Joy Reid doesn’t know what affirmative action is
Jack Elbaum
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Last Thursday, MSNBC host Joy Reid told the story of how she got into Harvard “only because of affirmative action.” However, in doing so, she exposed the fact she has no idea how affirmative action actually works.
Reid said, “I went to a [high] school no one had ever heard of.” But because “I just happened to be really nerdy and smart and have really good grades and good SAT scores … someone [from Harvard] came to Denver to look for me. … This was not the recruiter saying, ‘We’re going to take an unqualified person and put them in Harvard.’ Rather, they were saying, ‘We’re going to take a very qualified person who we would never know existed and put them in Harvard.'”
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What she presents affirmative action as doing is simple: Finding students who are just as qualified as any other applicant but would have been overlooked in the past because of their race. The keywords here are just as qualified as any other applicant.
This sounds reasonable enough — because it is. The issue for Reid, though, is that this is not at all how affirmative action worked in practice.
Rather, affirmative action meant selective universities held different races to different standards in admissions. As such, it raises expectations for some while lowering them for others.
This is why affirmative action is much better described as racial preferences. It certainly benefits some (at least in the short term) on the basis of race, but the flip side is that it discriminates against others on the same grounds. This is not to say anything about specific applicants, but rather it is pointing out the trend.
The data bear this out. A book written by Princeton professor Thomas J. Espenshade and MPR Associates researcher Alexandria Walton Radford found that Asian Americans must score 140 points higher on SAT tests than white people, 270 points higher than Hispanic people, and 450 points higher than black people in order to have the same odds of admission.
It is hard to imagine data any more clear than that. Additional data presented in the Supreme Court supports this, too. It revealed that “an Asian American in the fourth-lowest [academic] decile has virtually no chance of being admitted to Harvard (0.9%); but an African American in that decile has a higher chance at admission (12.8%) than an Asian American in the top decile (12.7%).”
There is a reason why liberal journalists, politicians, and activists have had to resort to 1.) distorting what affirmative action actually is, like Reid did, or 2.) acting as if there is no group who is being discriminated against, as the New York Times’s editorial board did: It is nearly impossible to defend open racial discrimination while acknowledging it is racial discrimination.
Chief Justice John Roberts agrees. In the opinion of the court, he wrote that these distortions and/or omissions are made to defend a system “that picks winners and losers based on the color of their skin.”
He continues: “While the dissent would certainly not permit university programs that discriminated against black and Latino applicants, it is perfectly willing to let the programs here continue. In its view, this Court is supposed to tell state actors when they have picked the right races to benefit. Separate but equal is ‘inherently unequal,’ said Brown. It depends, says the dissent.”
Just as the dissent in the Supreme Court case holds this position, so too do the political defenders of racial preferences in college admissions. But every indicator, from hard data to basic intuition, tells us this is unjust.
Affirmative action is not the story of creating a more equal playing field, but rather replacing discrimination against one race with discrimination against another. The Supreme Court was right to recognize just how wrong that is.
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Jack Elbaum is a summer 2023 Washington Examiner fellow.