Archimedes – nom de plume  of a member of our forum – wrote an essay against affirmative action in 1977 when it was a topic of intense debate in America. The reason for the interest in the subject then was an appeal by a white man, Allan P. Bakke, to the Supreme Court against the rejection by many universities, partly on grounds of his race, of his application to their medical schools.

In 1978 the Supreme Court issued its verdict in the Bakke case. It found for Bakke, but also allowed affirmative action in favor of black applicants. The universities launched it as a policy which persisted – against majority opinion – until this year, 2023. Now the Supreme Court has declared affirmative action to be illegal.

We have reviewed the essay by Archimedes and we agree with the him that his argument is still valid. We think he makes it excellently well.    

Here is the essay:

To reward or punish a person on the basis of his race is morally wrong; no good can come of it. And what the opponents of Bakke are proposing is not an end to this pernicious practice, but merely a change in victims and beneficiaries. The results, however, will be the same: resentment, envy, bitterness, social divisiveness, stereotyping, and a general corrosion of the spirit.

The American judicial system is based on precedent. Should the Supreme Court rule against Bakke, the equal protection amendment, which has been the bulwark of the civil rights movement, could be severely weakened, in which case there would be little left in the law to prevent a new Supreme Court or a vengeful majority from legally institutionalizing an inferior status for blacks.

Preferential treatment is condescending and patronizing and both stimulates and nourishes the very attitudes we are supposedly attempting to eradicate. One does not patronize a person one regards as an equal; neither does one regard as an equal a person one patronizes. Similarly, one does not accept preferential treatment without a loss of self-respect and integrity. I suspect that behind all the fine talk by white liberals is a posture of noblesse oblige and superiority, and behind all the strident demands by certain black groups and leaders is a gnawing sense of inadequacy.

Preferential treatment taints all black achievement, makes it suspect, gives it the appearance of a benefit conferred rather than something earned. Let this policy continue for another twenty or thirty years and not a single black doctor, lawyer, civil servant, teacher, engineer, scientist, business manager, or politica appointee will know for sure whether his success is the result of his own talent and efforts or is at least in part the result of some gracious indulgence on the part of Whitey. I cannot conceive of a policy more degrading and damaging to the black person of real merit. By the same token, I cannot conceive of a policy more likely to arouse the skepticism, resentment, and disdain of whites, however well-intentioned and kindly disposed toward blacks they may be initially. And the longer this policy is pursued, the more likely it is that all black achievement (except achievement in sports and entertainment, where excellence is immediately obvious) will come to be regarded by most whites and probably many blacks as not genuine.

We are told that quotas and affirmative action are necessary if we are to put an end to the underrepresentation of certain groups in various aspects of American life. But what does the word “underrepresentation” mean? When is a group properly represented? The quota people have the answer to that one. They tell us that if a group constitutes X per cent of the population as a whole, then that group should constitute roughly X per cent of every profession and trade. The premise here is that attitudes, aptitudes, tastes, and desires are, or at any rate ought to be, uniformly distributed among all racial and ethnic groups, and if in fact they are not, we must simply go ahead and pretend that they are and force people into their predetermined slots. This is egalitarianism at its worst. It is totally at variance with traditional American notions of individual merit and personal freedom. There is absolutely no health in it.

The argument that blacks as a group require quotas and special treatment as compensation for deprived and disadvantaged backgrounds lumps all blacks in one category and all whites in another category. Blacks are by definition “disadvantaged”; whites are by definition “privileged”. Yet we know that tens of thousands of black children are growing up in comfortable, middle-class homes and can by no rational standard be termed “underprivileged” or “disadvantaged” and that an even larger number of black children attend integrated schools and receive the same instruction and enjoy the same opportunities for learning as their white classmates. If the opponents of Bakke were truly sincere about taking into account and compensating for deprivation, they would exempt the above children from special consideration. But they do not. Deprivation is determined by race and race alone. What this says is that a black child who attends school in the wealthy, innovative, richly endowed Berkeley system is disadvantaged, while a white child who attends an impoverished, woefully understaffed school in Appalachia or the rural South is a member of a privileged group – the white race – and hence can learn to live with a few minor handicaps, such as exclusion from college or graduate school.

The whole argument about inferior schooling and disadvantaged backgrounds is shot through with cant and self-deception. It is true that blacks going to “bad” ghetto schools learn very little. However, it is also true and the NAACP knows this that – blacks enrolled in “good” desegregated schools do just as poorly. (This unwelcome fact has emerged from virtually every one of the numerous studies of the effects of school desegregation on academic achievement.) Thus, as things stand right now, even if the entire country were desegregated and every school had a statistically “correct” racial balance, the educational gap between blacks and whites would remain unaltered (as it has after nine years of integration in the much vaunted Berkeley school system) and there would still be a demand for quotas and preferential treatment.

What is required is not quotas but a fundamental change in the attitude of blacks toward academic achievement and a determination on their part to perform as well in the classroom as they do on the basketball court. But the policy of quotas and special placement seems to be precisely the kind of policy that will discourage such a shift in attitude and emphasis. It implicitly assumes that blacks cannot or will not do well enough to be admitted to colleges and graduate schools on their own merits; it awards blacks easy and unearned victories at the expense of a generation of whites that played no role in the previous subjugation of the black man; it discourages rather that stimulates a desire to excel on the part of blacks. And because it treats the symptoms instead of the causes of the problem, it cannot bring about fundamental change. To succeed in its goals, it can never be relaxed; it must be maintained forever. Is this what we really want?

Fortunately it can no longer be openly maintained.