The Tragedy of Affirmative Action

I love listening to someone explaining what they think is "fair" or "ought to be". What matters is discerning what works and what doesn't (is ineffective).

Affirmative action has been ineffective in advancing the well being of African Americans in this country. The California State College System is a wonderful natural experiment to prove my point.

What does "work" are inner city charter schools.

https://www.spritzlerreport.com/post/are-college-minority-students-bettter-off-without-affirmative-action

The Tragedy of Affirmative Action

Blacks were making rapid progress before the 1960s. Racial preferences didn’t help, and if anything they slowed the improvement.

By Jason L. Riley. WSJ

May 2, 2025 2:03 pm ET

Derrick Bell is best known for his contributions to critical race theory—which claims that racism is embedded in American law and institutions and that the historical mistreatment of black people largely explains current social and economic disparities.

Before becoming the first black tenured professor at Harvard Law School in the 1970s, Bell was a lawyer for the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, where he worked on school desegregation cases under the tutelage of Thurgood Marshall. Bell was once a critic of racial favoritism. But over time, he grew unhappy with the pace of black progress and came to believe that racism is so deeply ingrained in our society that colorblind remedies were destined to fail.

Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 and the unrest that ensued nationwide, including on college campuses, schools stepped up efforts to recruit black students and faculty. To expedite the push for racial diversity, elite colleges began lowering admissions and hiring standards. Previous black recruitment efforts had involved searching for capable students who met existing admission criteria and could handle the rigor of the institution. For the first time, schools started creating special programs to recruit black students with academic deficiencies.

How these underqualified recruits would fare once enrolled was less important to college administrators than how many black faces were on campus. The haste in which schools proceeded came at a high cost to the black “beneficiaries.” Studies conducted in the late 1960s and early 1970s showed that, at some elite schools, half of undergraduates admitted through special programs for blacks were on academic probation.

In a 1970 law-review article, Bell objected to this new trend of using different criteria to assess student performance depending on race and ethnic background. In the past, he noted, the small percentages of blacks admitted to selective law schools “not only met the usual academic criteria, but were often characterized by a strong inner drive to equal and, if at all possible, excel their white classmates.” The difference in the quality of black students being admitted for appearances, Bell wrote, was “monumental.” However well-intentioned, it was condescending and unhelpful to ask less of them.

“The view that black students, by reason of their deprived background and racist experiences, should not be required to perform as regular law students,” he argued, “is a form of benevolent paternalism” that feeds racist stereotypes among whites and takes a psychic toll on blacks. “What does such a seemingly sympathetic policy do to the black student’s self-esteem?”

Bell warned that racial preferences risked tainting the accomplishments—in the eyes of whites and blacks alike—of blacks who succeeded. “Whatever arguments are used to justify such a policy, there is little denying that it robs those black students who have done well of receiving real credit and the boost in confidence that their accomplishments merit,” he wrote. He also mentioned the “growing tide of bitterness and resentment” toward these practices and insisted that in “judging the work of black students, there is no reason to apply criteria more stringent than those used to judge whites, and no excuse for passing blacks on lower standards.”

Although Bell later changed his mind, he offered a preview of a half-century of arguments that would be made against racial preferences. He dedicated his professional career to advancing the interests of fellow blacks, and he wasn’t the only scholar to recognize the shortcomings of these policies. That might give pause to those who are inclined to dismiss criticism of affirmative action as racist.

Bell’s concerns about the psychological toll these policies would take on black America turned out to be especially prescient. More than five decades of affirmative action has created the impression that black advancement is impossible without racial preferences. In anticipation of the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard,Sherrilyn Ifill, a former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said that court-imposed race neutrality would have “catastrophic implications” for blacks. Paul Butler, a law professor at Georgetown, predicted that “public and private universities will resegregate.”

Following the decision, some of the most pessimistic assessments came from black elites. Barack Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate, said that race-conscious policies had “allowed generations of students like Michelle and me to prove we belonged.” Former MSNBC host Joy Reid insisted that affirmative action was the only reason black people like her had access to selective colleges. The “scale of what has been lost is difficult to assess,” wrote Columbia Journalism School’s Jelani Cobb, but “the result will be fewer students from traditionally underrepresented minorities on college campuses.”

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority ruling “rolls back decades of precedent and momentous progress.” In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the majority opinion had “detached itself from this country’s actual past and present experiences.” Yet actual past experience clearly shows that black advancement in higher education was far more momentous in the decades immediately prior to the implementation of quotas and set-asides.

