Brief Thoughts on Affirmative Action and The Talented Tenth
In this week’s edition of the newsletter, I’m thinking aloud about affirmative action in the wake of the Court’s recent ruling. I’m not happy about the ruling, but I’m also not satisfied with what the status quo has been subsequent to the ruling. I’ll be musing about why I think diversity in elite education matters, but also why I think elite education should be judged on the basis of what it produces for society at large. But before I jump ino that, some items to note.
First, I note with sorrow the recent passing of the preeminent economist Bill Spriggs who spent his life advocating for workers and pushing the economics profession to understand racism’s ongoing effects on labor market outcomes. I was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Spriggs shortly before his death, when he attended a panel I participated on addressing the risks of automation for minority workers.
Second, the team over at Economic Innovation Group have produced an important and detailed report on persistent poverty communities - which are places that have had elevated poverty across multiple decades. I think it’s helpful to dig into what entrenched poverty looks like in urban and rural settings across the nation.
Third, last night I watched Rensfield, the new Nic Cage Dracula movie, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. So if the description “Nic Cage Dracula movie” sounds enticing to you, then that’s all the recommendation from me that you should need.
Affirmative Action and the Talented Tenth
Let’s start with a tldr: of where things currently stand. Using quotas has long been considered unconstitutional and politically unthinkable. Likewise, previous Court decisions have stated that using race-conscious admission policies as a form of reparations is also not acceptable. The practice therefore has been to use consideration of race as one factor in service to ensuring broad diversity - with the Court previously recognizing such diversity as being of educational value to individual schools and the broader society. The Court now says that benefit is ambiguous and untenable. So the Court now mandates that rather than being able to use race itself as one factor in admission decisions in service of ensuring a somewhat diverse student population, selective schools will now need to rely on first-person accounts of how race affected lived experience in service of creating a student population with diverse lived experience. Though it’s not clear how far the Court will tolerate even this process-based workaround to the same core goals of affirmative action if outcomes look similar such that white and Asian students still have greviances to air. This decision also ensures that students will need to lean further into the trauma porn of application essays (“I was called the n-word every day in K-12, and was profiled by every police officer employed by the city of New York.”)
Ok, so now for some brief thoughts on all of this. I want to start this discussion with a few key reminders. First, only a little over a third of Americans ages 25+ have a college degree - and even fewer Americans (obviously) attend Ivies or even the top 100 selective schools. So we’re discussing a topic about pathways into elite positions (elite defined by wealth, power, status, or any combination of the three.) Second, rates of having a BA degree for that age group vary across races, with Black (27.6) and Hispanic (20.9) adults less likely to have a bachelors degree than white (41.8) and Asian (59.3) adults. (Source.) So let’s not pretend that affirmative action is the answer to the racial wealth gap especially when measured by the median. Third, white and Asian students are overrepresented in the nation’s most selective schools relative to their share of the national population, while Black, Hispanic, and Native students are underrepresented. (Source.) I can’t take serious any claims of “reverse racism” given that reality.
Regarding that latter point, Harvard is at the center of the recent SCTOTUS ruling and is centered in the subsequent discourse as well. As pertains to Harvard, looking at the class of 2025, eg., the class that entered in 2021 when Harvard resumed in-person education, we can see that white and Asian students make up the clear majority of the student population. In addition, the Asian share of the student population is 4x the Asian share of the U.S. population.
I don’t want to minimize the very real history of discrimination against Asian Americans, nor do I want to dispute the claim that it is often much harder for the Asian student who is just on the cusp of admittance to an elite school to get over that final hurrdle than it is for a similar Black or Hispanic student. But let’s be clear: it’s so much harder for that Asian student precisely because there are already so many white and Asian students already being admitted in any given year - a good number of whom are admitted on the basis of legacy and/or wealth-based preferences.
But I also want to be clear upfront that elite schools use zero-sum admittance policies to shore up their reputational clout. Harvard has the resources needed to substantially increase the size of its freshman class, but the prestige of a Harvard degree comes from the number of applicants it rejects, eg., the number of people who want but are excluded from receiving a Harvard education. Sure, there are plenty of people who apply to Harvard who would not be able to handle the rigors of its curricula, though I think that’s probably more true of other schools like MIT or of specific programs like engineering. But setting aside those applicants, there are plenty more who would flourish but who Harvard simply does not want to admit.
