On the menu today: This is the last Morning Jolt until July 5; may you have safe travels as we enter the Independence Day holiday weekend. The story of affirmative action’s rise and fall includes a curious chapter on how the first African-American president initially sounded open to its reform and to altering the programs to focus on class, but then quickly abandoned that idea upon taking office. The Supreme Court has ended the race-based approach. Meanwhile, there’s still no credible evidence that human arsonists, and not lightning, started the Quebec forest fires.
Affirmative Action’s Rise and Fall
There was a time, not that long ago, when Democrats could acknowledge flaws in affirmative-action programs. In fact, one of the party’s most popular leaders publicly recognized that a system designed and built upon the assumption that all whites were inherently privileged and all blacks, Latinos, or other minorities were inherently underprivileged was simply incompatible with the reality of life in modern America.
While on the Harvard Law Review editorial staff, young Barack Obama interacted with critics of affirmative action in a respectful, engaging, good-faith manner:
Similar tensions roiled the Harvard Law Review. The students were up in arms over — among other things — the role of race and gender in the selection of editors. “That year was unusual in that there was a group of very assertive conservative types on the Law Review,” says Adam Charnes, who counted himself among them. Obama, who had earned a place on the journal in his first year at Harvard, saw a role for himself that has come to define his pitch for the presidency today — as a bridge builder. He approached the conservatives, according to another member of that contingent who has requested anonymity, and explained that while he supported affirmative action as a policy matter, he recognized that it came at a cost. He didn’t consider them racists for opposing it. Charnes praises Obama as “a straight-up guy who always told you exactly what he thought.” The conservatives saw Obama as a moderate and threw their support behind him. Obama became the new Law Review president.
Fast forward to then-candidate Barack Obama, being interviewed by George Stephanopolous back in May 2007:
Stephanopoulos: And you’re a constitutional law professor, so let’s go back in the classroom. . . . I’m your student. I say ‘professor, you and your wife went to Harvard Law School. Got plenty of money, you’re running for president. Why should your daughters when they go to college get affirmative action?’
Obama: Well, first of all, I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with us taking that into account as we consider admissions policies at universities. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed. So I don’t think those concepts are mutually exclusive. I think what we can say is that in our society race and class still intersect, that there are a lot of African-American kids who are still struggling, that even those who are in the middle class may be first-generation as opposed to fifth- or sixth-generation college attendees, and that we all have an interest in bringing as many people together to help build this country. [Emphasis added.]
Stephanopoulos: Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that in 25 years affirmative action may no longer be necessary. Is she right?
Obama: I would like to think that if we make good decisions and we invest in early childhood education, improved K through twelve, if we have done what needs to be done to ensure that kids who are qualified to go to college can afford it, that affirmative action becomes a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society.
That was 15 years ago, and for eight of those years, Obama was president. Has America improved its education system to the point where affirmative action has become a diminishing tool to achieve racial equality? (The most recent national test scores would indicate probably not, but one big reason was the decision to shut down public schools for at least a year.)
In 2008, Obama made similar remarks while speaking to minority journalists:
Q: If the United States were to have a president of color, would there still be a need for affirmative action?
OBAMA: Well, look, I am a strong supporter of affirmative action when properly structured so that it is not just a quota, but it is acknowledging and taking into account some of the hardships and difficulties that communities of color may have experienced, continue to experience, and it also speaks to the value of diversity in all walks of American life. We are becoming a more diverse culture, and it’s something that has to be acknowledged.
I’ve also said that affirmative action is not going to be the long-term solution to the problems of race in America, because, frankly, if you’ve got 50 percent of African-American or Latino kids dropping out of high school, it doesn’t really matter what you do in terms of affirmative action. Those kids are not getting into college.
And, you know, there have been times where I think affirmative action has been viewed as a shortcut to solving some of these broader, long-term structural problems.
I also think that we have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren’t getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who’s struggled more. That has to be taken into account. [Emphasis added.]
More than once, Obama cited his daughters as children who had grown up comfortably, in a lifestyle that would meet every definition of privileged. The idea that they would need some sort of institutionalized, systematic leg up or separate lower standard in college, graduate school, or the workplace is absurd.
