A Quota Kerfuffle

I should have known better. The first rule of paper assignment is never give students the option of writing about either abortion or affirmative action. You're setting a bear trap for them: unable to resist the lure of the raw meat, they charge, saliva streaming through the air, into the iron teeth of irrationality.

My specific mistake: I picked an interesting-looking affirmative action case called Meredith v. Jefferson County, KY as the hook for one of my paper options for Honors American Government. The basic facts involve the desegregation plan in Louisville, where the public school system allows transfers within the system as long as they don't interfere with the racial balance of individual schools, each of which is expected to remain between 15 and 50% minority in order to maintain equity and prevent the kind of "tipping" where white parents abandon a school en masse. A white kindergartner was denied a parentally desired transfer on racial grounds, hence the lawsuit.

Not surprisingly, every single paper on this topic engaged in stem winding diatribes about the evils of affirmative action, how it crushes merit and imposes injustices on whites that rival slavery and Jim Crow, blah blah blah. I've said it before, but nobody does victimology in this country like privileged white people. Now I don't like quotas any more than the next privileged white guy, and I won't mourn much for affirmative action's eventual death. The decline in white whining would be a serious windfall. But let's get a little perspective here people. While AA surely imposes injustices, they are relatively mild, they target the otherwise privileged in the name of those less so, and the actual differences in qualifications b/w the boosted and the screwed are usually minor. But here's the thing: Meredith doesn't involve ANY trade-off of race vs. "merit." We're not talking about competitive college admissions as in Bakke or Grutter. In this case, race limits individual choice but nothing more. In oral argument, Ginsberg sensibly asked the plaintiff lawyer how you could possibly evaluate kindergartner qualifications "holistically" as called for in Grutter. Blinded by quota rage, not a single student managed to recognize this mitigating fact. Why won't I be surprised if Scalia and crowd prove similarly oblivious?

So how did I solve this problem of my own creation? Compensating for the deficiencies of white intellect, I artificially inflated their grades, of course. It was the system's fault. Who says conservative whites can't catch a break?