Hire a straight white man today, if he’s the best candidate
Those of us who oppose racial favouritism do not intend to stop with college admissions. I say that as someone whose work was cited by Justice Clarence Thomas in the Supreme Court’s recent decision to end “affirmative action” by American universities, and as someone who has spent the last quarter century fighting for race neutrality.
When my colleague Dion Pierre and I were working on the book cited by Justice Thomas, Neo-Segregation at Yale, we found that in the early 1960s Yale lighted the way for American colleges and universities that were determined to admit substantial numbers of underprivileged black students. Few of them academically survived their first semesters. When President Kingman Brewster met with the handful who survived the ordeal they told him what they wanted was a separate admissions system; higher quotas of black students; physical separation from white students; and a black studies program. In effect they demanded a segregated Yale, and to a large extent, that’s what Yale gave them.
Racial preferences in college today don’t work exactly like this, but they often bear a close resemblance. They seldom give rise to anything that looks like a community of students in which racial division has ceased to matter. Somehow “affirmative action” in higher education has solidified into racial separatism and settled grievance.
The fight against racial preference in college admissions, of course, is part of a much larger fight against racial preferences built into law in all circumstances. And the fight extends to institutional arrangements, political imperatives, and most of all the job market.