Some Good Words

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From: Ben Shapiro <daily@mailer.dailywire.com>
Date: Jul 5, 2023 10:00 PM
Subject: Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action in College Admissions. Good. It Never Worked.

In a historic decision, the United States Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions as a violation of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment includes the equal protection clause, which suggests that all human beings, regardless of their race, are to be treated equally under the law.

Affirmative action is deeply unfair on every level. It doesn't matter what race you are talking about. If one race is able to get into college with scores that are 200 points below another race, that is obviously racist and it's obviously discrimination under the equal protection clause.

That's exactly what was happening when it came to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina; both of those particular colleges were the ones named in this lawsuit. The statistics cited in the actual Supreme Court opinion showed Harvard's attempts to boost minority enrollment demonstrated the disparity between performances for the groups that got in and the groups that did not get in.

Let's say you're among the top performing people in your particular group, in the top 10%. If you were a top 10% performing Asian, you had a 12.7% chance of getting into Harvard. If you were a top 10% performing white student, you had a 15.3% chance; if you were a top 10% Hispanic student, you had a 31.3.% chance of being admitted to Harvard.

And if you were a top 10% black student, you had a 56% chance of being admitted to Harvard.
 
What's even more astonishing is that if you performed better than 40% of people and were white, you had less than a 2% chance of getting in. If you were Asian, less than 1%. Hispanic, less than 5%. But if you were black, you had a 12.8% chance of getting in.

That 12.8% for blacks and 12.7% for Asians meant that you had a better shot of getting into Harvard if you were a black student who performed better than only 40% of the population than if you were an Asian student who performed better than 90% of the population.

That's insane. That disparity is obviously racist.
 
Affirmative action is a massive failure. The idea that affirmative action is the rung to climb up, that it is the pathway to success for black students in America, is just not true. Sometimes the students who get into places like Harvard or Yale through affirmative action are the top performing black students, but they're also performing in the middle of the pack in terms of overall student body. They often wind up dropping out.

Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. noted in The Atlantic in 2012 that black students who got into college through significant affirmative action were twice as likely to be derailed from pursuing a doctorate and an academic career. Black law school grads were four times as likely to fail the bar as their white counterparts.

If you compared them to other students in terms of test scores, black students were underperforming. That's why they required affirmative action.
There is this idea that the best way to remedy historic injustices is to treat people as groups and then give them a "leg up." But there is no other context in which you would consider this good policy.

New polls show that many Democrats are wildly unenthusiastic about America, so we ask what they're celebrating on July 4th; a judge issues an order stopping the Biden administration from pressuring social media companies; and cocaine is found at the White House.

Take Major League Baseball as an example. Major League Baseball had a color line for the first half-century of its existence. It was evil that black players were not allowed to play; that was why the Negro Leagues got started with their amazing black players.

Imagine for a second that Major League Baseball had said, "We need a quota of black players. But we're not going to use the same standards for them as we do for others, whether they can hit, field, or run. In order to rectify past imbalances, we need an affirmative action program: Black pitchers only need to throw two strikes to strike somebody out and black hitters get four strikes before they strike out."

Would that improve black performance or would that be lowering the standard? Would it heighten or lower ethnic tensions in Major League Baseball if black players only had to throw two strikes and got four strikes at the plate?

That's what we are doing with affirmative action programs. They are racist.

They also happen to be racist against blacks because the assumption in America today is that it is impossible for them to succeed.

There are only two possible arguments here. One is that black Americans are somehow lesser or inferior, which is just pure racism. It's not true.
The other is that America is so inherently racist that black Americans will never be able to get ahead because of the color of their skin. That's not true either.

But those are the left-wing arguments that support affirmative action.

Ben Shapiro
Editor Emeritus,
The Daily Wire

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