Who Really Benefits from Racial Affirmative Action?

From Walter Williams in Frontpage Mag: Williams is commenting on the fact that black students, admitted via affirmative action to colleges where they must struggle to meet demands designed for well-prepared white students, disproportionately drop out, fail and end up at the bottom of their classes. This system, of course, has its beneficiaries.

There are beneficiaries from admitting black students with little chance of performing at the level of other students. They are college presidents, administrators and campus liberals. Whether blacks graduate or have been steered into useless “Mickey Mouse” courses is irrelevant. Government race overseers are only counting colors. College administrators win kudos for achieving and celebrating “diversity,” not to mention the fact that they can keep government higher-education handouts.

Another group of beneficiaries is composed of black staff and faculty who are hired and create campus fiefdoms with big budgets based on the presence of black students. The number of black students enrolled is the key, not the number who graduate or wind up in useless “Mickey Mouse” courses or in the bottom of their classes. In fact, there is an element of perversity. The greater the number of blacks who are on academic probation or do not graduate the more justified are calls for greater budgets for academic support and student retention programs.

Of course, struggling black students can easily pick up a sense of victimhood, blaming their situation on “racist” administrations, professors or fellow students. And it doesn’t help if white students let on, perhaps in subtle ways, that they know the black students are less well academically qualified. Thus we have “microaggressions.” In spite of good intentions, it’s not easy to consistently pretend that something you know to be true isn’t.

Of course, there are plenty of professors and administrators who will egg on and pander to racial grievances. Students articulating such grievances may get rewards — a position on a diversity committee, for example, or the favorable attention of the media. And, for course, when white students react negatively to the whining (or being bullied about “white privilege”) this simply adds to the stock of grievances.

Things like this may explain the findings of a recent Gallup study: black graduates of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) fare better than black graduates of other institutions.

This applies, first, to various indices of “thriving.”

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It also applies to college experiences.

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Interpretation

This Gallup study involved a large number of respondents, but it is short of a well-controlled social science study. Most importantly, there is probably a lot of self-selection involved, and black students who choose to go to such institutions may be different from students who choose to go to predominately white institutions.

But it may be that the climate at predominately black institutions is simply better than the racially obsessed hyper politically correct climate at many predominately white colleges.

Students at historically black colleges are unlikely to be struggling academically because affirmative action has put them in an excessively demanding environment. And it’s harder to articulate racial grievances against administrators who are black, or faculty who are black (or are whites who have chosen to teach at a predominately black college). Where the overwhelming majority of students are black, the color of your skin cannot make you the affirmative action pet of administrators, or the token black on this or that committee. If somebody disses you, it’s likely to be viewed as personal, and not a racial slight.

Conclusion

Does this mean that black students should prefer historically black colleges? No — although that might be a good choice for some students. But it does suggest that they should be wary of accepting admission to any institution where they will be far below the average white student in terms of SAT or ACT scores. Williams suggests “[d]o not enroll your children in a college where their SAT score [presumably, verbal plus quantitative] is 200 or more points below the average of that college.”

It also means your are better off in a school that is not hyper politically correct. A school that is not overrun with diversity bureaucrats, and where white students are not berated about “white privilege.” A religious institution (one that is really religious, not merely nominally religious, like Marquette) is a likely choice.

But the first thing to remember is this: the people who talk loudest about having your best interests at heart, probably don’t.

Public Opinion on Gun Control: Not What You Think

If you listen to the anti-gun people in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, you might think that there is an overwhelming public consensus for the policies the liberals favor.

But if fact, as a new Gallup Poll shows, the picture is much more complex.

It is true that a clear majority of Americans favor stricter gun laws, or at least say they do if asked that question.

The striking thing here, however, is that support for stricter gun laws has declined sharply since the early 1990s. True, Sandy Hook caused an uptick. But there have been mass shootings before, and any uptick was temporary.

But what about the most commonly mentioned kind of “stricter gun law,” a ban on assault weapons?

Strikingly, Gallup finds a bare majority opposed to an assault weapons ban.

Of course, if you asked the question differently, you might get a different answer. If you said “military-style weapons” you could probably get a majority favoring a ban. But Gallup did use a relatively straightforward question.

Asked about some more modest gun control proposals, majorities were in favor. Gallup showed an overwhelming majority in favor of background checks, including checks at gun shows. Gun shows are exempted under current policy, and for reasons that were good ones at the time: there was no way to process such a check in a timely fashion. But technology should have alleviated that problem — or at least it will if government makes the appropriate data available over the Internet.

A clear majority also favor a ban on large capacity magazines.

None of Gallup’s questions tap the intensity of opinion on these issues. But there clearly is a huge asymmetry of intensity, with pro-gun people being highly intense. The anti-gun people are split between relatively apolitical people who don’t care much, and liberals who are highly political, but are concerned with pretty much every issue under the sun.

Another striking thing in the Gallup poll was the fact that support for a ban on handguns has been dropping over the last two decades, and is at an extremely low point.

So what is going on here?

The public is not necessarily terribly sophisticated in terms of policy. Nuts wanting to get guns can use straw buyers or buy on the black market (or steal weapons) and thus evade background checks. Large capacity magazines would also likely be available on the black market even if banned, and it doesn’t take long to switch out a low-capacity magazine and keep shooting.

The guys who have engaged in mass shootings have been intelligent schemers. Deranged, but intelligent, and capable of mounting elaborate operations. These sorts of people would have both the smarts and the motivation to evade pretty much any gun law.

But it does appear the public increasingly “gets” the Second Amendment. It opposes anything that would excessively burden the right of ordinary law-abiding Americans to have the kinds of guns that ordinary law-abiding Americans have.

And there isn’t even a majority to ban military-style weapons that law abiding gun buffs own, and enjoy shooting.

And the trend of opinion over time favors gun rights.