Reader Mail: Affirmative Action

Hi Francis,

I was just going through your site again. It is much improved and continues to grow and blossom. Congratulations.

Since you invite comment, here is some.

Just about every thing you write, I find agreement with so I won't bore you with too much back slapping other than to say I admire your depth and love of thought and congratulate you for breaking through to the society of free thinkers.

However, regarding the issue of affirmative action I feel there is a need for remedial efforts. Since you mention the 20 points given for race, Afro American, Native American and?, I assume you are referring, in part, to the UM situation. This has been a hot and continuing topic on my Discuss Detroit forum and a lot has been revealed. For instance children of alumni also get 20 points. On the other hand there always seems to be a way for outstanding athletes to get around the standards.

I think your analysis is lacking in giving more consideration to the impact of past racism and class distinctions. It is difficult for an inner-city Afro American kid to get 20 point from U of M alumni parents when a legacy of discriminations, inferior schools, and economic hardships brought on by racism made sure they never had a chance to go there, or any other college for that matter.

It also explains why a C- high school student, like our beloved President, can get into Yale.

This was possible because generations of Bushes were able to accumulate and pass along wealth and, more importantly, powerful connections that come with wealth without ever having to overcome hurdles because of their race, but instead gain strength from their race.

Not so for the descendants of the slaves who had every cent of their earnings, estates, and children stolen from them for centuries. The freed slaves had to start from zero and then battle another century of Jim Crow laws and the KKK. It was a mere 40 years ago that most legal barriers against Afro Americans were ended, but hidden racism continues to deny them jobs, housing, and education. If it was legal for centuries to steal from and often to kill Afro Americans [and Native Americans] then I see no problem with the government and universities singling those groups out for remediation. This was done with our Japanese-Americans who the government imprisoned in W.W.II, even while their sons were dying for this country in segregated army units, one of which became the most highly decorated regiment in the army. Even in their case they were only paid a pittance for their economic loss and really nothing for the indignity and suffering.

My main worry with the some affirmative actions is that their impact is felt more by working and middle class Euro Americans thus setting at odds groups that really have more common interests than differences and allowing the moneyed powers of America to hold both back. My evolving position is all high schools in the state should be guaranteed a proportional number [to the state population] of admissions of their highest GPA students regardless of SAT, alumni parents or race. Since metro Detroit is the most segregated city in the US I think this would help balance out diversity and benefit students from inferior schools in the inner cities and rural Michigan. If still more remediation is required to at least match the statewide percentages, then out of state admissions should reduced and the highest of the rejected minority applicants should fill those slots.

Currently I am finishing "The Origins of the Urban Crisis" by Thomas Sugrue. This is a history of post W.W.II Detroit with a well documented study of the racist policies embedded in Detroit and Michigan law that created the divisions that have brought Detroit low and denied Afro American Detroiters jobs, housing and education. It is outstanding and revealing. One of the events mention is even physical, Detroit's little Berlin Wall, which I recently featured on my 8 MILE road tour.
http://detroityes.com/webisodes/2002/8mile/021106-04-8mile-berlin-wall.htm

[I have omitted the rest of the e-mail for the sake of brevity, as it consisted of (very helpful) technical suggestions for the site.]

You make many excellent points in your e-mail, and I must say that I agree with you entirely. I do believe that drastic, well-thought-out action needs to be taken to foster a greater sense of racial equality, especially when it comes to education and, of course, employment. I simply do not think that the current system of affirmative action works. I very much liked your idea that "all high schools in the state sh

ould be guaranteed a proportional number [to the state population] of admissions of their highest GPA students regardless of SAT, alumni parents or race." If colleges continue to ease entrance for children of alumni, an unbalanced racial distribution is almost certain to continue on for many more generations. Your idea sounds like a much more thought out way to achieve the same appropriate racial balance that I thought might be achieved by admitting students based on economic background. It is truly a pity that the system has so many loopholes for wealthy upper-class white males (like our president) to take advantage of. As you mentioned, Bush is a very clear example of this particular flaw.
"My main worry with the some affirmative actions is that their impact is felt more by working and middle class Euro Americans thus setting at odds groups that really have more common interests than differences and allowing the moneyed powers of America to hold both back." I also agree with you on this point; I think that this is the kind of Affirmative Action that is the most popular and meets with the most support, and it still appeases some Affirmative Action activists who seem not to realize its inherent flaws.
As far as the issue of reperations is concerned, it is something I would have to look in to further. I agree that some kind of reparations are necessary to those Afro Americans and Indigenous people who continue to suffer from their race's history of mistreatment, discrimination, and hatred, but any kind of action that makes generalizations by compensating everyone with "this much Indian blood" or "that color of skin" is an extremely delicate issue. I would be interested to hear what your take on reparations is, and how you think they should be properly distributed. Thanks for the HTML advice, I templated the page to make my life easier, and I padded the cells, so it should be a bit easier on the eyes now. Again, thanks for the support and the encouragement, and I hope to hear from you again soon.
--Francis

