Via Matthew Yglesias, this interesting N.Y. Times story discussing the fact that a disproportionately large percentage of “African American” students at Harvard (and other elite colleges) are actually of recent African or West Indian heritage, or are of mixed race.
One interesting aspect of the article is that those who argue that Harvard should be taking more descendants of American slaves do so on the grounds that Harvard has a special moral obligation to help such individuals. The president of Amherst College, for example, is quoted as saying that by not admitted blacks students with predominantly American roots, “colleges are missing an ‘opportunity to correct a past injustice’ and depriving their campuses ‘of voices that are particular to being African-American, with all the historical disadvantages that that entails.'”
One major problem with this argument, not addressed in the article, is that while racial preferences for “diversity” purposes are legal under Grutter v. Bollinger, racial preferences for remedial purposes are not. And it would be hard to argue that, say, the fifth African American student from Harlem adds more “diversity” to a class than the first recent Gambian immigrant. Any college (are you listening, president of Amherst?)that preferred “American” black students over black immigrants would likely be violating the law.
This is just one more example of the perverse consequences of the “diversity” argument for racial preferences. (Another perversity is that a white immigrant from a wealthy family in Peru gets a “Latino” preference, while a poor kid from Appalachia or from a poor Irish immigrant family does not.) While not everyone, to say the least, agrees with the remdial rationale for affirmative action/racial preferences, it is at least coherent, and, as any reasonable preference policy should, suggests targeting preferences as those whose ancestors suffered most, and whose communities currently need the most help. The Supreme Court, if it’s going to uphold the legality of racial preferences (and I’ve argued in You Can’t Say That! that it’s obligated to do so, at least for certain ideologically driven private schools), should abandon the diversity rationale in favor of the remedial rationale.
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