Abstract
Apart from the difficulties involved in publicly stating what the underlying purpose of affirmative action is or should be, namely the top-down deracialization of American society, acknowledging the very existence of that policy—and especially its antimeritocratic component—is likely to trigger several negative side effects.
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Notes
According to one of the most extensive studies available so far, eliminating affirmative action in top-tier universities would entail a 50 percent to 75 percent decrease in the numbers of black students (even though it would only increase the ex ante likelihood of admission for each white applicant by a small margin); see William Bowen and Derek Bok, The Shape of the River. Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 34–35, 39.
See generally Linda Hamilton Krieger, “The Content of Our Categories: A Cognitive Bias Approach on Discrimination and Equal Employment Opportunity,” Stanford Law Review 47, July 1995, pp. 1161–1248 (brilliantly reviewing a substantial portion of the relevant literature).
In some cases the subjects had been informed that their assignment to one “group” or another was purely random; in others the people involved were divided according to a minimal common denominator such as a stated preference for one item out of a set of paintings or photographs; see Henri Tajfel, Michael Billig, R.P. Bundy, and Claude Flament, “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 1, 1971, pp. 165–166.
See Henri Tajfel, “Cognitive Aspects of Prejudice,” Journal of Social Issues, 25 (4), 1969, p. 81;
Thomas Ostrom and Constantine Sedikides, “Out-Group Homogeneity Effects in Natural and Minimal Groups” Psychological Bulletin. 112 (3) 1992 pp. 536–552.
Sabine Otten and Dirk Wentura, “About the Impact of Automaticity in the Minimal Group Paradigm: Evidence from Affective Priming Tasks,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 29 (8), 1999, pp. 1049–1071.
See Michael Billig and Henri Tajfel, “Social Categorization and Similarity in Intergroup Behavior,” European Journal of Social Psychology, 3 (1), 1973, pp. 37–48.
See John Howard and Myron Rothbart, “Social Categorization and Memory for In-Group and Out-Group Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38 (2), 1980, pp. 303–306;
Charles Stangor and David McMillan, “Memory for Expectancy-Congruent and Expectancy-Incongruent Information: A Review of the Social and Social Developmental Literatures,” Psychological Bulletin, 111 (1), 1992, pp. 42–61.
See Rothbart and John, “Social Categorization,” p. 96; Thomas Srull and Robert Wyer, “The Role of Category Accessibility in the Interpretation of Information about Persons: Some Determinants and Implications,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (10), 1979, pp. 1660–1672.
See for instance, Madeleine Heilman, Caryn J. Brock, and Peter Stathatos, “The Affirmative Action Stigma of Incompetence: Effects of Performance Information Ambiguity,” Academy of Management Journal, 40 (3), 1997, pp. 603–625;
Luis Garcia, Nancy Erskine, Cathy Hawn, and Susan Casmey, “The Effects of Affirmative Action on Attributions about Minority Group Members,” Journal of Personality, 49 (4), 1981, pp. 427–437;
Rupert Nascoste, “Sources of Stigma: Analyzing the Psychology of Affirmative Action,” Law and Policy, 12 (2), 1990, pp. 175–195; “Social Psychology and Affirmative Action: The Importance of Process in Policy Analysis,” Journal of Social Issues, 43 (1), 1987, pp. 127–132;
Russell Summers, “The Influence of Affirmative Action on Perceptions of a Beneficiary’s Qualifications,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 21 (15), 1991, pp. 1265–1277;
Linda Hamilton Krieger, “Civil Rights Perestroika: Intergroup Relations after Affirmative Action,” Califomia Law Review, 86 (6), 1998, pp. 1264–1270.
Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, Cambridge (Mass.), Addison-Wesley, 1954, p. 281 (emphasis added);
on the reduction of prejudice through intergroup contact, see generally Thomas Pettigrew and Linda Tropp, “A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90 (5), 2006, pp. 751–783.
In this connection, see Lu-in Wang, “Race as Proxy: Situational Racism and Self-fulfilling Stereotypes,” DePaul Law Review, 53 (3), 2004, pp. 1013–1109. Two examples borrowed from the empirical literature on U.S. public opinion toward affirmative action confirm the existence of stigmatization effects induced by the policy’s visibility, of which blacks themselves are obviously aware.
See Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1990, pp. 116, 90.
See Francine Tougas, Stéphane Joly, Anne M. Beaton, and Line Pierre, “Reactions of Beneficiaries to Preferential Treatment: A Reality Check,” Human Relations, 49 (4), 1996, pp. 453–464;
Marlene Turner and Anthony Pratkanis, “Affirmative Action as Help: A Review of Recipient Reactions to Preferential Selection and Affirmative Action,” Basic and Applied Social Psychology. 15 (1–2), 1994, pp. 43–69.
The opposite view is defended in Michael Yelnosky, “The Prevention Justification for Affirmative Action,” Ohio State Iaw Journal, 64 (5), 2003, pp. 1385–1425.
See, for example, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve, New York, The Free Press, 1994, pp. 470–475.
See David L. Hamilton, Susan Sherman, and Catherine Ruvolo, “Stereotype-Based Expectancies: Effects on Information Processing and Social Behaviors,” Journal of Social Issues, 46 (2), 1990, pp. 35–60.