Finally, even when Harvard does admit “students of color” - there is nothing about its admission policies that would suggest it does so with an eye to increasing economic mobility for the least advantaged (who are, incidentally, more expensive students since they receive greater aid packages.) Indeed, much ink has been spilled about how African immigrants (the Nigerian doctor’s kid) are probably more likely to be admitted than descendants of slaves from the Bronx. And even as regards Harvard’s Asian student population, it’s likely that certain countries of origin are overrepresented relative to others - again as based on the advantages of intergenerational wealth and legacy which is again mostly about intergenerational wealth.
All that being said (and it’s a lot to say!), I do think diversity along factors that matter is an important component to how we think about the elite that we produce through exclusionary schools. There are at least two reasons why diversity matters. First, because the elite are positioned to make decisions that impact the nation as a whole. This SCOTUs case is a great example: a ruling decided by 9 judges, only 1 of whom is not the product of an Ivy education. But elites are of course found in every political branch, at every level of government. And elites are found on the list of Fortune 500 CEOs, and on important boards, and running influential non-profits, and the like.
Second, elites matter in the more local communities they reside in. This mattered more in the past when communities were more mixed in terms of SES, and where regional elites - the lawyers, doctors, businessmen, and clergy - were actively looking to uplift the people and places they felt a kinship tie to. This is the heart of Du Bois’ argument in his essay on the Talented Tenth. The Black elite would help elevate the overall wellbeing of Blacks in America not by becoming billionaire rap artists and TV icons nor by becoming management consultant or partners in Big Law firms - but rather by deploying wealth and leveraging influence in ways to advocate for the Black non-elite (that is, the majority) including improving baseline material conditions.
In this vision, diversity in economic status for sure, but race matters too. Because we cannot count on white and Asian elites to be sufficiently understanding of the needs of Black and Brown-majority communities, let alone motivated to work on behalf of those communities, we need Black and Hispanic elites who retain those ties and sense of motivation/obligation.
And while upwardly mobile Black and Brown kids from wealthy families may not be as motivated in this effort as Black and Brown kids who grew up with greater material hardship, the fact that wealth is not a full shield against racism is relevant. Rich and poor Black and Hispanic kids may differ in the extent of their exposure to racism, just as light skinned and dark skinned slaves may have differed in the harshness of the tasks they were forced to do. But race still matters, as Brother Cornel West reminded us years ago in his book of the same name, and the burden of proof is at this point on anyone who would wish to contest that claim. (Also: the suggestion that we just use lowerSES as preference since Blacks and Hispanics are overepresented in the lower class, misses the fact that there are still in absolute terms more poor whites than poor Blacks and Hispanics.)
But this whole argument is a lot harder to make when 1): elites of any race are increasingly siloed away from everyone else in terms of where they live, 2): elites of any race increasingly devote themselves to wealth and prestige over broader works of solidarity and advocacy, using the symbolic language and imagery of DEI to stand in for genuine engagement and collective action, 3): elites are increasingly happy to hoard privledges to benefit their own children rather than working to share their social capital and thereby increase the competition that their own kids face in the admissions cycle, job markets, etc..
So where does that leave me in regards to all of this? I went to a college that basically accepts any student with a pulse, with an honors college that is a little more selective but not terribly so. I think I received a stellar liberal arts education an do not feel as though I was robbed by not going to a more selective school. Admiteddly, I do not have the network that I would if I went to Harvard, and I likely won’t become the President or hold a similiar elite role in the public or private sector. I care a lot more about increasingly the number of Black and Hispanic students who attend college at all (and about making sure they have an opportunity to receive a liberal arts education if they want one) than I care about who goes to Harvard. And I also care more about ensuring that Harvard graduates are trained to be leaders who work to improve society, and that Black and Hispanic Harvard graduates are motivated to improve the material conditions of the lives of the least advantaged Black and Hispanic Americans, than I care about if the minority percentage rises or dips by a few percentage points in any given year.
But I do think elite education matters. And I do want better elite education. And I do think that a nation with persistent racial wealth gaps, pesistent poverty concentrated at the place-based level, and persistent concentration of economic opportunity within a few coastal cities needs to get real about how it plans to address those issues. DEI committees and diversity hires and even affirmative action policies are clearly not enough. It’s not all on the elites, of course, but since we’re talking about elites right now, let’s talk about what we should demand from them and the schools that form them.
Further Reading on this:
Fordham University’s response: https://news.fordham.edu/university-news/supreme-court-decision-on-affirmative-action/
Andre Perry at Brookings, on why HBCUs matter more than ever given this decision: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-supreme-courts-decision-to-strike-down-affirmative-action-means-that-hbcu-investment-is-more-important-than-ever/