A little note on the beneficiaries of affirmative action

At the New York Times, Stephen L. Carter argues that affirmative action (as it’s currently constituted) does little to help the black poor:

Cheap is what we like. When political consultants say, “Programs for the poor are poor programs,” what they mean is that poverty plays poorly on the stump. Even John Edwards, in trying to focus the nation’s attention on poverty during his presidential campaign, proposed strategies like raising the minimum wage, which, while admirable, do nothing to help the poor and may, at the margins, even harm them.

University affirmative action programs, whatever their benefits, are no remedy for the problems of the black poor. Perhaps this is why Barack Obama has questioned publicly whether his children should benefit from them and also why leading voices on the black left — Cornel West comes to mind — have proposed that college admissions programs give preferential consideration based on economic class.

Maybe I’ve been reading a bit too much Orlando Patterson (or Bowen and Bok, for that matter), but I’ve never had the impression that affirmative action in college admissions was designed to even benefit the black poor, at least not in huge numbers.  Patterson argues (and I’m inclined to agree) that affirmative action in college admissions  was intended to increase the number of African-Americans (and women and other minorities) represented in elite colleges and professions.  This in turn, is supposed to have the effect creating a sort of institutional inertia, where the existence of African-Americans in higher positions makes it more likely that they will recruit other African-Americans to similar positions.  All in all, this is intended to aid African-American’s integration into a broader society from which they had traditionally been isolated.  And, as Patterson stresses, these policies were targeted at middle and working class African-Americans who otherwise could have worked their way up to elite circles, if not for institutional racism.

If that’s the case, then Carter’s op-ed is a little silly, since he’s basically arguing that affirmative action doesn’t do what it wasn’t intended to do in the first place.