In fact, the advent of racial preferences coincided with the end of a black-white convergence in the quantity and quality of education in the U.S. that had been under way for nearly a century. Well before the implementation of racial preferences, blacks were making unprecedented strides despite tremendous racial hostility. Those who credit affirmative action with black educational advancement are getting the order wrong. Black advancement came first.

This doom-saying on the left rests mainly on the assumption that racial favoritism is a prerequisite for black accomplishment in a country where racism still exists. Because it has been asserted for so many decades that affirmative action and other government programs are responsible for the existence of today’s black middle class, few bother to question the claim. Yet whether black people have advanced more under quotas and set-asides than under nonpreferential policies is ultimately an empirical question, even if the issue is seldom analyzed empirically.

During the first two-thirds of the 20th century, well before affirmative action and an expanded welfare state supposedly came to the rescue of black people, they experienced significant progress. Education gaps narrowed, incomes rose, and poverty declined. This history hasn’t received the attention it deserves because black politicians and activists have a vested interest in a narrative that accentuates black suffering. The upshot is that a history of social and economic advancement that should be a source of pride for blacks—and of inspiration for other ethnic minority groups—has received relatively little consideration.

In 1940, 25- to 29-year-old whites had 3.6 years more schooling on average than their black counterparts. By 1960 both groups had advanced, but blacks outpaced whites and the gap narrowed by more than half, to 1.7 years. Most white-collar jobs, then as now, require a high school diploma. Between 1940 and 1960, the percentage of blacks who met that qualification more than tripled, again growing at a much faster rate than among whites. But as more colleges began compromising their admission standards in the late 1960s to admit black students, these trends slowed.

According to Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and co-author Shaylyn Romney Garrett, education gaps that had been narrowing started to widen. Greater numbers of blacks had been graduating from high school and entering college, but now fewer were completing college relative to their white peers. The “fastest and most dramatic progress toward parity between blacks and whites finishing high school was achieved before 1970,” the authors wrote in “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again,” a 2020 book. “But after 1970, the relative rate at which blacks were completing college dropped, then flatlined, and never recovered its previous upward trajectory. In fact, today black Americans are completing college at a lower rate compared to whites than they were in 1970.”

A similar story can be told about black income. More education meant better jobs and higher pay. And just as absolute and relative educational gains among blacks had been speedier in the decades prior to racial preferences in college admissions, wages for black workers rose at a faster pace in the decades before racial hiring quotas became commonplace. Again, affirmative action policies received far more credit than they warrant, mainly because proponents get the sequence wrong or start the story in the middle.

In 1939, the annual median income was $360 for black males and $1,112 for white males. (These figures are nominal, unadjusted for inflation.) By 1960 those figures had reached $3,075 and $5,137, respectively, an increase of 568% for blacks vs. 362% for whites. Among females over the same time, there was a 275% increase among whites and a 418% increase among blacks. All this occurred before affirmative action and the civil-rights legislation of the mid-1960s.

Between 1940 and 1970, the median annual income for black men rose from 41% to 59% of the median annual white male income, an 18-point gain. Yet under the first quarter-century of affirmative action, 1970-95, black male earnings as a percentage of white earnings grew by only 8 more points, to 67%. Among black women, the pre–affirmative-action gains were even more dramatic. Median black female earnings climbed from 36% of the white female median in 1940 to 73% by 1970. Between 1970 and 1995, however, pay for black women grew by only 16 more points. Black earnings clearly were rising at a much faster clip prior to affirmative action. They continued to rise thereafter, but more slowly. To say that affirmative action led to the jump in black incomes is to ignore these pre-existing trends.

Central to the social-justice ideology that promotes affirmative action is a belief that statistical disparities among groups result mainly from discrimination rather than from statistical differences in skills, behaviors and attitudes. Accordingly, black social and economic advancement is said to be dependent on policies that counter antiblack bias with antiwhite bias. Yet the phenomenal rise of blacks in the first two-thirds of the 20th century, despite centuries of maltreatment, provides a strong rebuke to such claims. History shows that black people have made greater strides under policies of colorblindness than affirmative action. At best, race preferences have helped to continue something that was already happening. At worst, they’ve done more to throttle than to expedite black upward mobility.

Mr. Riley is a Journal columnist and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This article is adapted from his book “The Affirmative Action Myth: Why Blacks Don’t Need Racial Preferences to Succeed,” forthcoming May 6.