A couple things have me thinking about the AA debate below. I don't want to contest the theory of Ivy League fraternity. But implicit in that seems to be this idea that if you get into the club, in the final analysis--once you become, say, a lawyer--it doesn't matter that you got in through AA. In other words, in terms of actual job performance, are we saying that AA Harvard law grads are no worse than someone who was just a star? If we aren't saying that, than are you setting someone up for failure in the market. If you are saying that, then it seems like the whole "standards" for admission are pretty trivial and should be thrown out anyway. Either the very idea of Ivy League is flawed, or AA admissions to Iv Leagues are--at the end of the day--inferior products, no?
Second--and here comes that old BookerT\Garvey\Malcolm shit in me--I think we need to talk about how power is wielded in this country. For the longest blacks have been focused on political power, and AA just seems to be an extension of that idea--go to a prestigious school so you can use government to influence policy. But what black folks really lack in this country is wealth. Read some Dalton Conley. Do we need an empty credentialism to make this happen? Or do we need some straight up hustlers? Dig this piece in the WSJ about how most CEOs don't attend elite colleges. We've got to find a way to fix our foundational problems (black families, our public schools etc.) and make use of what we have (HBCUs, state schools).
One of the things which gives me great, great pride is that I'm competing (with varying amounts of success) in a field (long-form journalism) where the Ivies ruled. But I come from something totally different. Like those cats, I have my support network, my own fraternity, but it came from the people who I was raised around and grew to love. The root is, of course, the family--my mother, father, brothers and sisters. It extends out into my father's business where I was forced to works as a child, and learned the value of work ethic (though, I still am the lazy journalist working today. I swear man). I did my Rights of Passage ceremony at Nationhouse\Watoto Shule up on Park Avenue and Georgia in the heart of Chocolate City. I played the djembe with Sankofa dance theater (then) down in North Avenue, where outside, the Crack wars were running wild.
In an era when so many black boys had no models of manhood, I had them all around. Everywhere I went, there were black folks around who would say "Ta-Nehisi one day you're going to do something beautiful."
And this was during a period when I was pulling a D minus GPA, assaulting teachers, fighting in the cafeteria, and ultimately getting kicked out of school. My SATs (1090) sucked, but were great for where I was coming from--Baltimore City Public Schools, where people were scoring really, really low. I wasn't even thinking about the Ivies, and they (rightfully) weren't thinking about me.
But I went to Mecca, and walked in the shadow of Thourgood Marshall, David Dinkins, Zora Neal Hurston, Ossie Davis, Carter G. Woodson. I had professors--mostly black, some white--who would debate me about politics after class, and then pull me aside and say "Ta-Nehisi, you're so much smarter than what you're doing in class. What is the matter?" I'll never forget my Black Diaspora professor, rolling up on me on the yard, embarrassing me front my whole crew, cause I'd cut class on the first nice day of Spring. I dropped out of Howard eventually to write. But when I left, all I could think about was all the black people who'd basically backed me from the day I was born. I was desperately, desperately afraid of disappointing them.
Any success I've had is really born out of a fear of letting them down, out of a confidence that my back was got. And now in 33rd year, I truly feel that great Chuck D line--I never live alone, I never walk alone. I say all that to say, there has to be a point in which we start nurturing our own organic apparatus, instead of begging people to let us into their club. My community, my network, originates in the streets of West Baltimore, runs through the nationalists in D.C., continues with strivers at Howard, moves through Harlem USA. My squad may not rival that whole Exter/Harvard/Skull and Bones thing. But it's my squad. Frankly, I am sick and tired of middle class Negroes shivering in fear every time the Supreme Court reviews an Affirmative Action case, every time election season comes around and Republicans stand ready to accumulate more power. Aren't we tired of being afraid of the guys? When do we start making them afraid of us? When do we begin to make racism more their problem, than ours?
