Progressive racism

From Unpopular, Polarizing, and Ineffective by Jason L. Riley.  The subheading is Affirmative action’s days may finally be numbered.

The whole piece is worth reading but he makes two empirical points which I thought were interesting.

Last year, in anticipation of two Supreme Court cases challenging the use of race as a factor in college admissions, the New York Times ran a story on public opinion of affirmative action. The coauthors queried a dozen college students and were flabbergasted by the responses, though they shouldn’t have been.

“For those Americans who assume that college students today are left-wing activists who aren’t in touch with the real world, our latest focus group will be especially eye-opening,” the article began. “Rarely have we been as surprised by a focus group as when we asked this racially and socioeconomically diverse group of 12 students whether they supported affirmative action in college admissions. Just one person said yes.”

In reality, the views expressed by these young adults fairly reflect long-held public attitudes about racial preferences. In a 1977 Gallup poll, a majority of blacks expressed opposition to special treatment. In a 1997 New York Times/CBS News poll that asked how “equally qualified college applicants” should be treated by admissions officials, 69 percent of all respondents and 63 percent of blacks said that “race should not be a factor.” A 2001 Washington Post survey asked: “In order to give minorities more opportunity, do you believe race or ethnicity should be a factor when deciding who is hired, promoted, or admitted to college, or that hiring, promotions, and college admissions should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race or ethnicity?” Ninety-two percent of all respondents and 86 percent of blacks said that such decisions “should be based strictly on merit and qualifications other than race/ethnicity.”

A Pew Research Center poll from 2019 found that 73 percent of respondents, including 78 percent of whites, 65 percent of Hispanics, 62 percent of blacks, and 58 percent of Asians, say that “colleges should not consider race in admissions.” In 1996, voters in California, not only the most populous state but also one of the most racially and ethnically diverse, approved a ballot initiative that barred the use of race in admissions at public universities. Over the next quarter-century, eight other states adopted similar restrictions. And in 2020, Californians soundly rejected a ballot referendum that would have overturned the 1996 ban.

This much like in England with regard to capital punishment.  I don't know what it is today but for two or three, maybe four decades the two primary parliamentary parties were far ahead of the public.  A majority of both Labour and Conservative MPs opposed capital punishment, making it illegal in 1965.  However, public support for capital punishment remained strong, only dipping below 50% in 2015.  Though majority support still exists for the death penalty when it involves multiple murders, murder of a child, or terrorism.  

The progressive chattering class have for more than fifty years been strong advocates of discriminating based on race while the great majority of citizens are committed to equality before the law, thank you very much.  They will support affirmative action as long as it does not involve discriminating against people based on race.

The second empirical point is that the massive Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s did not, as commonly presented, serve as a catalyst for improved attitudes.  Rather, the Civil Rights legislation was possible because of changed attitudes.  

he policies that would later morph into racial preferences got their start as efforts to secure equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race. That was the intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 shepherded through Congress by Senator Hubert Humphrey and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. But it’s worth noting that racial attitudes in the U.S. had been moving in a more enlightened direction long before the landmark federal legislation finally passed. In 1944, for example, just four out of ten whites said that job opportunities should not be restricted by race. By 1963, five out of six whites had come around to that view. Similarly, wrote Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in their 1997 book, America in Black and White, white support for school integration, desegregated public transportation, and residential racial integration grew by 80 percent or more over the same period.

Even in the South, where racially tolerant views were much rarer, attitudes were moving in the same direction. Between the early 1940s and early 1960s, acceptance of school integration among white Southerners grew from 2 percent to 31 percent, and support for neighborhood integration rose from 12 percent to 51 percent. “It has sometimes been suggested that federal civil rights legislation in the 1960s was responsible for the huge shift of white racial attitudes, but that puts the cart before the horse,” the Thernstroms noted. “Deep attitudinal changes created the political pressures responsible for the enactment of the new law.”