Affirmative Action - Reply to the Raven
This is a reply to the Raven's comments on my post yesterday.
Raven - I don’t think we’re as far apart on the subject of Affirmative Action as you think.
On your first point, I don’t think the salient factor is percentage of minorities in a certain job title, it’s percentage of successful minority job applicants vs. percentage of successful non-minority job applicants. In your example, if there were 198 white applicants for the air traffic job, of whom 96 were successful, and 8 minority applicants, of whom 4 were successful, then the outcome of 96% white is appropriate. If, however, white applicants of comparable qualification (important because of the specific skills necessary in this job) were hired at a significantly greater rate, then we may have a problem. Unfortunately, not many people take this nuanced a view because evaluating this kind of thing often requires more data than is generally available (except in the case of college admissions where very good records are kept regarding application statistics.) Consequently, the use of statistics in discussions of Affirmative Action cases is almost always misleading and propagandistic for one side or the other.
Your second point, about the aggregate economic success of a group vs. token “marquee” job titles is exactly what I’m talking about. The CEO-caliber people will always rise to the top, barring obscene injustice. Their success doesn’t represent anything. What propelled other non-WASP white ethnic groups forward in the 19th and 20th century was access by the average masses to decent paid work – either union jobs or mid-level professional in either the private sector or government. Having lots of regular folks in these kinds of positions is what raises the overall prosperity of a group. It is from these kinds of jobs that many non-whites are still routinely excluded – not because of anti-black bias, but because of pro-white bias. The dispatcher at the hiring hall isn’t a racist – he just naturally thinks of his (white) buddies first when the jobs come in; likewise the corporate recruiter values a BA degree from Franklin and Marshall higher than one from Grambling because his wife's nephew went to F&M but he never met anyone who attended a historically black school, etc.
As a result, white men with no special skills or qualifications enjoy a subtle advantage over run-of-the-mill minority applicants in jobs where no great level of proficiency is required – jobs where a little luck or a good connection is what’s required to get that first break. When this happens often enough, the middle levels of the minority community cannot gain a foothold on economic prosperity and the regrettable psychology of victimhood (the “culture of poverty”) sets in, creating a set of social problems that aggravate the problems of economic inequality.
The tendency of people to favor those of like ethnic background will always be with us to some extent in a pluralistic society. But just as we have laws (and customs) against nepotism to preserve fairness in hiring, so too do we need certain safeguards to prevent the normal, not-hateful race-consciousness of most people from perpetuating a historical social and economic injustice. Legal remedies are a sloppy way to fix this problem, but it’s a problem that needs fixing somehow in my opinion
In short, I think we agree that skilled jobs should always be hired on merit, regardless of race, where merit can be sufficiently quantified that hiring on that basis is fair. Quotas are, in most cases, a poor measure of success unless you have much more information about what the percentages represent. But there’s a great gray region of professional occupations that are decently paid but routinely staffed with people of no exceptional skills. The hiring process for these jobs is often skewed by subtle bias, and while it may be intrusive for government to get involved in discretionary decisions, in my view the long-term benefits in terms of both social justice and the realization of a true meritocracy are worth the costs. Of course, there also needs to be an end-date when we agree that the policies have served their purpose and everyone competes equally.
9:26:19 AM 
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