- Click here for the article.
It hits on a question we're discussing in 2305 about whether diversity on a campus is a compelling public purpose that allows for the consideration of race in public education. The article's author is opposed - though I don't he draws the argument out that well here.
Here's a useful bit from the commentary:
. . . if one is looking for proportional representation, or a “University that looks like California,” then one would want to reduce the number of Asians at the most selective University of California campuses, since Asians are sharply overrepresented there. Even if one is looking for things such as “diversity,” the fact remains that, so long as a disproportionately high number of seats is taken by Asians, a disproportionately low number of seats will be taken by members of other racial groups. That’s true not just for blacks and Hispanics but also for non-Hispanic whites at many campuses. For instance, in 2013 non-Hispanic whites made up only 30 percent of non-international UC Berkeley freshmen — or 34 percent if you assume that all the “decline to state” students were white — while East and South Asians made up 48 percent. Non-Hispanic whites make up 39 percent of the California population, while Asians make up 14 percent. Indeed, some backers of race preferences argued during the Prop. 209 debate that having too many Asian students is one of the problems that race preferences are supposed to fix.
. . . If it somehow ends up that Asians make up 80 percent of the students that have the non-race-based predictors UCLA Law School uses for admission, and my own racial group is thus vastly underrepresented, I would have no complaints whatsoever, and wouldn’t think there is any basis to use racial preferences to either reduce the number of Asians or increase the number of whites, blacks, or Hispanics.
I'm curious about the political consequences though. If more middle class and poor whites see the repeal of affirmative action programs as hurting them by expanding opportunities for Asian Americans, might this lead to a backlash? Affirmative action might - ironically and problematically - become favored by whites, and this might be driven to some degree by animosity towards Asian Americans. Racial identity has always played a role in politics. It is unreasonable to assume it will not continue to do so.
