How important is racial diversity?
Over at Andrew Sullivan’s joint, guest-blogger Conor Clarke asks why we should “treat racial diversity as more important than other forms of diversity at a place like the Supreme Court?” His argument for why we shouldn’t actually makes a lot of sense: it makes sense to argue for affirmative action as a means to remedy certain historic disadvantages, but the picture becomes a little uneven when you’re pushing for affirmative action – and especially race-based affirmative action – as a means to increase diversity within a particular institution/industry. As Conor asks:
Why do we think racial diversity — as opposed to diversity of opinion, religion, sex, sexuality, age, language or class — is uniquely disposed to make an institution more effective?
My only answer to this is that given the unique role race has played in the country’s history, and given the tremendous differences in upbringing, life experiences and outcomes that are associated with race, it makes the most sense to focus on race as the chief means of diversifying an institution. By focusing on race, your chances of adding a significantly different perspective are a little higher than would be the case if you were focusing on another characteristic, again, given the country’s history.
Now, that said, I’m not sure if I’m convinced by that answer. If you’re thinking in terms of what would make an institution more effective, it’s not necessarily the case that racial diversity fits the bill. Indeed, if anything, it’s gender, class and educational diversity that is far more relevant to broadening perspectives and avoiding organizational pitfalls like groupthink. After all, its easy to imagine a racially diverse institution which, nonetheless, is fairly homogeneous in terms of education, religion and economic background (the Obama administration, for instance). And I would be the first to argue that that kind of homogeneity is not a good thing, especially for an institution like the Supreme Court, whose pronouncements have incredible influence over a significant amount of time.
So, the short of it is that while racial diversity in an institution like the Court is certainly a good thing, I’m not so sure that it is more – or even as – important as other kinds of diversity.
Not too long ago you had a post on why affirmative action is still controversial. I think a good deal of opposition to affirmative action stems from this conflict between adversity and diversity as justifications for affirmative action. The rhetoric advocating affirmative action in principle almost always invokes adversity, or a history of cumulative disadvantage, and with good reason. Meanwhile, actual affirmative action programs usually champion diversity, the slippery concept that essentializes perceived racial differences. Hence, defending affirmative action sometimes feels like pitching a pig in a poke: affirmative action policies should counterbalance a history of oppression, but what specific policies actually do is sneak “diversity” into institutional decision-making.
I’m with Jamelle. Racial diversity is not necessarily the most effective diversity. I believe that thinking along racial lines is actually damaging for the social psyche.
That’s not to say though that I don’t think racial diversity isn’t important; I think it’s incredibly important given this country’s history. That said, how is it damaging for the social psyche? I think along fairly racial lines, as do many of my friends, and we’re fine.
I would go one further and say that we all think along racial lines, only some of us have the luxury of pretending they do not.
Actually – the questions is faulty. The only reason race is the focus is because that’s the ONLY criteria people trip about. AA opponents aren’t tripping about gender, not really. This question acts like race is the only factor and the deciding factor. It rarely is. It’s just the factor people want to get rid of. Because both proponents and opponents know that if you take away race as one factor, you loose everything else. Because for so many white people, who we are starts and begins with our race (as such, we need race-conscious programs)
As with surgeons and pilots and firemen too, I want technical competence in certain jobs above all else. Affirmative action changes this focus and we end up with people of mediocre intelligence there, who will likely make many mistakes, and we’re all supposed to pretend not to notice.
Her command of English and her analytical abilities are weak. Read her famous speech on Wise Latinas in its entirety. It sounds like it was written by a resident assistant at a mediocre state university, and that’s why she was so alienated, outclassed, and uncomfortable at Princeton.
“As with surgeons and pilots and firemen too, I want technical competence in certain jobs above all else. Affirmative action changes this focus and we end up with people of mediocre intelligence there, who will likely make many mistakes, and we’re all supposed to pretend not to notice.”
The very astute logic here suggests that minorities are of lesser intellect or “technical competence” than white folks, because, of course, if all races were of equal intellect, affirmative action would by no means alter the intelligence, competence, or [insert other measure of ability here] of any occupation. Affirmative action only diminishes the “competence” of an occupation if in fact all races do not have folks with comparable intellect.
So minorities are of “mediocre intelligence?” Interesting.
