Ross Douthat has opinions

Today we take a look at Ross Douthat’s scatjob on affirmative action. If you’re in a hurry (and Ross hopes you are), the takeaway is that affirmative action is bad because minorities will soon outnumber white people, and we have a black president, and white people don’t like affirmative action. As usual though, the devil’s in the details…

During last week’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Republican senators kept bringing the conversation back to 2001 — the year when Sonia Sotomayor delivered the most famous version of her line about how a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences” might outshine a white male judge.

It was left to a Democratic senator, Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, to ask about the much more interesting year of 2028.

Notice the really poorly executed year theme. Douthat really really wanted to make a year theme, but maybe he was too busy playing coy with Kathryn Lopez to flesh it out. Basically, he says: “Republicans asked Sotomayor about an event. This event happened sometime in time. Another event will happen in time that will be more interesting! 2028!”

By then, according to recent Supreme Court jurisprudence, some kinds of affirmative action may no longer be permissible. In 2003, writing for the majority in Grutter v. Bollinger, Sandra Day O’Connor upheld race-based discrimination in college admissions … but only for the current generation. Such policies “must be limited in time,” she wrote, adding that “the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

OK, so, pretty interesting question, at least. I’m not really sure what sort of mathematical model was used to get the 25 years figure. Presumably, you need to use numbers to get other numbers… maybe you’ll find this equation somewhere in the back of O’Connor’s notebook:

Amount of racism in college admissions = 25 – (1 x (Current year – 2003))

That would give you an answer of 2028.

It was a characteristic O’Connor move: unmoored from any high constitutional principle but not without a certain political shrewdness.

Did you at all consider the possibility, given the presumably weak math behind the calculation, that O’Connor was simply punting on the issue? To ‘expect’ is to look forward to a probable occurrence. That doesn’t mean it will definitely happen; it sounds to me like O’Connor is opening the question up for discussion at a later period. But hey, I’m just a blogger, not an op-ed columnist. (Also, don’t we want our judges to stick to constitutional principles?)

In a nation that aspires to colorblindness, her opinion acknowledged, affirmative action can only be justified if it comes with a statute of limitations. Allowing reverse discrimination in the wake of segregation is one thing. Discriminating in the name of diversity indefinitely is quite another.

Sure, I’m with that.

It’s doubtful, though, that Sonia Sotomayor shares this view.

Oh? Did she say something like, “I like discriminating in the name of diversity indefinitely?”

“It is firmly my hope, as it was expressed by Justice O’Connor,” she told Senator Kohl, “that in 25 years, race in our society won’t be needed to be considered in any situation.”

Uhhhhh, did I miss something? Maybe that should read “she told Senator Kohl while crossing her fingers and winking slyly at the Indefinite Diversity lobby.”

But O’Connor didn’t hope; she expected.

I want you to put yourself in Douthat’s shoes. You’re a syndicated columnist at the New York Times. The NYTimes website gets about 1.5-2 million views a day, not to mention the number of people who still subscribe to the paper version. I don’t know how many people click through to Douthat’s article, but let’s say it’s about a million. A million people will read your article. You can write about anything you fucking want. And the best thought you have, the most pressing topic, the real issue of the day, is niggling over the difference between “expect” and “hope”? Both want affirmative action policies to be irrelevant at some point. No one has any idea when that point will occur. One person happened to set an arbitrary date that they’ll never be held accountable for. SHUT UP.

And Sotomayor’s record suggests that there’s a considerable difference between these postures

So why didn’t you just start the editorial by talking about her record rather than making a huge deal about semantics? Oh, wait, you won’t talk at all for the rest of the article about her record either?

— that for the nominee, as for most liberal jurists, as long as racial disparities persist, so too must racial preferences.

O’Connor said she expected that in 25 years affirmative action won’t be necessary to “further the interest approved today.” Any guesses on what that interest is? I’m gonna take a stab and say it has something to do addressing existing racial disparities. Affirmative action is not a form of reparations – it’s not supposed to be in place until we feel we’ve made up for denying freedom to millions of people. It’s supposed to redress current disparities. So yeah, presumably, as long as these disparities exist, there can be a rationalization for affirmative action. And, to be fair, there is some nuance, in the sense that a racial disparity may exist not due to discrimination or other societal reasons (no one, for instance, is advocating taxing Asian-American students’ grades because they perform better than national averages). But we haven’t figured out a satisfactory way to measure how much disparity is caused by discrimination today, let alone forecast that for 25 years into the future. What’s informing your highly scientific views on this subject Ross? Your senior thesis on Rider Haggard?

This is the big question underlying both the “wise Latina” contretemps and the controversy surrounding Sotomayor’s role in Ricci v. DeStefano. Whither affirmative action in an age of America’s first black president? Will it be gradually phased out, as the Supreme Court’s conservatives seem to prefer? Or will it endure well into this century and beyond?

Does racial discrimination exist today? Yes (in the Supreme Courts view).
Does affirmative action help alleviate this in a constitutional way? Yes (ditto).
Is it both desirable and conceivable that racial discrimination won’t exist at some point in the future, thus rendering affirmative action obsolete? Yes (according to pretty much everyone mentioned in the op-ed)
Has Ross Douthat presented any reasonable way for identifying when this point occurs? No (but wait! He’ll try!)

