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Can discrimination ever
be the right thing to do?
By MURRY FRYMER
of TheColumnists.com
Way back in the mid ‘50s, I applied as a student
to the University of Michigan. I remember my application included
a request for a picture. I thought such a request was suspect.
Certain people, black people for example, might be rejected,
I thought. Why would the university need a photo for its application.
Those, of course, were the days when Negroes (the common identification back then) were frequently the victims of discrimination at colleges. Unless, of course, they were coveted athletes, or the sons and daughters of the famous. The photograph was one means of discrimination.
I remember that during my college days on the Michigan Daily, we reported a major breakthrough. The University had acceded to protests and decided to drop the photograph request on the entrance examinations. We celebrated that achievement.
Nearly a half century later, Michigan is again in the center of a controversy over discrimination, but now the issue has turned 180 degrees. Michigan is asking entrance seekers their race and rather than discriminate against blacks, the new program is to offer preferences. The goal is something called “diversity.” There was little diversity on the campus when I was in Ann Arbor. Virtually all students were white. The minority group were people like me, Jewish, who faced quotas on many campuses. We suspected that was true at Michigan.
When my children applied for entrance to the University of California at Berkeley, there was no real discrimination against Jews. However when my high school valedictorian daughter was rejected, while a classmate with one-eighth Native American heritage and a C average was admitted, I felt discriminated against anyway.
But terms like discrimination have become redefined and confused. Are whites being discriminated against if a preferred minority with considerably lesser academic achievement is admitted? Probably. But then is there a social benefit to this process now? I don’t know, though my liberal friends tell me there is.. Can discrimination ever be of social benefit? Again, my friends tell me there can be.
Anyway, we have had a couple more Supreme Court decisions lately in which the Court has made clear that it thinks, as does the University of Michigan, that there is such a compelling benefit in “diversity,” that the discrimination that comes with it is worth it.
I can understand the university position and the position of the liberal community that feels that the discrimination exacted against blacks in earlier years requires this new kind of discrimination to even the playing field, as the argument goes.
Yet there is a price to pay in all this. For one, there will be the feeling of unfairness among those groups not favored by “affirmative action,” those for whom it all seems negative action. In today’s environment, it is the Asian student, in large part, who must stand aside when his or her academic qualifications are subordinated to the need for diversity. There are already great numbers of Asians--primarily Chinese--in the universities. They are today’s Jews who, some administrators fear would overwhelm the university enrollment if academic achievement were allow to rule the entrance criteria.
I realize that there has never been a time when academic achievement-grades and tests-were the whole story in entrance criteria. The legacy student gets preference, especially in private institutions where Dad’s gift-giving is so important to the school. There are the athletes and the sons and daughters of notable people. There are other subcategories.
But the issue of black (and in some locations, Latino) preferences are different. This indicates that an entire race requires a lower standard of admission, simply by the fact of being a member of that race. It is part of the theory that created busing and other race-based programs, all implying a certain inferiority that required special solutions.
We can all recall, in our own school days, black students who were superior. When I was at Michigan, I knew many bright and talented black students, some who have gone on to great achievement since. James Earl Jones was already earning respect in Ann Arbor. But, of course, the overall number of blacks were small, nowhere near “diversity.”
There is a great danger now, I believe, in creating an image of inferiority for the beneficiaries of affirmative action. There is a danger now in unfairly denying some deserving students the opportunities they deserve. There is a danger is saying that opportunity can now be segregated for the greater good of diversity.
Perhaps it is all to the good. I am not so sure. I hated the photos on the applications back in my own time and I do not particularly like the new procedures of admission today which are again selecting students by the color of their skin, now favored rather than disfavored.
Busing didn’t work and affirmative action is probably not going to either. As the country grows and changes, as Asians and Hispanics begin to dominate in some parts of the country, programs that are set up to benefit this or that racial group will look all the more arbitrary. I continue to value the application that has no photograph or other identification of race and I think, in the end, this will benefit all the applicants, including the favored minorities. And I am amazed at how a once-seen bias is now seen as a social good. Go figure.
©2003 by Murry Frymer. The Frymer caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. The illustrations are from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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