White Privilege Under Attack

For two decades now Shelby Steele has been arguing that affirmative action programs in college admissions stigmatize minority applicants. Regardless of whether they could have competed without receiving an unfair advantage, they are assumed not to belong. The solution, Steele has suggested, is to eliminate diversity programs and choose students merely on merit. In that case, the number of minority class members would shrink, but those who are there would have earned it.

Since the nation seems wedded to diversity programs, how are we to diminish the stigma? One way is to declare that just about everyone who enters these august institutions of higher learning has benefited from a diversity program. Thus, legacy admissions are only admitted because of an affirmative action program for white people. As it happens, Heather Mac Donald has shown, legacy candidates can compete academically with their peers. Thus, many of them would have been admitted anyway.

And now we also read about white privilege, purportedly suggesting that white people gain an advantage merely by being white. Thus, diversity programs level the playing field by offering minority privilege to those who lack white privilege.

Again, no one really believes that the white students admitted to those institutions have markedly lower SAT scores, as is the case with minority applicants, and no one really has an explanation of why those who enjoy the greatest white privilege seem to be Asian students.

Diversity quotas and affirmative action programs do not just rig the system in favor of minority applicants, especially of applicants whose test scores are hundreds of points lower than those of Asian students, but they rig the system against white and Asian students. Since there are only a limited number of places at these school, if you choose to render your incoming Freshman class 15% minority, you are going to be discriminating against white and Asian students who are significantly more qualified. Currently, Asians are suing Harvard University on just these grounds.

So, the system is rigged in favor of minorities and against white and Asian candidates. Now, with the cheating scam run by one Rick Singer, the one that paid off coaches and test takers, some people who should know better are touting the scam as an instance of white privilege. You see, we are told, white people cheat too, white people rig the system so there is nothing inherently unfair about allowing minorities to cheat too. It's all about erasing the stigma.

In a long, detailed, and ultimately unsatisfying article on the college cheating scandal, Caitlin Flanagan, an excellent writer, by the way, draws the wrong conclusion. She thinks that the world is changing, and that white people cannot stand not having their privileges. In truth, white people and Asians are upset at not being judged fairly and by merit. When a minority applicant with significantly lower SAT scores is guaranteed admission over a white applicant, the problem is not the loss of privilege but the absence of fairness. Diversity programs discriminate on the basis of race.

Flanagan blames it on Trump… naturally:

These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bitching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bitching; some of them decided to go MAGA.

They do not like seeing their children rejected from schools because they are white.

But, you will say, if you grant admissions merely on the grounds of merit, then the schools will be disproportionately Asian. Such is the case for New York’s elite public high schools, the ones that Comrade de Blasio is trying to destroy by eliminating meritocratic admissions and instituting a form of proportional representation. Advocates of the de Blasio approach have attacked the way the schools determine merit, by giving a test. The notion of testing for merit goes back, I recall, to the Song Dynasty in China, so it is not a novelty.

The tests, Daniel Friedman reminds us, are identity blind:

The multiple choice SHSAT is completely blind to identity. The test form and the computers that grade it don’t know any tester’s race, gender, sexual orientation or nationality. The rich and the poor must face the same examination, and must compete on a level playing field. If there is any bias built into the test itself, its critics have failed to identify it.

Choosing candidates on the basis of academic merit removes any chance that wealthy parents will try to game the system.

Stuyvesant has no development office to exert admissions pressure on behalf of the rich and famous. There are no legacy considerations, and no coaches to bribe. There are no Olivia Jades or Jared Kushners at Stuyvesant. There is also no affirmative action program at Stuy, though de Blasio used his authority as mayor in 2018 to force the expansion of a “discovery program” that provides a pathway into the specialized schools for students from disadvantaged backgrounds who missed the admissions cutoffs. Despite that program, black and Latino enrollment remains extremely low, and Stuy, the most selective of the specialized schools, is nearly 70 percent Asian.

As it happens, Friedman continues, the children who do the best on the tests continue to outperform all other students throughout their high school careers. Thus the tests are a good indication of future achievement:

The widespread contention that Asian students only outperform other groups on the SHSAT because they prepare unreasonably or unfairly for the test is false and racist. The students at Stuyvesant have repeatedly proven that they’re the highest-performing public school students in the city.

Stuy and Bronx Science have the highest median SAT scores in the city for graduating seniors, by a commanding margin. Nearly 40 percent of NYC’s National Merit Semifinalists are Stuyvesant students, which is impressive considering Stuy competes with both elite private schools like the $51,000 per-year Dalton School and the ultra-selective program for extremely gifted students at Hunter College High School. Stuyvesant students are routinely among the semifinalists and finalists in the prestigious Intel Science Competition, and in several recent years, Stuy had more semifinalists than any other school in the country. Stuyvesant also frequently fields national championship chess teams.

And also,

At every opportunity, Stuyvesant students compete successfully against the best students other schools have to offer, and repeatedly demonstrate themselves to be top performers in a range of academic tasks. Yet the school’s critics continue to claim that these students’ only distinction is their performance on a single meaningless test that demonstrates nothing but how much money their parents spent on test prep.

As for the SAT, national results show that white and Asian students consistently outperform blacks, by a significant margin. This explains why top colleges must use affirmative actions programs that accept black students at significantly lower levels of aptitude.

A Brookings Institution analysis of race gaps on the SAT found that only 2,200 black students nationwide scored above a 700 on the SAT’s math section, the 97th percentile overall. By comparison, 48,000 whites and 52,200 Asians scored above a 700. In order to make up for the shortage of black applicants with top scores, highly-selective schools where the median white admitted student scores at the 95th percentile will accept black students scoring at the 85th.

The same disparity pertains in law school admissions:

On the LSAT, the admission test for U.S. law schools, only 5 percent of black students score above 160 out of 180, which is the 80th percentile among the overall set of test-takers. Only 29 black students nationwide scored a 170 or higher on the LSAT in 2004, compared to 1,900 white students. The median LSAT score among students at Harvard and Yale is 173, and the lowest-scoring law schools in the top 10 have median LSAT scores of 169. If they didn’t consider race in admissions, the top U.S. law schools would admit about the same number of black students as Stuyvesant.

The solution is not to dumb down the academy but to figure out how to improve the performance of the underperforming children. It is certainly not to rig the system against white and Asian students. 

It’s no small task, but our culture is not up to the challenge. It would rather pretend that there is no problem. And it prefers to defame anyone who dares say otherwise.