Affirmative action does more harm than good

A glance at the November issue of Harper’s: Affirmative action does more harm than good

Affirmative action is stifling black individualism in America, writes Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Black Americans are expected to embrace the idea that racial preferences are necessary to level the “playing field” and make their white counterparts atone for past racial injustices, but preferences hinder, rather than help, black advancement, he writes. Affirmative action undermines black self-esteem because it promotes the wrongheaded notion that black people need white intervention in order to succeed, he says. While American colleges fight to keep affirmative action alive because it gives them legitimacy and a way to show that they’re not racist, the policy only dehumanizes black people further by making institutions blind to black individuality, he writes.

Affirmative action, Mr. Steele writes, “is another ‘little gulag’” for black individuals, who live in a society that needs their race “for the good it wants to do” more than it needs them as individuals. For example, “Harvard did not promote Cornel West to a university professorship because his academic work was seminal,” he writes. “It was never Cornel West -- the individual -- that Harvard wanted; it was the defanged protest identity that he carried, which redounded to the university as racial innocence itself.”

In fact, Mr. Steele argues, there’s no proof that affirmative action even works. “Blacks from families that make $100,000 a year or more perform worse on the SAT than whites from families that make $10,000 a year or less,” he writes. “After decades of racial preferences, blacks remain the lowest-performing student group in American higher education.”

Black people are embracing “a pattern of reform that represses our best hope for advancement -- our individuals -- simply to keep whites ‘on the hook,’” he writes. “We couldn’t have made a worse mistake,” Mr. Steele writes. Black people will not be treated as individuals until American society “drops all the mechanisms by which it tries to appease white guilt,” he concludes.

The article is not available online, but information about the issue can be found at http://www.harpers.org