Here's JP responding to my lukewarm feelings toward Affirmative Action:
You're right -- many more black doctors and lawyers come from HBCUs than from Harvard or Yale. But many more black mayors in major cities (Cory Booker, Kurt Schmoke), governors (Deval Patrick, David Paterson), Supreme Court justices (Clarence Thomas), and presidents to be (Obama) tend to come from the Ivy League.
"Elite" by definition means a small group of people -- even the people of color within that elite. But it's important that "we" make sure that we are represented in that tiny circle. Because those are the folks who shape the policy of who gets a tax break and who doesn't, whether we invade a country or not, and whether a woman has a right to decide what happens to her body.
It's important that there are black faces in the corridors of power. The Ivies (and Berkeleys and Stanfords and Dukes) of the world are the pathways to that power. In New York, the black neighborhood doctor undoubtedly affects the lives he touches. But so does the black Columbia alum who sits in the governor's mansion, who may decide how much funding the public schools will get next year.
And here is is Amitav responding to JP:
I would push back on JP's defense of the value of AA at Ivy League schools for three reasons. First-- why should we assume that the people mentioned needed race-based AA to get into their elite schools? Cory Booker obviously didn't; he played football at Stanford. And as a Rhodes Scholar, I doubt he was a borderline applicant at Yale Law. The idea that the Bookers and Obamas wouldn't be at top schools without race-based AA is not clear to me.
Second, such anecdotes imply a causation (Harvard --> political success) that is misleading and probably backwards. Douglas Wilder went to Virginia Union. JC Watts went to University of Oklahoma. Colin Powell went to CCNY and Condi Rice went to University of Denver. Willie Brown went to San Francisco State and David Dinkins went to Howard. For that matter, Richard Nixon went to Whittier, Ronald Reagan went to Eureka College, LBJ went to Southwest Texas State, and I don't think Harry Truman even went to college. It's true that an elite college can open doors-- but it's not the sole determinant of future success. The people JP named have the intelligence, work ethic and people skills to have been extremely successful coming from any school.
Finally and most important-- Economic empowerment comes from more poor people who are literate, numerate, and not in jail (to start), and who are ultimately in college-- not from a larger Congressional Black Caucus. Rather than pushing to get an upper middle-class kid into a Northwestern rather than a U of Illinois, we need to focus our resources on getting "at-risk" youth of all backgrounds to (a) graduate high school and (b) pursue some sort of higher education-- trade school, community college, or 2nd Tier State U would each be a huge improvement. The battle to have it both ways (race-based affirmative action without regard to income) allows people to stop and think that the problem is solved when it is manifestly untouched.
Most of you know that I favor the Amitav argument--I'm much more concerned with getting people "in the game" than getting them a higher seeding. At some point you just have to accept that you're in the game and compete like everyone else. Also, I'm bias--I think anyone who didn't attend Howard is deranged. While this mostly applies to black folks, you aren't exempt white people. Anyway, I'd love to hear the rest of the room. As I always say, keep it civil please.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
As a Howard alumna, I have to second Amitav and Ta-Nehisi. The list of impressive AND influential HBCU grads is lengthy.
As an employee at a top-tier PWI (predominately white institution) with an agressive 'diversity' initiative, I know that kids of color who meet the basic requirements of admission are recruited much more heavily than most white kids. That's about all the affirmative action I can stomach, since it doesn't guarantee them a place based on their skin color, but it does get them in the running.
But many of the smaller HBCUs are where the kids who don't have a chance anywhere else get a shot.
And, uh, goooo Bison!
I attended a community college (HVCC), a second-tier engineering school (RPI) and I'm now at an elite law school (UVa).
For several reasons, I am not placed well to take advantage of everything UVa has to offer (I'm nearly 40, married, 2 kids and I carry around an awful lot of contempt for blue-bloods that walk around absolutely certain of their superiority), but... I think there a couple of key arguments that can be made on the pro-AA side.
It has to do with networking. If you have an Obama-like ability to stand-out amongst your peers, winning their respect and earning their friendship... well... the relationships you forge at a Harvard or Yale may come to be invaluable 10 or 15 years later when your peers are key decision-makers in powerful places.
Secondly, there are good teachers and professors at every educational tier, but almost without exception, professors at the top-tier schools earned their placement. They truly are extraordinary people and almost always have real-life experiences to draw upon in the classroom. In other words, they aren't pure ivory-tower.
In classic liberal form, however, I don't want to diminish the other argument... When I was at the community college, my schedule included some of the most challenging courses. In those courses, I became friends with some truly amazing people. Which is to say that even at the most accessible schools (the joke was that if you could sharpen a pencil, you'd be admitted), it isn't hard to find excellent people that whose friendship you'd value.
