As Adam says, if any of those enrgaged by affirmative action would spill half as much ink on legacy admissions, a practice which, whatever its intended purpose, has the clear effect of privileging the progeny of wealthy white people, I'd be more sympathetic.
And Adam Serwer's original point:
It makes me wonder if the vitriol directed at AA isn't just a matter of competition for resources. People instinctively let legacies fly because the people benefiting from them are white, while affirmative action is seen primarily as a method of rewarding undeserving outsiders...All of this makes sense. But a few points do need to be made (not necessarily all of which will be coherent or grounded in logic):
Despite the focus on race-based AA, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action remain white women.This points to AA's real purpose: not "punishing whites" for historical injustice, but acting as a corrective against intentional or unconscious discrimination. Once you acknowledge that, it's hard to describe AA as discrimination against whites, which eliminates the line of argument most often used by its opponents. At the same time, the people most likely hurt by legacy admissions are white people of a certain social class.
1. Affirmative action, as it stands today, will always lead to at least some, if not many, prospective students being passed over for less qualified students. That's just the way it works in an environment with finite resources. So yes, to that point--Serwer's "competition" argument is very strong. If one white kid is displaced for one Hispanic kid, for no reason besides ethnicity, I think that a lot of people would have, and do have, strong aversion to that idea.
2. With that said, affirmative action's goal is to combat institutional benefits, aside from legacy admissions, that are afforded whites. So when someone complains that he didn't get into Notre Dame because a black kid "took his spot," he should realize that he himself was likely the recipient of a) a better secondary school education, b) better prep for the SAT, c) a more diverse set of clubs and activities to pad his resume with, and so on. Affirmative action, in theory, helps to put on a black kid from D.C. on a sorta-but-not-really equal plane with a white kid from suburban New Jersey.
3. However, if that is true, then there's a huge fail going on in affirmative action. Socioeconomics, as many others far smarter than I have touched on, is the real issue. Race isn't. Race is correlated with socioeconomics, for sure. But the idea that wealthy African-Americans are displacing less fortunate and more qualified white Americans, purely on quota reasoning, is fairly absurd. And yet it's assuredly happening. And it's not as though whites have a monopoly on the legacy game; you don't think that a Barack Obama who was still working as a law professor in Chicago would make a few calls to get one or both of his daughters into Harvard when the time came?
4. Legacy admissions, or their equivalent, of course will never end. To a huge extent, they are unfair. You'd be more likely to hit the Powerball than get into an Ivy these days without some external "help." Yet a few things need to be said about legacies:
- The absurd craziness that surrounds college admissions bears the bulk of the responsibility. Of course, in the old days, it was simple. You lived in Westchester, you went to Exeter, and you--and 50 of your male classmates--got plucked for Yale. Easy peasy. Not so easy today. And you really only get one shot. So for people that have their heart set on going to Yale, if their parents' friend of a friend's cousin is a trustee, you can be sure they're going to be making a phone call. To do otherwise is to throw away expectation and put yourself at a disadvantage.
- Legacies don't work in the same fashion as affirmative action. A white legacy candidate isn't going to replace a less qualified black candidate who was accepted for quota reasons. Universities want a certain percentage of students to be black. They don't want a certain percentage to be legacies. The latter result is simply because of how the institution works.
- How much do legacies really change the outcome of admissions? Being a "Harvard legacy" usually means your parent or grandparent went to Harvard (and continued to give money after he graduated). This quality in and of itself usually means that you will be smarter than many or most of your peers (or, if not smarter, than privileged with access to things--good schools, tutors, and a nondisruptive household--that can make all the difference in a college admissions setting). So if you throw away legacies, something which will never happen, then how different, from a 30,000 foot view, will admissions results be? White underprivileged kids will certainly, it appears, receive a not-insignificant benefit from the undoing of legacy admissions. But will university student bodies really be much different? Whereas, if you undid affirmative action, things certainly would be different.
- Serwer's initial point--"People instinctively let legacies fly because the people benefiting from them are white, while affirmative action is seen primarily as a method of rewarding undeserving outsiders"--still does hold serious water with me. But I'd have a quibble: the reason people let legacies fly is not simply, or not really, that the people benefiting from them are white--it's that they are the people benefitting from legacies. Look, poor white people in Kansas don't have the ability to call someone up at Columbia and ask for special favors. Yet poor people aren't those who you hear complaining about affirmative action (poor people do not have voices in American politics). Middle class white are both the main beneficiaries of legacy admissions and the loudest drumbeaters against affirmative action. Certainly, you'll hear grumbling about how "you need to play an instrument" or "you need to be a legacy" in order to get into Harvard these days. And that grumbling is fair. But it's only grumbling, and not Congressperson-writing, because these people know full well that while an Ivy League school for their daughter might be a bridge too far, they sure as fuck are calling their brother-in-law on the board of University of Michigan. And so the cycle continues.