[Two paragraphs skipped]

The nation’s largest states, Texas and California, already have “minority” majorities. By 2023, if current demographic trends continue, nonwhites — black, Hispanic and Asian — will constitute a majority of Americans under 18. By 2042, they’ll constitute a national majority. As Hua Hsu noted earlier this year in The Atlantic, “every child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.”

As this generation rises, race-based discrimination needs to go.

This is it. This is Douthat’s big thought. Stop the fucking presses. Discrimination of minorities is going to fade away because… there will be more minorities. Yup. There’s never been an example of a minority discriminating against and oppressing a minority. Can’t think of one. All Rwandans were born in a post-Tutsi generation. Iraqis today are born in a post-Sunni generation. Because that’s what matters when it comes to discrimination: sheer numbers. Not access to better opportunities or positions of power.

The explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to class-based affirmative action[.]

This explicit scale-tipping in college admissions should give way to another explicit scale-tipping that I like more.

A system designed to ensure the advancement of minorities will tend toward corruption if it persists for generations, even after the minorities have become a majority. If affirmative action exists in the America of 2028, it will be as a spoils system for the already-successful, a patronage machine for politicians —

THAT’S WHAT DISCRIMINATION IS. IT IS A SPOILS SYSTEM FOR THE RACE THAT WASN’T A BUNCH OF SECOND CLASS CITIZENS FOR CENTURIES. A system (even if it’s an implicit social construct) designed to ensure the advancement of a majority will also trend towards corruption. Is affirmative action going to solve every inequality ever? No, but if a patronage machine is going to exist anyway, I’d rather all races have a representative in it.

and a source of permanent grievance among America’s shrinking white population.

I’m gonna get to this stupid comment later.

You can see this landscape taking shape in academia, where the quest for diversity is already as likely to benefit the children of high-achieving recent immigrants as the descendants of slaves.

I really hate this higher education trope. “Oh, sure, Harvard has x% of black people, but they grew up in rich white neighborhoods. They’re not reaaalllly black.” What the fuck is really black? It’s like its not diverse unless black students are smoking crack and stealing hubcaps in between classes. It’s this illusion that affirmative action is leading universities to accept African princes instead of hardworking white kids from a poor exurbs. And that’s horseshit – if rich blacks are being admitted, it’s probably at the expense of similarly rich whites. Affirmative action isn’t supposed to solve the fact that top universities end up discriminating based on class. I fully support class-based affirmative action (or rather, a real public education system), but to suggest that race-based affirmative action is somehow mutually exclusive with class-based affirmative action is heinously disingenuous.

You can see it in the backroom dealing revealed by Ricci v. DeStefano, where the original decision to deny promotions to white firefighters was heavily influenced by a local African-American “kingmaker” with a direct line to New Haven’s mayor.

Saying that racism doesn’t exist because there’s a powerful African-American behind the scenes of one affirmative action case is like saying that racism doesn’t exist because white people will get fucked up in Compton.

You can hear it in the resentments gathering on the rightward reaches of the talk-radio dial.

Resentment. Permanent grievance. The Civil Rights Act was a source of permanent grievance for a lot of people. Gay marriage will be the source of permanent grievance for a lot people. Just because a lot of people don’t like something doesn’t mean that it’s wrong (or, if you want to take a more narrow view, that it’s unconstitutional). That’s why Supreme Court justices aren’t elected into office and serve for life.

And you can see the outlines of a different, better future in the closing passages of Barack Obama’s recent address to the N.A.A.C.P., in which the president presented an insistent vision of black America as the master of its own fate.

Obviously that’s a part of it. The question is how large is that part? The answer is you have no idea.

Affirmative action has always been understandable, but never ideal. It congratulates its practitioners on their virtue, condescends to its beneficiaries, and corrodes the racial attitudes of its victims.

Discrimination, psychologically speaking, has been comprehendible, but never ideal, less ideal, in fact, than affirmative action. Discrimination does all those three bad things, but even less justifiably. Yes, we wouldn’t need it in a better world, but you, Ross Douthat, have no idea what that better world will look like.

All of this could be defended as a temporary experiment. But if affirmative action persists far into the American future, that experiment will have failed — and we will all have been corrupted by it.

This is the central problem with “public intellectualism.” The New York Times published a piece, that came to the above conclusion but offered no rationales for doing so. Ross woke up and realized that his gut thought that affirmative action will corrupt, and he liked O’Connor’s obviously arbitrary 25 year limit. He wrote a piece. Lots of people read it. Everyone went about their business.

Now, I realize that racial integration is a complicated topic. It’s hard to write something rigorous in the span of 800 words. But then, can’t we just admit that? Can’t Douthat just write a piece that asks some interesting questions about affirmative action, and maybe states his gut opinion? Can his editor take a moment and think, why am I letting someone who has done no rigorous research on race in America write a piece title “Race in 2028”, when it’s unlikely that even experts in the field would have the smug confidence to predict where race relations will be 19 years from now? Or does Douthat just get it from his gut?