The “technical competence above all” argument cuts both ways. There may not be enough competent white [add adjectives to taste] men to fill these and other critical skilled positions. Without affirmative action, other competent individuals may not have a fair shot at these jobs, and so some of the positions will go to people of mediocre intelligence, who will likely make many mistakes – and you might happily pretend not to notice.
Well, if our primary concern is competency of job holders and we have no concerns with government meddling in employer hiring decisions (not to say this is my stance, just for the sake of the argument), why not take a further step to absolutely ensure all decisions are rooted in qualifications only?
Mandate that all applications must be structured with an anonymous labeling system (Candidate A, Candidate B, etc.). Gender and any other majority/minority identifier can likewise be left off.
This obviously wouldn’t achieve the goal of many affirmative action supporters – balancing previous racial injustices and to some degree accounting for still extant racism – but it would fix the issues you and Mr. Roach have highlighted, would it not?
No: unfortunately, it would not. Understand that identifying competency in job applicants is not straightforward, and often the only sure way to ascertain if someone is best qualified for the job is to watch them do it. (The Presidency is an extreme example of this idea.) Job “qualifications,” as we understand them, only get you so far in sorting out applicants by competency. This was one of the liberal arguments about why it was OK to throw out the test results in the Ricci case: if the test didn’t do a good job at teasing out differences in competency, why use it?
Now, this is where affirmative action comes in. The errors in many (most?) methods of evaluating workers’ competency are not random, but generally tend to favor workers from a background of (relative) privilege: white, male, middle class, etc. Since it is impossible to devise perfectly accurate, precise, and non-biased tests of competency, then in the absence of race- (and class-, and gender-) conscious affirmative action the scenario I outlined above will continue to occur.
Fair enough. I was thinking more in terms of initial hires, where there’s minimal, if any opportunity, to examine someone in action, so the decision is made off of things like resume and the like.
It seems to me if a certain test or a certain set of criteria was used in the past to distinguish between white candidates for a particular job, whether that was a test, a series of timed exercises, whatever, then we should assume that test to choose between White Fireman A and White Fireman B or White Pilot A and White Pilot B has no discriminatory intent. It’s just the test in a race-neutral world that people concerned with finding the best people for a particular job devised. Why shouldn’t that test with, say, obscured names and demographic data for applicants be used today.
The reason is simple, of course. Pretty much every standardized test under the sun results in blacks doing around the 15th white percentile, and this is an unacceptable outcome for people who assume the races are equal and that in a nondiscriminatory world they’d be roughly equal in outcome. So, what is couched as a type of procedural fairness–as in Clinton’s famous phrase “affirmative access”–is all smoke and mirrors to obscure naked and extreme preferences for undeniably unqualified minorities of one kind or another. Except Asians of course. Their IQs are roughly equal to whites, they do quite well on all these tests, and though once discriminated against quite severely, now they’re doing quite swimmingly as a group.
Wow, you’re a huge racist. And, since this is relevant, you realize that you’re commenting on a black person’s blog, right?
Whether such a test has or had discriminatory intent is irrelevant. If, instead of intent you had suggested such a test had no discriminatory effect, then the argument does not follow from the premise. Either way, try again. Or, you know, don’t.
What did I say that was factually incorrect? Mostly liberals say those tests are biased, not that the outcomes are in fact equal. There’s a 1SD gap, just like on SAT, just like in school, just like on the firemens test.
Facts are facts are facts.
PS I speak “truth to power” I don’t care where I say it.
I would add to grandmute that “discriminatory effects” are exactly what we want tests to have: discriminating among greater and lesser qualified folks for a job. When that test is, say, a 40 yard dash in the NFL, no one worries and no one should regardless of the racial disparity in outcome, because it’s a useful test. Once a test is used between whites, when blacks are now allowed to compete–as they should be allowed–then the same test should be presumptively used and presumptively correct and accepted even with disparities. Other than some religious belief in racial equality in ability, which has no factual basis whatsoever, there is no reason to think people from different groups will have the same outcome on different kinds of tests for different kinds of skills.
Nice strawman you got going there. As I described the problem only five posts up, it doesn’t matter what average test scores for different racial groups are, because the inefficiency arises when a black candidate who is more qualified than a white candidate scores lower on some (biased) assessment of competency, and therefore is passed over by the hiring or promoting process.