In the end though, I come down firmly in the camp of pro-AA. And the reason is that I am white. In the United States, my race will soon find itself the minority. For purely selfish reasons, I want to have a diverse classroom; I want to learn how to move effortlessly between racial cultures. I'm not sure AA is the perfect way to get there (Blacks, Asians and whites still separate into study and lunchtime cliques), but like the famous quote about democracy... it's probably the worst system we've got except all the others.
I find this discussion really interesting because my parents went to Virginia State (a HBCU) for their undergrad degrees, but my dad got his master's at UVa and my mom got her master's at Averret College in Danville, VA. My parents never pushed me or my sister to consider particular schools (in fact, my sister went to Georgetown undergrad and UVa law and I went to UVa undergrad and am going to the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism this fall).
Some time back, I shifted from thinking AA should be an exclusively race based program to one based on socio-economic background. My shift simply reflects what I think is a pragmatic view of the program that says that it's a lot easier to get people to stomach helping those that might be poor than it is to help people based solely on race.
I agree with Amitav that getting more people into the system rather than getting more people into the top of the system might be the best thing for all, but at the same time, I think that there's a tendency in some quarters to really underestimate the power of those Ivy (and other elite school) networks. Of course, going to Harvard doesn't mean one will be successful, but, in particular industries, you can get inside the door a lot easier than other folks can. As I think Mr. Coates has mentioned before, look at the folks he writes with at the Atlantic: Yglesias (Harvard), Megan McArdle (Penn and Chicago MBA), Ross Douthat (Harvard), Sullivan (Oxford and Harvard PhD), Jim Fallows (Harvard and Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar), Jeff Goldberg (Penn). It's certainly true that all of the above are smart with or without having gone to those schools, but I would bet that all of them would say that the value of going to those schools in terms of networking and the like has been a huge net plus for them in their professional lives. That's not to devalue the accomplishments of those who didn't go to a Harvard or a Yale in the least, though. Lord knows I'd love to be able to write like Ta-Nehisi can...
Count me in with the "it's more important to get them in the game" crowd, because if they're not in the game now, they won't magically find themselves there in 20 years when they should be ready to start leading on a larger scale. Amitav's point about economic empowerment is the important one, because it's the one most closely tied to economic class and mobility. The best way to make it possible for people to get out of the lowest economic class is to educate them and give them job skills--and we're not necessarily talking about a 4 year degree either. The world needs electricians and plumbers, and those are good ways for people to raise themselves out of poverty. They require education, but they don't require degrees. We ought to be focusing more that we do on that kind of stuff, because those are ways to build the middle class quickly.
Like this society has ever made a commitment to getting people long since locked out into the game.
At some point, you have to call a spade a spade. Brown vs. Board, let alone MLK's Poor People's Campaign attempted to focus on getting them in the game and the response has been virtual crickets. So let's not kid ourselves.
Amitav was on point in showing the speciousness of JP's argument about Ivy league schools and public office. And yet, it still seems like there's something missing from this conversation. AA doesn't help prepare people before they get to that college age level. Amitav mentioned the importance of, as Ta-Nahesi called it "getting in the game," but he didn't talk about how it serves both the AA folks, the Ivy league folks, and whomever is already in the game to keep those numbers limited. The destruction that is the public school system is evidence. It makes me wonder why all the pro-black schools and black churches aren't adopting schools and saying "this won't be a failing place." People who aren't in the game provide the jobs for the folks who are, whether it's the pyschologists or the cops, there is a nation of people who make good livings by keeping those not in the game at an unignorable level.
dwayne
I think that the most important thing is getting kids to college, and getting them to succeed once they're there. But I also think that we're kidding ourselves if we say that the top-tier schools don't provide some advantages, and that there's value in making sure that public schools reflect the diversity of their area.
To use California as an example, you can certainly get a damn good education in the Cal State system. But the perception is still that in most cases, a UC > a CSU. Since Prop 209, the percentage of Black and Latino students at the UC's has dropped sharply, in part because fewer Black and Latino students apply. In effect, you end up with a two-tier system: one for the White and Asian kids, and one for everyone else. And they're not equal, because the financial resources are allocated differently.
The irony is that the top-tier private schools are more diverse in many cases, because they can consider not only race, but geography, major interest, or anything else they feel is necessary to getting a well-balanced student body. When I was at Stanford, there was always one state that wasn't represented in the freshman class--and it was never the same state two years in a row. I'll grant, though, that no one ever assumed that the kid from South Dakota was an affirmative action admit.
I'd like to respond to Amitav's three points.