From those comments, you could conclude that Obama wanted to shift affirmative-action programs from focusing on race to focusing on a broader definition of challenged or underprivileged, perhaps even moving to a system that focused on class. I suspect there are a lot of Americans who would look far more sympathetically at a system designed to give a leg up to those who have faced any kind of significant challenge — poverty, broken homes, troubled communities, abuse of any kind, limited educational opportunities — instead of a system that primarily measures the color of your skin. I also think the Supreme Court would be much more likely to find that kind of a system constitutional.
And yet, during Obama’s presidency, he did not push for any significant change to affirmative-action programs. Then yesterday, the Obamas denounced the Supreme Court decision.
The editors of National Review declared, “For most of American history, the greatest obstacle to equal justice under law has been state-sanctioned discrimination on the basis of race. Today, at long last, the Court has said to such discrimination: No more.” Robert Delahunty and John Yoo conclude that the Supreme Court “finally removed higher education’s exemption from the principle of colorblindness.”
Charlie Cooke notes that Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent assumes an America that resoundingly supports existing affirmative-action programs, when all available public-policy polling indicates the opposite. In fact, 58 percent of Democrats — as well as 72 percent of independents and 78 percent of Republicans — oppose the use of race as a factor in college and university admissions. The Supreme Court is meant to make its decisions based upon the law and the Constitution, not public opinion. But it is fascinating to see one of the justices invoking public opinion as a reason to keep the programs as is, when public opinion shows something very different.
And Michael Brendan Dougherty observes that the intensity of the debate around affirmative action is directly related to the perception that there are only a few avenues through which to join the country’s ruling class:
That college-application gauntlet is a major feature in selecting our political and cultural elite. Look no further than the Supreme Court itself: Eight out of nine went through Harvard or Yale Law School; the only exception is Amy Coney Barrett, who was just summa cum laude at Notre Dame. People are right to believe that a change in the behavior of admissions offices at these universities means a change for our nation in the long run. . . .
The stranglehold of the Ivy League on our elite has been bad for everyone. It impedes the circulation of elites that is healthy for a society. It turns the childhoods of our elite into a meritocratic gauntlet. And it produced our presidential leadership from 1993 to 2017, leading to the inevitable backlash in the form of Trump.
Dan McLaughlin notices a left-wing defender of affirmative action fuming that his ideological comrades are often giant hypocrites, supporting any system of institutionalized advantages that doesn’t affect them personally. Welcome to the party, pal!
AOC seems to think that the Supreme Court should have struck down legacy admissions, even though that wasn’t an issue in the case before it. She also seems to think that conservatives are big defenders of legacy admissions in the Ivy League and at other prestigious universities, which is absurd. I don’t think it is accurate to say that progressives as a whole are consistent defenders of that policy, either.
You know who really wants to preserve legacy-admissions programs? People who went to prestigious schools whose kids aren’t that bright — regardless of political ideology!
We Didn’t Start the Fire, Part Two
Smoke and haze from wildfires in Quebec are blanketing portions of America again.
Back on June 7, the Toronto Sun reported Quebec police were investigating the possibility that at least some of the region’s massive forest fires may have been the result of arson. Since then, there have been no arrests and no updates in the case. As written in the Morning Jolt of June 8, for now, the best explanation for the widespread forest fires in Quebec is the “perfect storm” of “very low humidity, no rain, strong winds, and many thunderstorms and lightning strikes.”
There were two arrests in British Columbia for arson in connection to forest fires, but if you look at a map of Canada, a fire set in that province is not related to the fires on the East Coast. This is like claiming that a case of arson in California is the cause of forest fires in New England. Embers can travel far, but not across an entire continent. Nor is there any reason to think that a case of arson in downtown Montreal is connected to the forest fires.
Every major entity that monitors, studies, and fights forest fires is saying that while it is impossible to say with 100 percent certainty how all of the current 76 active forest fires in Quebec started, all of the available evidence points to their starting as a result of those atmospheric and environmental conditions. Dry forest, lots of lightning, not enough rain, and strong winds — no human action needed. Apply Occam’s Razor.
Alas, those who are most committed to believing the explanation that the forest fires started because of some nefarious human actors are the ones most resistant to listening to counterevidence.
ADDENDUM: The fifth Indiana Jones movie arrives in theaters today, and to use a line associated with Harrison Ford’s earlier works . . . I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Armond White blames Steven Spielberg for abandoning the franchise.