Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [80]
The question for the courts is whether affirmative action hiring and admissions policies violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws. But let’s set aside the constitutional question and focus directly on the moral question: Is it unjust to consider race and ethnicity as factors in hiring or university admissions?
To answer this question, let’s consider three reasons that proponents of affirmative action offer for taking race and ethnicity into account: correcting for bias in standardized tests, compensating for past wrongs, and promoting diversity.
Correcting for the Testing Gap
One reason for taking race and ethnicity into account is to correct for possible bias in standardized tests. The ability of the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) and other such tests to predict academic and career success has long been disputed. In 1951, an applicant to the doctoral program in the School of Religion at Boston University presented mediocre scores on the GRE (Graduate Record Exam). The young Martin Luther King, Jr., who would become one of the greatest orators in American history, scored below average in verbal aptitude.6 Fortunately, he was admitted anyway.
Some studies show that black and Hispanic students on the whole score lower than white students on standardized tests, even adjusting for economic class. But whatever the cause of the testing gap, using standardized tests to predict academic success requires interpreting the scores in light of students’ family, social, cultural, and educational backgrounds. A 700 SAT score from a student who attended poor public schools in the South Bronx means more than the same score for a graduate of an elite private school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But assessing test scores in light of students’ racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds does not challenge the notion that colleges and universities should admit those students with the greatest academic promise; it is simply an attempt to find the most accurate measure of each individual’s academic promise.
The real affirmative action debate is about two other rationales—the compensatory argument and the diversity argument.
Compensating for Past Wrongs
The compensatory argument views affirmative action as a remedy for past wrongs. It says minority students should be given preference to make up for a history of discrimination that has placed them at an unfair disadvantage. This argument treats admission primarily as a benefit to the recipient and seeks to distribute the benefit in a way that compensates for past injustice and its lingering effects.
But the compensatory argument runs into a tough challenge: critics point out that those who benefit are not necessarily those who have suffered, and those who pay the compensation are seldom those responsible for the wrongs being rectified. Many beneficiaries of affirmative action are middle-class minority students who did not suffer the hardships that afflict young African Americans and Hispanics from the inner city. Why should an African American student from an affluent Houston suburb get an edge over Cheryl Hopwood, who may actually have faced a tougher economic struggle?
If the point is to help the disadvantaged, critics argue, affirmative action should be based on class, not race. And if racial preferences are intended to compensate for the historic injustice of slavery and segregation, how can it be fair to exact that compensation from people such as Hopwood, who played no part in perpetrating the injustice?
Whether the compensatory case for affirmative action can answer this objection depends on the difficult concept of collective responsibility: Can we