You’ve done nothing but avoid explaining how this inefficiency can be corrected sans affirmative action.
I reject your premise that such people exist that are easily identified. More important, if such people exist, they also existed in the white-on-white competition of yesteryear. The tests were still used because there’s a cost of getting information; in other words, we have to 80/20 certain decisions and we should presume the tests used in white-on-white competition are good for multiracial competition regardless of outcome. There’s inefficiencies of finding these supposedly qualified people doing horribly on tests. There’s likely many more “qualified white people” slipping through the cracks too under your view; why assume they’re all black? Why assume there are any of either race?
Why not just say you don’t care about merit and want equal outcomes no matter what. That’s the reality. You’re assume this great deep bench of qualified blacks doing horribly on tests. The pretense of identifying these diamonds in the rough is kind of ridiculous. There are technical jobs and technical tests test for what is needed. There are cognitively demanding tests and things like logic tests and what not show what’s needed to succeed and, more important, correlate for success within racial cohorts.
Look at the mediocrity of someone like Michelle Obama, a typical and resentful product of affirmative action. She lasted two years at Sidley, failed the bar the first time, and got some sinecure gig at the UC Hospitals because her husband was a state senator. Great use of a Harvard Law education, huh?
If you reject the premise that tests of job competency have no error, then you are, as a member of the workforce, willfully ignorant. Proportionally, because tests of job competency are biased against those of less privilege, more black than white candidates test worse than their actual competency level. This justifies certain affirmative action programs.
I have never said that, never believed it, and never written anything to that effect. Thank you for playing.
How would you prove tests were more biased against the minorities than whites in general and not, the alternative hypothesis, that the minorities are in fact less qualified and that’s why they do worse on the tests, which are reasonably good at identifying the most qualfied people for jobs and promototions? I mean you can’t just look at the outcome and work backwards, unless you’re devoted to a particular conclusion.
Incidentally, outside the civil service and ASVAB arena, most jobs don’t have tests. They’ve not had IQ tests which were widely used in the 50s and 60s because of a Supreme Court decision named Duke Power that frowned upon their disparate impact. Even the federal government got rid of its civil service general intelligence test for similar reasons in the late 70s. So employers have relied more on proxies like college degrees, college grades, prestige of degree, difficulty of undergraduate major, and other soft indicators of brainpower and competence. Firemen, postmen, the military and its ASVAB and the like are the exception not the rule. I agree this creates probably greater degrees of cronyism, less-than-stellar promotions and hiring, etc. It also allows affirmative action to flourish since the criteria of selection are so amorphous.
The reason those tests are considered biased toward minorities is that when the test is changed to be unbiased, the whites continue to do just as well, and the minorities did better on the tests. Jobs that require tests to be hired or to get promoted constantly refine their tests used to select candidates for the job or promotion, they are never a static test because they know it is biased on some level. So if the people giving the test recognize that it is biased, how can you argue it’s not?
That argument seems mistaken. Tests can be made so easy that 90% of blacks and 99% of whites pass or indeed 100% of both. This is not a useful means to distinguish between qualified people. It’s not like 99% of white firefighters are so awesome they should all be a lieutenant or batallion chief.
Tests that are useful distribute their results in a bell curve of some fashion, allowing the test-taker to see the top ten, twenty or whatever percent. If they’re too hard–nearly everyone fails–or too easy, they’re not that useful. These everyone pass tests have been used in Chicago’s fire department and elsewhere, and, in the name of nondiscrimination, what ends up happening is that standards are corrupted across the board. Since the test in this case provides not-very-useful data, other more subjective or less useful criteria such as popularity, years of service, and the like become substituted. This is what’s happened in federal hiring, where in the absence of a general civil service exam, the infamous KSA (knowledge, skills, abilities) narratives have become so stylized and thus federal hiring is such a big pain for private sector professionals and others who don’t have time or energy to use their ridiculous standardized format. Jobs end up going to cronies and people “in the know” without regard to brains or ability. This is a problem that goes beyond affirmative action, but it’s a product of the affirmative action regime’s dislike of and suspicion towards standardized tests.
Incidentally, collegse and universities use standardized tests like crazy and seemingly do a good job of distributing students by brain power. If you’ve ever met folks from Yale or Harvard, you know what I mean. They may be annoying and pompous, but they’re undeniably smart, analytical, and generally good writers.