SCOTUS Ruling on Race and College Admissions: We’ve already Seen this Movie in Michigan and it Doesn’t End Well

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Conservatives in the United States have a stealth function of supporting white supremacy, even if they deny it. Maybe some do not even realize that is what they are doing. People focus on process and not outcomes when thinking of fairness, but what they think of as fair processes don’t guarantee fair outcomes. Nothing is more threatening to white supremacy than affirmative action, which holds that the government and social institutions can reshape American society toward greater racial equality. Hence, the Federalist Society’s corrupt SCOTUS struck down affirmative action in college and university admissions nationwide.

Nothing will change for my institution, the University of Michigan. In 2006 the good people of the state passed Proposal 2, forbidding the use of race as a factor in admissions.

This measure caused the percentage of African-American students to drop. In 2005 non-Hispanic Blacks made up 7.2% of the Ann Arbor undergraduate student body.

Today African-American students make up less than 4% of the undergraduate student body on the Ann Arbor campus. That is a 45% drop. Virtually the same thing happened in the University of California system when they had to stop doing affirmative action.

The University of Michigan drop came despite the university’s attempt to substitute “hardship” as an admissions criterion for “race.” Students wrote in their personal statements about difficulties and obstacles that they faced in life through their high school years. But of course, as hard as life might be for African-Americans in the United States, there are others who face obstacles and hardships — poor whites, LGBTQ+ people, and women, and many of these other disadvantaged people are white. So they seem to have taken up nearly half the slots formerly allotted to Black people.

In other words, “hardship,” which Chief Justice John Roberts admitted in his decision might be considered in admissions, just doesn’t do the same work as race-conscious admissions do.

13.64% of Michiganders are African-American, so they are vastly underrepresented on the Ann Arbor campus.

Leave slavery aside, when they were unpaid labor for as much as 400 years. From the 1930s to 1968 the practice of redlining in Michigan prevented African-Americans from accumulating wealth through home ownership. That gave white families a galactic advantage. Even since redlining was officially outlawed in the 1960s, it cast a long shadow on homeownership rates and pricing of houses by neighborhood. Informal segregation, sometimes abetted by realtors, continues to keep Detroit and Flint among the most segregated cities in the United states.

H/t Urban.org

That bastion of left-wing radicalism, the RAND think tank (which started out as an adjunct to the US Air Force) reports: “The median Black household in America has around $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity, and other elements of wealth. The median White household: around $189,000,” This happened because of redlining and other elements of systemic racism, not because of any fault of African-Americans themselves.

John Roberts believes that such injustices have already been made up. They haven’t. They haven’t begun to be. Having robbed Black people blind since 1619, the least we can do is try to give them educational opportunities consonant with their proportion of the population.

Personally, I think the University of Michigan should set up a magnet K-12 school in Detroit and promise admission to those who graduate from it with good grades. If it was our school, we should be able to do as we please with its graduates. If it was in Detroit, it would ipso facto have mostly African-American attendees, but that wouldn’t be our problem.

There is a well-known fallacy among economists, called the “lump of labor.” Many people assume that if you increase job-holders among one group, it will reduce the jobs for another, that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done. This idea could not be more false. Look at Turkey in 2016-2017, when the economy grew 4% a year at a time of slowdowns for other countries. Economists concluded that the growth came about because two million Syrian workers had fled to Turkey from their civil war. That meant that farmers who wanted to expand suddenly had access to farm labor, and urban businesses that wanted to expand had access to educated Syrians, adding to the available work force. Turkey could do more work because it had more workers. Syrians didn’t take jobs from Turks, they expanded the pie.

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education believe in a similar fallacy, the “lump of education.” So they think if you admit more minorities to colleges and universities, it will keep out some whites who might otherwise have gotten in. But the colleges and universities might expand their student body. This has happened at my university, In 1984 when I arrived at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus there were a little over 34,000 students, including about 6,000 graduate students. Today we have almost 50,000 students, including 17,000 grads. Michigan’s population was 9 million in 1984. It is 10 million today. The state grew 10%. The student body grew by 32%. Things change. In many cities and states “meds and eds,” medicine and education have replaced traditional industry as contributors to gross domestic project, and we can expect further expansion of education.

There is room in this growing economy for everybody. Let’s find a way to benefit from the talents of all Americans of all races and backgrounds, and not systematically sentence some to menial labor based on the color of their skin.