This isn't an argument for separatism--it's the exact opposite. I live today in a very integrated world. I've got more diverse friendship than I ever could have imagined. But to achieve that type of integration, there needed to be some level of mutual respect. I don't have this completely worked out, but I think coming to the rest of the world secure in who I was, unashamed of my community, of my home team, needing to prove nothing, really helped me relate, on a basic human level, to the wider world.
I am sorry I rambled a bit guys. You know I do that from time to time...
UPDATE: Bottomofthe9th refers us to this very interesting study on Affirmative Action and law school. It doesn't really shock me. But its always interesting to me that folks are outraged by efforts to right a historical wrong, but seemingly undisturbed by legacies, in particular. I'd be very interested in how black folks did when compared to, say, people who got hooked up because their Pops knew someone on the board.
I meant what I said above. I don't have much oxygen to fight for a black lawyer who has to go to lower tier firm because of "racism." Likewise, given our society, I have even less oxygen to fight for some white lawyer who has to start out a tier below, because a top level firm is trying--if clumsily--to do the right thing.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
Over the years, I have had the "keeping up with the elite school grads" moments. I went to an elite school as an undergrad--and regret it (in some ways) to this day. It wasn't until I started exploring grad schools, that I determined that what I was looking for was not in some top MBA program, but in a lesser known program that is well know for the caliber of housing, community development, and non-profit management students it puts out.
The network I was able to assemble, the friendships I made, and the access I had to high level folks in my field was amazing. And I will say that me and my cohorts are heads and tails above many who went to top schools and can spout theory all day ,but have no clue about application.
I encourage younger people, particularly young black students, to get away from the branding, and look for schools where you will not only flourish academically but also feel comfortable socially and with who you are.
Although I largely agree with your thinking on affirmative action (and I'd be curious to hear what you make of the study on black law students from a couple years ago...http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200606u/nj_taylor_2006-06-20 I think there's a decent amount of evidence that the Ivy League is flawed. Too many children of really rich people (alumni and otherwise), athletes, etc. are admitted for it to be anything resembling purely meritocratic. Now CalTech on the other hand...
The Price of Admission by Daniel Golden is a great book about the extent to which various preferences for (largely rich and white) people are more prevalent than affirmative action.
Anyway, as you say, I'd rather we threw out all of them.
Checking out that article now. Editing your post to take a parenthesis off of the link. Also, saw you've done some econ work. Please feel free to bring that to bear on anything you see here. It's one of my blindspots.
EDIT: Read the article. Updating thread.
Ivy League colleges developed the admissions policy they have now as a way of preferring more white men over Jewish men, who had higher academic records.
Malcolm Gladwell has written about this:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge
The article in The Atlantic, linked above, features the work of Richard Sander, who has been arguing for a while now that AA in law schools hurts black people. Most people who study this, though, have come to the opposite conclusion; the bulk of the research shows that folks admitted into elite law schools via AA do comparably well to those who weren't, and certainly weren't hurt by their admission.
That shouldn't be so surprising. First, success in actual law practice rests in important degree on personal qualities (e.g., entrepreneurial attitudes & people skills) that aren't reflected in LSAT and GPA. Second, while LSAT is supposed to measure the extent to which you have the kind of smarts you need in law school, I take for granted that the reason most black law school applicants tend to present lower LSAT scores isn't because they're dumber than white folks. Rather, it's because they tend not to have the sort of educational backgrounds that make them as good at filling in the little circles on standardized-test forms. Moral: we shouldn't fetishize LSAT (or for that matter, undergraduate GPA) as predictors of success as a lawyer. So why do law schools use those measures for admissions? Because, as flawed as they are, they're the best predictors we've got (and because any law school that decides not to rely on them will be punished in the marketplace -- US News will lower the law school's ranking, and that it turn means that the school will have a harder time hiring faculty and attracting students).
Last point: AA in law school admissions *is* about money. Folks who graduate from more prestigious law schools tend to get higher-paying jobs.
