state legislators increasingly believe that a multiracial United States is unique precisely because race and tribe \u2014 unlike most other places in the world \u2014 are incidental rather than essential to our American identities.<\/p>\n
The advice of Martin Luther King \u2014 judge Americans only by the content of their characters \u2014 is not only the simplest but in the end the only moral standard.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of<\/i>\u00a0\u00a0The Savior Generals<\/a>.<\/i>\u00a0You can reach him by e-mailing\u00a0author@victorhanson.com<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n \u00a9 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A problematic concept of an age of intermarriage, assimilation, and immigration. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0National Review Online\u00a0 Sometimes doctrines just vanish, once they appear as naked as the proverbial emperor in his new clothes. Something like that seems now to be happening with affirmative action. Despite all the justifications for its continuance, polling shows […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[111,383],"tags":[132,487,1036,1031,570,1042],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Tm","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3141,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/from-affirmative-action-to-diversity\/","url_meta":{"origin":7276,"position":0},"title":"From Affirmative Action to Diversity","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 21, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Sometime in the new millennium, \"global warming\" evolved into \"climate change.\" Amid growing controversies over the planet's past temperatures, Al Gore and other activists understood that human-induced \"climate change\" could better explain almost any weather extremity \u2014 droughts or floods, too much heat\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Race in America"","block_context":{"text":"Race in America","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/race-in-america\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3077,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-an-idea-why-affirmative-action-should-stop\/","url_meta":{"origin":7276,"position":1},"title":"The End of an Idea: Why Affirmative Action Should Stop","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 19, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media 2011, not 1970? We have had about a half-century of racial preferences and often unspoken but real quotas for hiring and admission based on racial identity. If the original intent was to level the playing field for African-Americans and Latinos, who had been subject\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Race in America"","block_context":{"text":"Race in America","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/race-in-america\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1207,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/slurs-replace-reasoned-debate\/","url_meta":{"origin":7276,"position":2},"title":"Slurs Replace Reasoned Debate","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 15, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media A McCarthyite Attack from the\u00a0Stanford Daily Recently, the\u00a0Stanford Daily\u00a0[1] accused me of being a racist for comments on the university in general that appeared here on\u00a0Works and Days, and were later excerpted in the\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0[2].\u00a0Here is the passage I wrote now in question:\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2010"","block_context":{"text":"October 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/october-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1293,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/diversity-inc\/","url_meta":{"origin":7276,"position":3},"title":"Diversity, Inc.","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 29, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online \u2018Affirmative action\u201d was the logical sequel to the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s. The initial reasoning was attractive enough. New guarantees of equality of opportunity were insufficient to achieve the promised social parity, given the legacy of slavery and the existence of ongoing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Human Rights"","block_context":{"text":"Human Rights","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/human-rights\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2699,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/lost-in-the-labyrinth-of-race\/","url_meta":{"origin":7276,"position":4},"title":"Lost in the Labyrinth of Race","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 31, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media The Sotomayor Nomination and the Politics of Racial Identity One of the unexpected results of the Sotomayor nomination is a refocusing on the politics of racial identity and the fossilized institutions of affirmative action \u2014 or the belief that the U.S. government should use\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2009"","block_context":{"text":"May 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/may-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8625,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/what-does-the-modern-malleability-of-gender-and-race-mean-for-the-future-of-affirmative-action\/","url_meta":{"origin":7276,"position":5},"title":"What Does the Modern Malleability of Gender and Race Mean for the Future of Affirmative Action?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 27, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ National Review Online In the present postmodern world, we are told that there is no such thing as a biologically distinct gender. 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