"I got into law school because I am black.
As many black professionals think they must, I have long suppressed this truth, insisting instead that I got where I am the same way everybody else did. Today I am a professor at the Yale Law School. I like to think that I am a good one, but I am hardly the most objective judge. What I am fairly sure of, and can now say without trepidation, is that were my skin not the color that it is, I would not have had the chance to try.
For many, perhaps most, black professionals of my generation, the matter of who got where and how is left in a studied and, I think, purposeful ambiguity. Some of us, as theysay, would have made it into an elite college. or professional school anyway. (But, in my generation, many fewer than we like to pretend, even though one might question the much-publicized claim by Derek Bok, the president of Harvard Uni-versity, that in the absence of preferences, only 1 percent of Harvard’s entering class would be black.) Most of us, perhaps nearly all of us, have learned to bury the matter far back in our minds. We are who we are and where we are, we have records of accomplishment or failure, and there is no rational reason that anybody—employer, client, whoever—should care any longer whether racial preference played any role in our admission to a top professional school.
When people in positions to help or hurt our careers do seem to care, we tend to react with fury... We bristle when others raise what might be called the qualification question—“‘Did you get into school or get hired because of a special program?”’—and that prickly sensitivity is the best evidence, if any is needed, of one of the principal costs of racial preferences. Scratch a black professional with the qualification question, and you’re likely to get a caustic response, such as this one from a senior executive at a major airline: ‘‘Some whites think I’ve made it because I’m black. Some blacks think I’ve made it only because I’m an Uncle Tom. The fact is, I’ve made it because I’m good."
Given the way that so many Americans seem to treat receipt of the benefits of affirmative action as a badge of shame, answers of this sort are both predictable and sensible. In the professional world, moreover, they are very often true: relatively few corporations are in a position to hand out charity. The peculiar aspect of the routine denial, however, is that so many of those who will bristle at the suggestion that they themselves have gained from racial preferences will try simultaneously to insist that racial preferences be preserved and to force the world to pretend that no one benefits from them. That awkward balancing of fact and fiction explains the frequent but generally groundless ery that it is racist to suggest that some individual’s professional accomplishments would be fewer but for affirmative action; and therein hangs a tale...
I was disturbed rather than excited by this vision of law schools circling the wagons, as it were, to defend their beleaguered minority students against racially insensitive remarks... there would still have been outrage—not as much, but some— had the interviewer asked only what I called at the beginning of the chapter the qualification question.
I suspect this because in my own student days, something over a decade ago, an interviewer from a prominent law firm addressed this very question to a Yale student who was not white, and the student voices—including my own—howled in protest. “‘Racism!”’ we insisted. ‘‘Ban them!” But with the passing years, I have come to wonder whether our anger might have been misplaced...
(It is useful here to dispose of one common but rather silly anti-affirmative action bromide: the old question, ‘‘Do you really want to be treated by a doctor who got into medical school because of skin color?” The answer is, or ought to be, that the patient doesn’t particularly care how the doctor got into school; what matters is how the doctor got out. The right question, the sensible question, is not ‘“What medical school performance did your grades and test scores predict?” but “‘What was your medical school performance?’”’) But irrelevance and boorishness cannot explain our rage at the qualification question, because lots of interviewers ask questions that meet the tests of boorishness and irrelevance.
The controversy is not limited to outsiders who come onto campus to recruit. In the spring of 1991, for example, students at Georgetown Law School demanded punishment for a classmate who argued in the school newspaper that affirmative action is unfair because students of color are often admitted to law school on the basis of grades and test scores that would cause white applicants to be rejected. Several universities have considered proposals that would deem it “racial harassment”’ for a (white?) student to question the qualifications of nonwhite classmates.* But we can’t change either the truths or the myths about racial preferences by punishing those who speak them.
This clamor for protection from the qualification question is powerful evidence of the terrible psychological pressure that racial preferences often put on their beneficiaries. Indeed, it sometimes seems as though the programs are not supposed to have any beneficiaries—or, at least, that no one is permitted to suggest that they have any.