"Either the very idea of Ivy League is flawed, or AA admissions to Ivy Leagues are--at the end of the day--inferior products, no?"
Well, yes. The idea of the Ivy League is flawed. Check out Malcolm Gladwell's piece on the history of AA at the Ivies:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/10/10/051010crat_atlarge
AA was devised by Ivy presidents because too many (in their eyes) Jewish students were getting in. The Ivies wanted to make sure Wasps with lower test scores could get in ahead of their more academically gifted Jewish peers. So AA was created to help rich, white Wasps! (See the irony?)
So, for about a century, AA was used to build up what is still the dominant ruling class in this country -- at the expense of high-performing Jewish students.
To me, the fact that AA has been turned on its head to help incorporate black folks into that ruling sphere is a good thing.
You also ask if the AA admittees are "inferior" or if they are being "set up to fail." You're missing the point. There have ALWAYS been AA admittees at Ivies (well, at least for the past 100 years). And yes, those AA beneficiaries probably graduated with lower rankings than the average non-AA student. But the point is, they graduated. They're in the game. They're in the network. Before 1968, all the AA beneficiaries were white (i.e., privileged Wasps and legacies). If you eliminate race-based AA, we will still be left with AA for those same white applicants. AA will never go away. Once you accept that premise, the question remains: Is it just for AA to be for whites only? Or for everyone?
Yeah, most Fortune 500 CEOs didn't go to elite colleges. But where did most hedge-fund managers go? Where did most analysts at Lehman, Goldman, and JP Morgan go? Do you think it would have been better to have a few more black folks at the major banks to say, "Wait a second, these predatory lending practices are ravaging lower-class (and disporportionately black) homeowners. We need to stop." Or would it have been better to let an all-white enclave make those decisions?
Of all the Supreme Court justices of the last thirty years, I can only think of two without Ivy degrees: Thurgood and Stevens. (And Stevens went to Northwestern, which is basically a Midwest Ivy. Yes, Rehnquist and O'Connor went to Stanford, but just about everyone counts that as an unofficial Ivy.) The Supreme Court affects our everyday lives beyond their AA cases. They decide whether certain sentencing practices are fair or unfair, how much punishment individual plaintiffs can inflict on corporate wrongdoers, and how much religious activists can impose their will in the public sphere. These are not decisions that should be entrusted to a homogeneous group of nine philosopher-kings. No, race is not a perfect proxy for liberal views (see Thomas, Clarence), but if we have a pipeline of nonwhite candidates with the threshold credentials for the job, there's at least a greater potential of finding justices other than Roberts and Alito -- who will soon rule on a landmark Second Amendment case without having any concept of the rampant destruction caused by gun violence in urban America.
You say, "We've got to find a way to fix our foundational problems (black families, our public schools etc.) and make use of what we have (HBCUs, state schools)."
Yes, of course, we need to fix these fundamental deficiencies. But that's like saying, We shouldn't bother taking public transportation to save gas, because the more fundamental problem is to develop an alternative to fossil fuels. Yes, that solution would be better -- but it's also more difficult and will take several generations to solve (if it's ever solved). In the meantime, should we just suffer? Or should we exercise lesser alternatives that may improve the lot of the whole -- while AT THE SAME TIME addressing the more fundamental issues you listed?
I'll leave you with this. I've read all you've written about Obama. His campaign has clearly galvanized you, as it has many of us. Obama was, by all accounts, a good high-school student, but not a superstar, at a very good Hawai'i prep school. But most prep school kids in Hawai'i usually end up at the University of Hawai'i. He went to Occidental and transferred to Columbia. Generally, you need to be at the top of your class to make a transfer like that. Obama wasn't top of his calss at Occidental. Nor was he at Columbia. And, as for Harvard Law, they routinely reject students from the top 10% of Columbia's undergrad class, even some with near-perfect LSATs. And Harvard Law Review? They have an AA program, where they reserve several slots for minority students.
