Making the Right Move on Racial Preferences
10th July 2018
Given the reality of minority underachievement, black and Hispanic leaders had a choice: they could have focused relentlessly on self-help, in the tradition of Booker T. Washington, so that minority students became academically competitive, or they could play the race card and demand lowered standards. Almost all have chosen the second course. Minority advocates focus exclusively on the defense and extension of racial preferences; calls to crack the books are virtually nonexistent. The press is complicit in this swerve from personal responsibility by keeping the skills gap as far as possible off stage. And universities themselves would rather let stand the implication that they are somehow denying “access” to underrepresented minorities than reveal the extent of preferences, as demonstrated by Harvard’s fierce opposition to releasing anonymized admissions data in the ongoing discrimination lawsuit against it.