And that’s ridiculous. If one supports racial preferences in professional school admissions, for example, one must be prepared to treat them like any other preference in admission and believe that they make a difference, that some students would not be admitted if the preferences did not exist. This is not a racist observation. It is not normative in any sense. It is simply a fact. A good deal of emotional underbrush might be cleared away were the fact simply conceded, and made the beginning, not the end, of any discussion of preferences. For once it is conceded that the programs have beneficiaries, it follows that some of us who are professionals and are not white must be among them. Supporters of preferences must stop pretending otherwise. Rather, some large segment of us must be willing to meet the qualification question head-on, to say, “Yes, I got into law school because of racial preferences. So what?’’—and, having said it, must be ready with a list of what we have made of the opportunities the preferences provided.
Now, this is a costly concession, because it carries with it all the baggage of the bitter rhetorical battle over the relationship between preferences and merit. But bristling at the question suggests a deep-seated fear that the dichotomy might be real. Indeed, if admitting that racial preferences make a difference leaves a funny aftertaste in the mouths of proponents, they might be more comfortable fighting against preferences rather than for them.
So let us bring some honesty as well as rigor to the debate, and begin at the beginning. I have already made clear my starting point: I got into a top law school because I am black. Not only am I unashamed of this fact, but I can prove its truth.
As a senior at Stanford back in the mid-1970s, I applied to about half a dozen law schools. Yale, where I would ultimately enroll, came through fairly early with an acceptance. So did all but one of the others. The last school, Harvard, dawdled and dawdled. Finally, toward the end of the admission season, I received a letter of rejection. Then, within days, two different Harvard officials and a professor contacted me by telephone to apologize. They were quite frank in their explanation for the “‘error.’”’ I was told by one official that the school had initially rejected me because ‘‘we assumed from your record that you were white.” (The words have always stuck in my mind, a tantalizing reminder of what is expected of me.) Suddenly coy, he went on to say that the school had obtained ‘additional information that should have been counted in your favor’’—that is, Harvard had discovered the color of my skin. And if I had already made a deposit to confirm my decision to go elsewhere, well, that, I was told, would “not be allowed’ to stand in my way should I enroll at Harvard.
Naturally, I was insulted by this miracle. Stephen Carter, the white male, was not good enough for the Harvard Law School; Stephen Carter, the black male, not only was good enough but rated agonized telephone calls urging him to attend. And Stephen Carter, color unknown, must have been white: How else could he have achieved what he did in college? Except that my college achievements were obviously not sufficiently spectacular to merit acceptance had I been white. In other words, my academic record was too good for a black Stanford University undergraduate, but not good enough for a white Harvard law student. Because I turned out to be black, however, Harvard was quite happy to scrape me from what it apparently considered somewhere nearer the bottom of the barrel.
My objective is not to single out Harvard for special criticism; on the contrary, although my ego insists otherwise, I make no claim that a white student with my academic record would have been admitted to any of the leading law schools. The insult I felt came from the pain of being reminded so forcefully that in the judgment of those with the power to dispose, I was good enough for a top law school oe because I happened to be black.
aturally, I should not have been insulted at all; that is what racial preferences are for—racial preference. But I was insulted and went off to Yale instead, even though I had then and have now absolutely no reason to imagine that Yale’s judgment was based on different criteria than Harvard’s. Hardly anyone granted admission at Yale is denied admission at Harvard, which admits a far larger class; but several hundreds of students who are admitted at Harvard are denied admission at Yale. Because Yale is far more selective, the chances are good that I was admitted at Yale for essentially the same reason I was admitted at Harvard—the color of my skin made up for what were evidently considered other deficiencies in my academic record. I may embrace this truth as a matter of simple justice or rail against it as one of life’s great evils, but being a member of the affirmative action generation means that the one thing I cannot do is deny it. I will say it again: I got into law school because I am black. So what?"
--- Reflections of an affirmative action baby / Stephen L. Carter
How ignorant. Doesn't he know that affirmative action just exists to level the playing field?!
One left wing cope to reconcile the paradox Carter identifies of claiming that affirmative action simultaneously means certain groups are getting in based on lower standards but also doesn't mean members of those groups who do get in are less capable is to claim that affirmative action just removes bias so those groups are being evaluated the same as the "majority". Quite how affirmative action is so precise as to perfectly balance the supposed bias out without biasing it in the other direction is never specified, of course.
You can tell this was published in 1991 because he doesn't consider the possibility that medical school performance / tests can be influenced by affirmative action too.