Did AA help Obama? I have no idea. But probably. If, absent AA, he had just graduated from Occidental and then went to say UC Davis Law, would any of us know his name today? He would most certainly have done great work, but no, we wouldn't know who he is. If there were no AA, would you be content to wait another quarter or half a century -- for the black family to heal and for public schools to be properly funded -- for us to see what we've seen in the past six months? Me, I'm glad I got to see it now. Because I believe having this (likely) AA beneficiary lead the free world will speed up the healing of the deeper wounds.
I just wanted to add that I really have enjoyed this debate so far. Every time I think I have made up my mind, someone (in this case JP) posts with an excellent counter-argument. Not to mention that the civility and level of discourse here are pretty much unrivaled...
IIRC, Sandra Day O'Connor (whose pragmatism and clear-headedness I really admire) made essentially the same argument as JP--that while not ideal in any sense, AA is a tool we have to make a difference now, and that hopefully we'll make enough progress not to need it before too long.
I also am curious what everyone thinks of the role of sports in college admissions, especially for black men. At my school (one of the ones mentioned here http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/11/black ), about half of the black men were athletes, which to me (admittedly, an upper-middle-class white person) sent a pretty awful message (young black men: the best way to get into our school is to play sports). I always thought my school (and others like it) used its athletic department to do the hard work (attracting talented and qualified black students) for them.
A few quick comments (I'm getting on a plane). First, as an Ivy grad I have no doubts that the network I developed has enormous value for me professionally and as ameans of helping me (and my wife) create wealth. We have personal relationships with people in law, banking, publishing, consulting, academia, etc. As my career has evolved, it's been a great advantage to call on these folks for advice, insights, and connections. Does this make us any smarter than the people who went ot non-Ivy places? No, of course not. That said, I wouldn't discourage my children or friends of availing themselves of the obvious advantages that are associated with these places. In essence, the Ivies provide something of an insurance policy, as well as significant help in admissions to graduate school. Look, I'm all for building and finding community in college and smaller colleges or colleges with larger black populations may be more comfortable. However, education is an economic investment and an investment in getting access to as much opportunity as possible. As unfair as it is, the Ivy League does (marginally) better on these fronts.
As for affirmative action and legal careers, I am very doubtful about Sander's findings. In part, I express this doubt because attrition rates are enormous for all attorneys at big firms. Indeed, part of the attrition is the result of clients actively hiring away minorities in order to diversify their ranks. Second, the work most young attorneys do today is quite boring, takes little legal acumen, and is more about completing rote taks than analytical skill. If there were a difference in the skills of black and white students, it's not clear to me that the type of work done by young attorneys would highlight any such difference.
That said, I'm all for having us (blacks) do whatever we can to boost our credentials so that there are no lingering biases.
Last, for all of Sander's talk about agressive efforts to attract black attorneys, my wife and I have seen little evidence of this in the very large firms we work in. The numbers of black attorneys continue to be quite small, and our experience finds few exceptions to GPA requirements. Of course, our knowledge is based on a small sample.
1.) Good points JP
2.) I also found his Sander's contention that big law firms are "under pressure" to diversify, uhm, wanting. I'm sure there's some pressure. But it just felt overstated in his piece.
Here is a question I've always had about AA and law schools. Are there any statistics about AA-beneficiaries and the bar exam? Unlike undergrad admissions, for example, law school admissions have a "judgement day" on which everybody takes the same test, no matter what their background. The test results are curved. If AA admits law students who are as intellectually qualified as non-AA students, but who, for socio-economic/cultural reasons don't do as well on the LSAT, I would expect AA bar exam takers to pass at an equal rate as non-AA takers (?). This is probably a totally unscientific hypothesis. But it's something I've wondered nonetheless.
(For the record, I'm an attorney. And I think law school is a total racket!)