(1) I didn't mean to suggest that AA was the ONLY factor that got any one of the individuals I mentioned into college or grad school. However, if we want to believe that AA had NOTHING to do with it, we're being naive.
Amitav says that Booker "obviously" didn't benefit from AA because he "played football." (I'll set aside that the response wasn't that he "obviously" didn't benefit from AA because he's brilliant -- but because he was a jock. Which, in itself, is just another form of AA, i.e., awarding admission based on non-academic factors. And if Amitav wants to believe that being a black applicant from Stanford didn't help Booker at least stand out a little in the Rhodes competition, he's a lot less cynical than I am.)
The cold reality is that most black applicants wouldn't have the raw numbers (test scores, GPAs) to get past Ivy admissions boards. The causation is socioeconomic -- i.e., the underfunded public schools most black children are stuck with. They need a boost to get in the door. Just get in the door. What they do with the opportunity is up to them.
Yes, the Bookers and Obamas may have gotten in without AA (but they may not have). But even if they had, they would have been a lot more isolated. It's tough to compete in a highly selective environment when you're black and there are only 7-8% black students in your class and, oh by the way, everyone assumes you're dumber than they are. Now imagine it's only 1-2%, or less. Would Obama have made law review if he had been one of five black students in his law class -- instead of one of fifty? Maybe, but it would've been a hell of a lot harder without the communal support of at least a critical mass of fellow students who looked like him.
AA helps ensure that critical mass. White students never have to think about being the "one." I.e., "I'm the black ONE in class, so I better not get this answer wrong because then ALL blacks will appear stupid because of me." AA levels the playing field by easing that burden. It sucks to be one of the few, but it beats being the only one.
(2) Yes, many people have succeeded in life and done great things after graduating from schools that no one ever heard of. No one's denying that. I never said an elite education was the "sole determinant" of future success. Nor should it be.
But let's look at the presidential finalists for the last 20 years: Bush I (Yale), Dukakis (Harvard), Clinton (Yale), Dole, Bush II (Yale, Harvard), Gore (Harvard), Kerry (Yale), Obama (Columbia, Harvard), McCain. That's 7 of 9 with Ivy degrees. And of the two without, one's married to a Harvard alum and the other's married to a beer heiress (if there's one thing that counterbalances prestige, it's cold hard cash).
The Ivy network in this country is unparalleled. There is no aristocracy in this country (thank God). But although most of white America believes this is a pure meritocracy, nobody earns anything purely on merit. People aren't comfortable with that imbalance, so they pretend a degree from a fancy school means someone has earned a place in the upper crust. And that perception -- fair or unfair -- confers benefits.
Tom Cruise doesn't play a UMass alum in The Firm. When employers see Harvard Law on a resume, they think "star," whether that label is fitting or not. I'm not saying Ivy alums deserve this honor. I'm saying this is a mass national psychosis that compels us to prop up certain people as elites despite the lip service we give to principles of egalitarianism.
But if there's a broken system, and all the beneficiaries of the social benefits are undeserving, I say let's have some black and brown undeserving Ivy alums mixed in with the sea of undeserving white Ivy alums.
(3) Yes, absolutely -- let's get all the black kids out of jail and into trade school. That'd be great. Um, but since the values of black education are still only now recovering from the fractured black nuclear family, we're going to have quite a long wait.
Forget the kids in jail. Have you looked at the average birth weight and mortality rate for black infants in this country? They're just a notch above infants born in Calcutta. It's staggering.
Black Americans are by far the wealthiest black people, per capita, on Planet Earth. But our children are still born into Third World conditions. And the demographics are not likely to change anytime soon. More than 75% of black children last year were born out of wedlock. That doesn't mean that single parents can't do a great job, but it's much tougher.
Amitav says that we should put our "resources" into getting the poorest of us out of jail and into school. Well, who's "we"? America? Black people? The government? All of the above? And what resources? Money? Time? Family counseling?
Look, getting upper-class black kids into Yale doesn't solve black America's problems. Not by itself. But why do solutions have to be top-down OR bottom-up? Why can't they be both?
I feel like W.E.B. DuBois arguing for a Talented Tenth against Booker T. Washington's grass-roots empowerment. Well, I like both options. And I think both are necessary.
Top-down is much easier than bottom-up. Getting a couple generations of black Ivy alums took only 30 years. Healing the wounds of the black family could take ten times that long. We should work toward both goals, all the while recognizing that we will need black CEOs in the Old Boy Network to hire, in a few decades, all the black middle managers graduating from public universities.