Sticking with the topic at hand, here is another e-mail I received, from Steve Tripp, addressing the issue of Affirmative Action.

I hope you will find the following comments concerning affirmative action interesting.

I agree that affirmative action is a flawed system that results in "unjust" actions. However, on balance, I still support the concept for several reasons that I will discuss below. But first a few comments on prior notes. I am not certain, but I believe that the number of points given to children of alumni at U of M is only 4, not the 20 mentioned by Lowell Boileau. This is a minor point that is not essential to my comments, but if it is the case, it does detract a little from the veracity of Boileau's argument.

Boileau's suggestion, while appearing to represent an improvement over the current affirmative action would really only lead to a different set of injustices, based on zip code instead of race. Wouldn't there inevitably be students from Farmington Harrison High School that would get into Michigan with grades, test scores etc. that were lower than those from Farmington High (or vice versa). At that point the FHS student (or the Harrison student, whichever was "wronged") would know that someone who lived a few blocks away got into the program that they couldn't because they lived one half mile east or west or whatever. That seems pretty unfair and arbitrary to me.

This critique of Boileau's proposal demonstrates an important point. Any way we structure things, there will be injustices and unfairness. We live in a flawed world and we can't just reset the starting point to a position of complete equality. We have to deal with things as we find them. And the way we find them is that many minority groups in our nation are dramatically underrepresented in "good" places and over represented in "bad" places (like prison). We have a few choices in how we respond to this inequality. One choice is to ignore it completely because we are willing to accept things the way they are. Another choice is to study the issue and think about how we might change things, but not actually implement anything because it leads to imperfect results. A third approach is to implement actions designed to address the problem that are admittedly imperfect but lead to some positive results.

Personally, I prefer the third alternative and therefore favor things like affirmative action. While affirmative action may be flawed it "puts pressure on the system". For example, where I work we try very hard to promote minorities to higher levels of management. Frequently, we have lamented the fact that the "white male" candidates are better qualified than the "diversity" candidates. If we said, "just pick the best person regardless of race etc." we would then just pick the white male and be done with it. By occasionally forcing us to pick the minority candidate it forces us to look for ways to avoid being in that situation again.

That desire to avoid the situation causes us to more actively recruit diversity candidates from college and provide them the training they will need to become executives. But this shifts the problem to the recruiting stage, where we often don't have enough minority students with great credentials to choose from. So this dilemma forces us to think, "What can we do to get better candidates from colleges?" So we provide scholarships to minorities to draw them into colleges and we send volunteers to urban schools to tutor kids and help them have a better chance to get into college. Essentially affirmative action FORCES us to get engaged in the problem and take actions to improve the situation. Despite its flaws, and you are correct in pointing out that it is flawed, it has positive benefits and for those reasons I support the principle of affirmative action.

Mr. Tripp,
Thanks for taking the time to write in and express your viewpoints. First of all, in the interest of clarity, U of M does grant 20 points towards admission for racial minorities [however, they only grant 4 points to the children of alumni] (source); this leads some people to view affirmative action policies as reverse discrimination- no better than any other form of conventional racism. Why? To put things into