I'd like to echo bottomofthe9th's comment. This discussion has been both stimulating and refreshing in its civility. There's a lot of passion on this thread, and it's great to see reasonable minds can disagree with respect and courtesy.
TNC -- Keep up the great blog, though it may result in reprimands for me at work due to lack of productivity. And try not to smirk too much around your Ivy-educated Atlantic colleagues as your book rockets past theirs in the Amazon sales rankings.
Great discussion; this has really made me think about where I stand on this issue. To be clear, I don’t particularly care about the admissions policies at Ivy League schools-- they are private institutions and can do what they like. However, since I sort of helped kick this off, let me respond to a few more points. I will try not to generalize from personal experience, but for the sake of full disclosure: I went to an elite private college.
In this discussion I’ve seen a few consistent arguments pop up; I apologize in advance if I misstate someone else's views:
1. If the number of blacks at top schools dwindle, the remaining black students suffer from a smaller support network.
2. Diversity is a valuable goal for the entire student body; it benefits white (and other) students to have more blacks in the student body.
3. Class-based AA would displace poor blacks in favor of poor whites.
4. We need to increase the overall number of black elites in order to help black people throughout society; admission to top colleges is the best way to increase this black elite.
5. There is no reason Booker T and WEB Du Bois can’t both be at work—the top-down and bottom-up models can co-exist.
Also, the distinction probably needs to be made between top public schools and private elites as well as between undergrad and grad schools; I don’t think all of the issues are the same. I’m focused mostly on undergrad here.
I think #1 and #2 are reasonable points, but not strong enough to make me want to promote under-qualified rich kids if that is the only pool from which to draw. As to #3, it’s also a reasonable point, and it’s worth debating whether a pure class-based system is appropriate right now. My point was restricting race-based AA to a means test. But there’s an argument to be made that a pure class-based system (even one that might disadvantage blacks) is better. I probably would not agree right now.
My concern with #5 is that this is what we’re supposed to be doing. I don’t think it is working; more importantly I think it distracts from the most important problem. It’s easy to feel like there’s been progress among social classes when some representative percent of top universities is made up of minority students. But in 2006 in Texas, 62% of black tenth graders and 56% of Latino tenth graders failed the state minimum skills test in math. Are you kidding me? These kids were born in 1990-1991! Why should I want Texas or any other state to be able to point to its best schools and pretend like the problem is improving when there has been almost no progress among poor minorities since the end of the civil rights era? If both approaches can co-exist, I have no problem, but it hasn’t happened in my lifetime.
But my main issue is with #1, the idea that (a) elite school attendance is necessary for membership in the elite and (b) increasing the number of black elites will have material impact on the masses of poor black people. Here’s some back of the envelope math. Assume there are 20 “elite” colleges and they graduate on average 2000 students per year, who each maximize their income for the next 40 years; no one dies or retires or goes into non-profit or stays at home with the kids. They start in the top 10% of wage earners and stay there. That means that today there would be 1.6 million elites in the top decile of wage earners. There are roughly 15.5 million people in the top decile today, so somehow about 14 million people made it to the top decile without attending an elite school. Relax the initial constraints and even more of the proletariat climbs to the top.
And I get it-- perhaps there’s a concentration of the elites at the tip-top-- say the top 0.1% of earners. Or maybe the elites are over-represented among the “thought leaders” or decision-makers-- academics and journalists and politicians. But it’s correlation vs. causation: prove to me that X is influential because X went to Stanford, rather than that X went to Stanford because X is smart, ambitious, and hard-working, all of which helped make X influential. I’m not blind-- I understand the value of networks. But for any claim that an elite network is a necessary condition for success, there are multiple counterexamples to prove that statement false, except perhaps the Supreme Court (too small a sample set in the modern era). The network helps; it especially helps as a backstop for failure. But networks are not restricted to your school, at least in the business world. I just can’t lose any sleep over the tens of thousands of people who don’t attend Ivy League schools.