* * *
I'll close with an anecdote. In the early '90s, a Dominican kid graduated from Evander High School in the Bronx. Those of you familiar with Bronx know Evander sends more kids to Ryker's than it does to college. The kid scored in the 1100s on his SATs. Not bad, but definitely below Ivy levels.
Kid gets into Harvard. Clearly an AA beneficiary, and everyone knows it. Butguess what: the kid busts his ass and just outworks the competition. He majors in History of Science, one of Harvard's more esoteric and difficult majors, and graduates magna. Ends up getting into Harvard Medical School. This time, AA doesn't enter anyone's mind.
My point is: AA just gets someone in the door -- just as the "white" forms of AA do, i.e., being a legacy, being from South Dakota, etc. What the student does with the opportunity depends on their own work and inner resources.
Was George W. Bush the "best" white America had to offer Yale? Of course not. But AA got him in. And his resourcefulness took him far.
The masses of us need to forge ahead down whatever avenues are open to us, be they trade schools, community colleges, public universities, or whatever.
But, like everyone else, we DO have an elite. And like all the other elites, they are flawed and they are petty and they are small-minded. They are no saints. But they are part of us. And advancing their interests ultimately advances our own.
I want to say a word about class-based affirmative action. (I've got some background in this. I chaired the admissions committee at a (non-first-tier) law school for a bunch of years; I read the files, and I know the numbers.) We had race-based affirmative action at our law school; that is, we gave a really big boost to the credentials of minority applicants. Just on the numbers, we needed to give minority applicants a really big preference, or we wouldn't have been able to admit more than a few of them (there are way too many white applicants with better LSATs/GPAs). That's a consequence of the socioeconomic factors JP references.
If we had substituted class-based for race-based affirmative action, what would have happened? First, because we had a lot more poor applicants than minority applicants (this country has more poor white people than it has black people), we'd have had to give each individual poor kid less of a boost than we had given the minority applicants. Otherwise, we'd have ended up admitting "too many" people through the affirmative action mechanism -- that is, we'd have admitted a sufficiently large number of folks with weaker LSATs and GPAs as to significantly hurt our overall LSAT and GPA medians, and that would have killed the law school in the competitive marketplace.
Second, the group of poor kids we did admit would have been almost completely white, since the poor black kids who applied to us tended to have the sort of numbers that wouldn't get them in even with a modest class-based affirmative action bump. (Unsurprisingly, our poor black applicants tend to have worse credentials than the middle-class black applicants who, under this regime, would no longer have been eligible for a preference. Socioeconomic factors again.) Basically, we'd have been substituting a small number of poor white kids with otherwise-not-quite-good-enough credentials for wealthier white kids with otherwise-only-just-barely-good-enough credentials. This might have been laudable, but it wouldn't have had squat effect on racial equality.
I agree whole-heartedly with Amitav that "we need to focus our resources on getting 'at-risk' youth of all backgrounds to (a) graduate high school and (b) pursue some sort of higher education." That would be much more valuable than law school affirmative action. But race-based affirmative action at my (non-first-tier) law school wasn't nothing. It got a bunch of black applicants into a more prestigious law school than they would have attended otherwise, better putting them in a position to take places when they graduated as future leaders of the community. That's a good thing, and class-based affirmative action couldn't have done it.
I am a class-is-primary guy, because that is the reality, class birthed racism, not the other way around. However, lets not confuse apples and oranges, a class-based program is about all Americans, and AA is supposed to be about folks that this country enslaved and lynched for about 350+ years.
Black folks are not just poor, we have been systematically oppressed and millions of us are still suffering from that oppression in ways that become more difficult to connect to the past as time passes. I dont hold out hope that the gov't will address that in any meaningful way, but since we are talking in this in the abstract, it should, and AA should be about addressing that historical wrong. We have been done extra dirty.
The way AA is constructed does not help people who need it most, and TC has made that point. I dont support the 'we need a black bourgoisie'/trickle down theory. Its a small scale solution to a large scale problem. You didn't get into Harvard, most folks dont, go get an education elsewhere. We need to be strengthening HBCUs because the numbers show that black kids graduate from HBCUS at far greater rates than other schools.
We need job training and basic education in the hood. I live on 114th and 7th in Harlem, and AA isn't going to help anyone in my neighborhood except a few middle class people like me, who don't NEED help, but could use it. Lots os people in my community NEED help and AA is not the vehicle to provide it.
A few points re Amitav:
The careers of those who went to college (or didn't) before WWII mean little in the current context, in which (for example) it seems to be hard to get nominated for president without a Harvard or Yale degree; similarly, blacks who went to college pre-AA (e.g., Wilder) may not be representative of the present situation.
For a black politician, the message sent by an Ivy League degree is not only "smart," but "safe" -- very important.