perspective, a perfect SAT or ACT score is worth 12 points, and the maximum number of points to be distributed at the provost's discretion (for exceptional talents, such as operating one's own business) is 20- the same amount an applicant is granted simply for being a racial minority. To you this may not seem wrong, but it would make a white student who is not socioeconomically disadvantaged roughly 20% less likely to be accepted than a black or Hispanic student of good or poor socioeconomic status. Surely your argument that it is better "to implement actions designed to address the problem that are admittedly imperfect but lead to some positive results" than to ignore the problem altogether is irrefutable, but shall we turn a blind eye towards valid criticism of these policies for that very reason? I believe that it is far from unreasonable to criticize these policies, though I do not think that we should do away with them all together. Let us return to the analysis of Michigan's point-based system. There are two categories under Miscellaneous which deal with the underprivileged, the minority: a 20-point grant for simply being an ethnic or racial minority, and another 20-point grant for being socioecomically disadvantaged; these grants are mutually exclusive, so why are they both necessary? Forgive me if I am incorrect in this assumption, but is affirmative action not designed to grant an equal opportunity to those who are underprivileged in our society? Perhaps this same measure of diversity could be more fairly achieved if the racial / ethnic grant was done away with and the socioeconomic disadvantage grant remained, thus allowing low-income kids from rural and inner-city areas a higher chance at admission without employing an entirely arbitrary discriminating factor such as skin-color. Also, perhaps the school quality factor, currently worth a maximum of 10 points, should be worth a maximum of 5 additional points, thus further helping underprivileged inner-city minorities to gain admission. Furthermore, if we are to really clean up the system, the points given for Michigan residency (10), alumni legacy (4), underrepresented MI county (6) and underrepresented state (2), should be done away with. Though I agree with both you and Lowell in that positive affirmative action is necessary to assist underprivileged minorities, I stand firm in my contention that this action should not be based solely on an arbitrary factor like skin color, but rather on actual socioeconomic status and academic disadvantage, two deciding factors already taken into account, but completely separate from the simple issue of skin color or ethnic heritage. The fact of the matter is that the racial minorities who benefit from the sort of affirmative action I choose to criticize are not the underprivileged, inner-city youth which the action claims to help, bur rather privileged middle-class racial minorities who attended good schools, earning good grades and high test scores. Though you claim that affirmative action will remain somewhat unjust regardless of its execution, I think that, as with all things, it must remain the subject of criticism and be revised, for we are still a long way away from racial equality.
Thanks, Francis.

That said, Ouch! It really hurts when one’s passions gets ahead of their research. That is what I have done by incorrectly attributing 20 admission points to alumni children when, as Mr. Steve Tripp point out correctly, it is 4 points [albeit there is another point available for family connections.] My mistake was from to quote from a usually reliable source with checking on it, so shame on me for not doing what I have since done -- find out what the non-academic points really are:

What we have is a list of exceptions not unlike the US tax code ending, interestingly to me, with the 20 points for Athletic Scholarship and 20 for Provost’s discretion. I think the latter may have been the source of my ’20 point’ alumni confusion. I would think it possible for discretion to be given to the children of large donors and alumni as well as athletes, however that would require analysis. I have also since learned that all Upper Peninsula counties are considered disadvantaged, so all ‘Yuppers’ get an automatic six points.

My point still is that prior to this point system the disadvantaged of Michigan were not getting into the U of M in anywhere near their proportion to their demographics. And they still are not. So we are not dealing with both a catch up and pay back situation, just catch up. [Some argue that due to decades of past denials, minorities should not only have their current demographic share, but still another share for the past, a point with which I disagree.]

My position for redress at current demographic levels is based on the fact that legal, social, and informal discriminations have, de facto, denied the parent of the students the opportunities to be in position to enter the children that prestigious institution and gain access to all the advantages it offers.

As a public institution supported by the taxes of all, I feel there is a responsibility of the institution to reflect the state’s demographics. So I am in general agreement with their effort. I also feel that a diversity of students brings with it a cross cultural richness that has a positive benefit for all while inspiring the children in difficult situations to study hard because they can see role models setting example. It shouldn’t be all about academics and tests, but no matter what the kids have to be bright to get in. I would also like to see remediation on race 'grandfathered' out at something like 30 years.

Since our past and present history of racism has left our regions and schools so segregated, [metro Detroit the worst in the nation] I suggested my solution of guaranteeing so many admissions to each high school with further correction being made by reducing the number of out of state admissions.

I do realize there are imperfections with that and that further offsets are needed especially, as Francis stated so well, in the socio-economic factors. However it would address two huge factors important in Michigan political realities, race and region.

Ideally I would like to see race remove from the equation because it makes the issue such a lightening rod so my guaranteed admissions idea is my solution of the moment. Color of skin judgment is illogical, but as an indicator of descendents of past wrongs it offers a temporary measure.

In spite of our differences, I think we all share a lot of common ground on this issue and common concern about fair play and redress. As always when I get into such topics, their depth expands. I learn a lot and generally end up in an evolved position. So I think you both for being helping me write another chapter in my school of life long learning.