Affirmative Action v25.4
Today's tidbit.
There used to be a guy at a website called discriminations.us whose writings I attended pretty much the entire time I considered myself to be a race man. Like me and many others, his website disappeared after the fall of Typepad. His name is John Rosenberg. I hope to meet him one day.
I have the small honor of having been the last commenter on Discriminations. I believe that for the past several years you and I have been out on that same limb, despite the probability of having been treed from a variety of different threats. But there is clarity from that altitude and balance gained from holding tight through fair or foul winds.
My last comment was this:
I am so pleased to see that you are still out on a limb doing good work. Over the years (intermittently) I have always considered your reasoning. It turns out that you have outlined some arguments that have won me over. I guess that’s the proof that when one attends to reason, they wind up in a reasonable accord. Please keep up the good work, and consider any piece you like to be republished in our Journal.
Today, Cremieux Recueil has put together some statistical arguments about Affirmative Action that I am predisposed to believe are true, even though that’s lazy. Let’s skip to some of zero-sum implications:
Another way affirmative action wouldn’t matter would be if it actually corrected an unjust representation issue. That is, if, in the absence of affirmative action, groups were being unfairly penalized at any given level of ability and affirmative action merely fixed that. But we know from all existing data, from the MCAT, to the LSAT, to the data from SFFA v. Harvard, to so much data contained in IPEDS, that this is not the case, so we can ignore this possibility too.
Cremieux is one of the most perfectly sound rational publications in all of the noise we consume on the interwebz. I consider Cremeiux to be world class and so defer to that source. The Harvard admission chart is stunning, which only underlines to me how much my peer networks sucks. (sad trombone)
My Bottom Line
Affirmative Action is racial discrimination for the purposes of inclusion.
It sounds fair, but is it? I would say the overwhelming majority of Americans find inclusion to be a positive, yet squishy and sentimental value. The problem is that the assumption of the exclusion of racial types is overstated for two main reasons.
We already have anti-racial discrimination law.
Race isn’t who we actually are.
Roughly 7% of black Americans live in California; my kids are third generation ‘California immigrants’ with myself being the anchor baby and my parents living here since their early 20s. Considering that 56% of black Americans live in the South, I am acutely aware of my ethnic and cultural differences from the racial aggregate. So as I say it has always been easy for me to recognize my distinction within the racial mainstream.
So what would I be ‘inclusioned’ into as compared to a black Southerner? How is that the very same integration? It cannot be. Nor can its costs and tradeoffs be easily calculated. These more economic measures are indisputably more significant and meaningful than those around the sentiment of inclusion. Then again, one can not reason away that which was not reasonably adopted. The emotional adherence to Affirmative Action is non-trivial.
What I’m left with is a sad conclusion that the political majority of Americans are not interested in actively enforcing anti-racial discrimination law in order that we can feel good about engineering ‘people of color’ into bogus elite regimes defined by ‘racial inclusion’.
We need more Mordecai Johnsons in America for whom DEI would mean:
Discipline
Excellence
Integrity
Your reframing of affirmative action as "racial discrimination for the purposes of inclusion" captures the core tension that statistical analyses like Cremieux's make unavoidable. The point about existing anti-discrimination law is crucial—if we already have legal protections against exclusion, then affirmative action becomes not a corrective but a preferential mechanism. The distinction you draw between your California experience and Southern black Americans highlights how crude racial categories fail to capture actual cultural and economic differences, making "inclusion" metrics fundamentally arbitrary. When credentials lose their signaling value through differential admission thresholds, we end up with a system that simultaneously devalues the achievements it's meant to facilitate while doing little to address actual discrimination in enforcement.