I do think, though, that at this point AA may be more important to the institutions (which do have an interest in inclusiveness, up to a point) than to the direct beneficiaries.
Finally, please bear in mind that HBCUs, for all their undoubted contributions, are basically a regional phenomenon -- and most of them individually are the kinds of institutions that have great difficulty achieving more than regional visibility.
I had an interesting argument about this exact thing when I was at a dinner party a ways back. (http://midwestreality.blogspot.com/2008/04/terrible-thing-to-waste.html#links)
I went to elite school as an undergrad. And if I could do it again, I probably would have gone to Howard. I look at many of my friends who went to black colleges and their is a level of self-confidence and self-assuredness that comes from them and their universal belief that they didn't need to be at those other schools to make them any more competitive.
I understand the "be in the room" argument, but those of us went to these schools know their is a level of self-segregation that often happens just for psychic survival.
JP:
Doesn't this statement point out a big problem with AA?:
It's tough to compete in a highly selective environment when you're black and there are only 7-8% black students in your class and, oh by the way, everyone assumes you're dumber than they are.
That assumption isn't a sign of racism, it's an acknowlegdement of the fact that, according to your rough estimates, there is a 75% chance that the person wasn't as academically qualified as the non-AA students.
Crack -- I think I disagree with your premise, at least in part. Yes, black AA beneficiaries have to labor under a perception of inferiority because of AA. But even absent AA, I still believe there would be a perception of inferiority -- because that's the case in America in general. All things being equal, a white person will more often than not choose a white plumber over a black plumber to fix a leaky faucet. There's a built-in assumption that the white guy will do a better job.
For example, now that Berkeley has only a 1-2% black undergrad population, in the absence of AA, do you really believe that the white and Asian students view the black students as equals? I doubt it. I bet they assume that the black students are the bottom 1-2% of the (bogus) meritocracy. (I went to school with people like this; I know how they think.)
The best way to disprove assumed inferiority is to outperform the competition. And I still say the competition is a lot fairer if the numbers are 90%/10% rather than 99%/1%. It may have been a small factor, but Obama's magna cum laude laurel from Harvard Law was definitely assisted by the fact that he wasn't the ONLY black guy in his class.
JP --
Historically, I believe, the facts are against you, at least with respect to Harvard Law. In the pre-AA period, IIRC, the very few black students tended to do very well; when AA came in the numbers went 'way up, but for some time none of them graduated with honors or made law review. There were at least a couple of theories about this -- one being that students do less well if they believe they can succeed without doing quite as well as average that if they believe they have to do better, another that success in law school depends upon "going along" which was actually easier with fewer peers.
In other words, Obama may have done it all on his own (well, of course he did), but he may have benefited more from the "normalization" of AA (everyone is admitted for some reason) than from a critical mass of black classmates.
Mr. Punch -- Let's assume, in a non-AA regime, a certain number of black students get accepted to Harvard Law. Introduce AA, and a certain additional number of AA-assisted black students get in. The question is, Do the non-AA black students benefit from the presence of the AA-assisted black students?
"Benefit" can mean different things: (1) Actual academic performance or (2) Perception of merit.
As to #1, I just don't buy that the advantage of having additional black peers is outweighed by the feeling that one may "let up" and not work as hard because of greater numbers. As for #2, I think history is very much on my side.
The most famous pre-AA black Harvard Law alum (in modern times) is William Coleman, Secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration. Coleman graduated summa from Penn, magna from Harvard Law, and clerked on the Supreme Court -- yet could not get a job with a single private firm in DC. (Thankfully, the NAACP LDF and federal government were able to find some use for the skills of Mr. Coleman, which the private sector found wanting.)
So Coleman scored well on #1 (performance) but was shafted on #2 (perception). It would be difficult to see someone of Coleman's caliber being screwed over like this in today's environment. Partially because we are living in more enlightened times. But also partially because -- due to AA -- there are more black Harvard Law alums in private-sector positions to make sure a kid like Coleman gets an offer, much less an interview.
I for one don't think you can single out the rightness or wrongness of AA without addressing the other admissions shenanigans that go on across all races and genders: there are athlete recruits, women athlete (Title XIX) recruits, women (who benefit far more from AA than blacks), children of alumni and children of wealthy donors (who were admitted with lower test scores and lower GPAs). I went to an ivy league school for undergrad and even with AA, there were often fewer than 100 students in a class of 1200-1300... forget the "talented tenth", it was more like 8-9%. And not all of us graduated on time.
In the graduate/professional schools it's a lot harder to get in and class sizes are still smaller. Those admits are much more rigorous, but I'm sure some AA is still going on.