See Joshua Correll, Bernadette Park, Charles M. Judd, and Bernd Wittenbrink, “The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83 (6), 2002, pp. 1314–1329;
B. Keith Payne, “Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81 (2), 2001, pp. 181–192;
Andrew Sagar and Janet Ward Schofield, “Racial and Behavioral Cues in Black and White Children’s Perceptions of Ambiguously Aggressive Acts,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1980, pp. 594–595.
See Thomas Pettigrew, “The Intergroup Contact Hypothesis Reconsidered,” in Miles Hewstone and Rupert Brown, eds., Contact and Conflict in Intergroup Encounters: Social Psychology and Society, New York, Blackwell, 1986, pp. 169–195.
See Pettigrew and Martin, “Shaping the Organizational Context,” pp. 56–57, 64, and, more generally, Thomas E. Ford, Charles Stangor, and Duan Changmin, “Influence of Social Category Accessibility and Category-Associated Trait Accessibility on Judgment of Individuals,” Social Cognition, 12 (2), 1994, pp. 149–168.
Since then, the university has decided not to disclose such data anymore, in order to protect the students’ right to “confidentiality”; see Robert Klitgaard, Choosing Elites, New York, Basic Books, 1985, p. 155.
See Linda Wightman, “The Threat to Diversity in Legal Education: An Empirical Analysis of the Consequences of Abandoning Race as a Factor in Law School Admission Decisions,” New York University Law Review, 72 (1), 1997, p. 30 (table 6).
For other similar illustrations, see DeFunis v. Odegaard, 416 U.S. 312 (1974), p. 325; Jerome Karabel, Freshmen Admissions at Berkeley: A Policy for the 1990s and Beyond, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989, p. 22.
See Richard Kahlenberg, The Remedy: Race, Class, and Affirmative Action, New York, New Republic Books/Basic Books, 1996, pp. 66–68, 242;
Terrance Sandalow, “Minority Preferences Reconsidered,” Michigan Law Review, 97 (6), 1999, pp. 1895–1896.
See Klitgaard, Choosing Elites, pp. 174–175; Thomas Sowell, Preferential Policies: An International Perspective, New York, Morrow, 1990, p. 110. Other factors help account for the persistence of this race-based gap in qualifications within each university. Among them is the fact that even if some of the black students preferred to attend an institution where they could be admit-ted without the affirmative action bonus, financial considerations might discourage them from doing so. As far as private colleges are concerned, the institutions whose admissions criteria are the most difficult to meet are also the ones that are best endowed and therefore in a position to grant the largest amount of financial aid, upon which black students are more dependent than others.
See Thernstrom and Thernstrom, America in Black and White, pp. 391–397, 405–409. In the same vein, Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at UCLA who went on record opposing affirmative action, reports that some white students, while choosing optional courses, consider the proportion of blacks and Hispanics present during the first class and choose the course in which that proportion is the highest. Their choice is based on the assumption that members of these two minorities, some of whom have been admitted thanks to affirmative action, will be less well-prepared, thereby automatically propelling whites to the top of the class and allowing them to get better grades, all other things being equal; see Eugene Volokh, “Diversity, Race as Proxy. and Religion as Proxy,” UCLA Law Review. 43 (6), 1996. p. 2067.
Bowen and Bok, The Shape of the River. For additional evidence, see Mitchell Chang, Daria Witt, James Jones, and Kenji Hakuta, eds., Compelling Interest: Examining the Evidence on Racial Dynamics in Colleges and Universities, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003;
William Bowen, Martin A. Kurzweil, and Eugene M. Tobin, Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2005.
Ibid., pp. 55–59. See also Sigal Mon and Marta Tienda, “Assessing the Mismatch Hypothesis: Differentials in College Graduation Rate by Institutional Selectivity,” Sociology of Education, 78 (4), 2005, pp. 294–315.
Ibid., pp. 118–148. On the other hand, it is true that the grades of black students remain on average lower than those of white students, a fact for which affirmative action may be partly responsible (for conflicting views on this matter, see Richard Sander, “A Systematic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools,” Stanford Law Review, 57 (2), 2004, pp. 367–483;
Ian Ayres and Richard Brooks, “Does Affirmative Action Reduce the Number of Black Lawyers?” Stanford Law Review, 57 (6), 2005, pp. 1807–1854;
David L. Chambers, Timothy T. Clydesdale, William C. Kidder, and Richard O. Lempert, “The Real Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: An Empirical Critique of Richard Sander’s Study,” Stanford Law Review, 57 (6), 2005, pp. 1855–1898).
For an empirical study finding that minority students are deterred from pursuing Ph.Ds, and hence entering academic jobs, because affirmative action at the undergraduate level channels these students into more selec-tive schools, where they get lower grades relative to their nonminority peers, see Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, Increasing Faculty Diversity: The Occupational Choices of High-Achieving Minority Students, Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University Press, 2003.
Bowen and Bok, The Shape of the River, pp. 231–240; 266–268. This finding has been challenged, however: see Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Levitte, “Does Enrollment Diversity Improve University Education?” International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 15 (1), 2003, pp. 8–26.
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© 2007 Daniel Sabbagh
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Sabbagh, D. (2007). The Negative Side Effects of Transparency. In: Equality and Transparency. The CERI Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607392_6
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