I have the most trouble with the assertion that a rising number of black elites inevitably helps the poorest black people. We have the largest black middle class we’ve ever had in this country’s history, yet our urban problems as bad as ever. And as much as I hate to get into example wars because they’re always ultimately inconclusive, I have to point out in response to someone else's post that Franklin Raines (Fannie Mae), Stan O’Neal (Merrill Lynch) and Ken Chenault (American Express) were three of the most powerful CEOs in finance. Didn’t help black homeowners hit by the mortgage crisis-- not that I hold those CEOs responsible, unless they did something illegal. In fact, I don't think it's the responsibility of rich blacks to help poor blacks anymore than rich whites should exclusively help poor whites. We live in a society in which poverty is a problem, and we as a society have to come up with answers.
Amitav,
About implementing both top-down and bottom-up strategies, you say, "I don’t think it is working; more importantly I think it distracts from the most important problem. It’s easy to feel like there’s been progress among social classes when some representative percent of top universities is made up of minority students."
Is it really the case that AA prevents us from addressing more fundamental educational inequality? For example, Head Start is a federal program designed to improve education for children living in poverty. I'm not aware of any members of Congress arguing to cut funding for Head Start (or other similar programs) because Dartmouth's black population crept up from 1%to 8% in the past three decades.
AA at private universities (and even at elite public universities) does nothing to take away from efforts to improve education at earlier ages for the underprivileged. Even with AA, black students at elite schools are considered the exception, not the rule.
The public school system is a mess. Everybody knows it. The problem is being worked on. The Texas statistics you cite don't mean Texas educators have stopped trying; it just means what they've tried so far hasn't worked. Eliminating black students at top-tier colleges won't raise a single additional tax dollar to fix that system. (Nor will it motivate a single black couple to stay together to raise their children with a love of learning.)
These are overlapping problems, but not identical ones. And their remedies generally come from different sources.
So what's the "distraction"?
I'd like to take this discussion in an entirely different direction by trying to answer the question that inspired Ta-Nehisi's ramble: do we need an empty credentialism to make this happen? Or do we need some straight up hustlers?
There are several reasons why the Black community had not created more wealth and i'm sure economists posting here can elucidate some of them. But to me it all boils down to a lack of entrepreneurial attitude. This is another way of saying that Black entrepreneurs run their companies like African dictators run their countries. And yes, in this analogy Mbutu is indeed Bob Johnson.
Seriously, in the 1980s there were two dynamic business men setting up shop in the DC area, Bob Johnson at BET and Steve Case at AOL. Case set up a compensation model that rewarded his employees for innovating. The faster they enabled AOL to grow, the better is was for ALL of them. Bob Johnson set up a compensation model that rewarded him and a small coterie around him. As BET grew, Bob Johnson benefitted. Today both Bob Johnson and Steve Case are billionaires. The quick googling I've done suggests that Steve Case's company created 700-1000 AOL millionaires by the time they merged with Time/Warner. There were, at most, 6 BET millionaires when they merged with Viacom, and two of them are related to Bob Johnson.
The same thing is happening today when you compare, say, Google to Harpo Entertainment. The white companies make everyone rich, the Black companies make their owners rich. Think of all the businesses started and clout engendered by the AOL/Microsoft/Yahoo/Google millionaires. If Bob Johnson, Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Tyler Perry going all the way back to Barry Gordy created compensation models like Bill Gates, Steve Case, Warren Buffett, Jerry Yang et al our community would have created wealth for many and not for few. Black business people seem to have a fear of empowering their employees. The folks in the barbershop would call it the crabs in the bucket syndrome. It appears they were wiser than we knew.
I hear Beatrice created a few zillionaires in its day...
Please note that the high-tech model of compensation was to give relatively low salaries supplemented with stock options. The high-tech zillionaires were created by the tech bubble; the vastly more numerous high-tech firms that failed created very few millionaires.
For an Oprah Winfrey or a Bob Johnson, the more generous compensation model may well be rich in cash and poor in stocks. Perhaps the Johnson and Winfrey millionaires are more numerous when you count assets outside of their employers' stocks.
And, isn't it a bit unfair not to count the authors, psychologists, gurus, cooks, trainers and others launched by Oprah as Oprah millionaires?
JP--
I have no problem with Dartmouth or any other private school doing whatever it wants with regards to admissions. As I said above, I've yet to see a convincing argument that more black elite-educated graduates means less black high school dropouts. But I have nothing against black elite-educated graduates (they are, literally, my best friends); I don't think they create dropouts either. Just don't ask me to believe that the numbers of minority students at those elite schools is any reflection on the actual progress of poor minorities in this country. And don't ask me to believe that an effective bottom-up strategy is in place when 62% of black Texas tenth graders can't do basic algebra in 2006.
With regards to public schools, I would support a program that gave bonus points to under-represented minorities from poor backgrounds, in recognition of a lack of access to the educational amenities their richer counter-parts may have had, as well as an acknowledgment of the systemic effects of inner-city poverty that started with historical racial discrimination.
But if you are already well-off, if your parents went to college, if you have lots of money, in 2008 I just can't get that worked up about your college prospects.
And to further clarify, when I talked about a tension between bottom up and top down in my initial post, I was referring to top public universities, not private schools, and the ability of state officials to ignore fundamental primary school problems because of college admissions numbers. The obvious case study is the limited progress of black primary school students in California during the 30 years affirmative action was in place for UC admissions. Though I lived in California and opposed it at the time, in retrospect the passage of Prop 209 may have been a good thing if it forced a focus on the harder issues.
Not to beat this to death, but I just learned about this week's Bill Moyers discussion on race with Orlando Patterson and Glenn Loury:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/profile.html
Moyers's site links to Patterson's 2003 NYT op-ed on affirmative action:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9404EFD61F38F931A15755C0A9659C8B63
If I'd known about this before, I would've just quoted Patterson and saved some serious time on my comments... here's his proposal:
"The nation needs this policy, but it must be modified. For starters, it should exclude all immigrants and be confined to African-Americans, Native Americans and most Latinos. It should include an economic means test. Only those who are poor or grew up in deprived neighborhoods should benefit. At the same time, poor whites from deprived neighborhoods should be phased into the program, a development that would counter the arguments of right-wing critics.
Finally, affirmative action should be severed from the goal of diversity -- which, as the legal scholar Peter Schuck has argued, is best left to the private sector. Middle-class blacks and Latinos would continue to benefit from such voluntary programs, properly understood as a sharing of diverse experiences and perspectives rather than a withdrawal into ethnic glorification. There is every reason to believe the nation's corporations and universities will continue to find such a policy to be in their own best interests, and the nation's."
Amitav -
Minor quibble on your Texas point: Texas big state Us don't use AA, it was replaced a decade or so ago with the Top Ten Percent Rule, a racially neutral policy that guarantees admission to the top ten percent of the graduating class of all Texas high schools. This policy, while not in the same manner you are suggesting AA is used, does make it easier to resist substantive public education reform, particularly regarding desegregation and improving poor school districts. They typically point to high minority student enrollment and say "Look if you try to aggressively desegregate then there won't be overwhelmingly minority schools that send their top ten percent to big state Us anymore!", but retention and graduation rates of these students (which are disproportinatley lower) are swept under the rug. Even colorblind alternatives to AA are used by unscrupulous state officials to falsely claim progress in fixing the abysmal, segregated public education system.
That being said, I'm skeptical that proponents of prop 209 or other similar measures are actually committed to fixing the public education system than scoring political points with aggravated whites, and would not count on their support in any such attempts following a a successful ban on AA (see Texas and the top ten rule fiasco).