The Wall Street Journal
Racial preference has never achieved what
proponents promised. Why would it this time?
By Jason L. Riley
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that race can be a factor,
but not the predominant one, when states draw maps for legislative districts.
If that formulation sounds familiar, it’s because the same court has offered
similarly useless guidance regarding affirmative action in college admissions.
Both state officials and college administrators deserve better, as do the
supposed beneficiaries of these policies.
Race-driven legislative districting is an outgrowth of
the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was intended to ensure that historically
disenfranchised blacks had the ballot access guaranteed by the 15th Amendment.
The law’s passage was followed by a sharp increase in black voter registration,
particularly in the Deep South. In 1964 black voter registration in Mississippi
was less than 7%, but by 1966 it was 60%. In Georgia the figure climbed from
19% to 51% over the same period. It would seem that the law had worked as
Congress intended.
As with so much civil-rights legislation, however, the
goal posts moved over time. An effort to ensure ballot access became an effort
to secure the election of black officials.
And despite decades of evidence that
whites now regularly vote for nonwhite candidates—including Barack Obama, who
in 2008 carried a majority of white voters in nearly a third of states—we
continue to pretend that voters must be racially segregated in order for blacks
to win office.
Besides being outdated, current interpretations and
enforcement of the Voting Rights Act probably do more to hamper black
candidates and facilitate racial polarization.
Running for office in a district
drawn to guarantee a winner from a certain racial or ethnic group gives a
candidate little incentive to appeal to voters outside that group. Insulated
politicians are less accountable and more given to extreme positions held by
few beyond their small base of supporters.
The Congressional Black Caucus has
one of the most liberal voting records in Congress year after year, and black
candidates from overstuffed minority districts struggle to win statewide.
Affirmative action has a similar record—to the detriment
of the people it intends to help. In the decades immediately following
implementation of racial preferences in the 1970s, the number of whites living
in poverty fell while the number of impoverished blacks increased, and incomes
for the poorest blacks declined at more than double the rate of comparable
whites.
After the University of California system ended race-based admissions
by referendum in 1996, black graduation rates increased.
A policy designed to
help the black middle class had in practice hampered black economic progress.
The U.S. is not the only place where racial preferences
haven’t achieved what proponents promised.
Last week’s Economist magazine
includes a story with the headline, “Race-based affirmative action is
failing poor Malaysians.”
Anyone familiar with the trajectory of affirmative
action policies in America will recognize the similarities.
“Schemes favouring
Malays were once deemed essential to improve the lot of Malaysia’s least
wealthy racial group; these days they are widely thought to help mostly the
well-off within that group, while failing the poor and aggravating ethnic
tensions,” the magazine reports. “Yet affirmative action persists because it is
a reliable vote-winner for the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the
Malay party that has dominated government since independence.”
After the British colonists left in the 1950s, Malaysia
implemented racially discriminatory policies that favored the indigenous
population over immigrant laborers and merchants from China and elsewhere.
Malays, who comprise the majority of the population, receive preferential
treatment for government loans, jobs and public university admissions.
Marketplaces in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, reserve spaces for Malay
shopkeepers and ban ethnic Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs from doing business
there.
Policies that were supposed to be temporary—proponents
said they would be needed for no longer than 20 years—have not only continued
for more than twice as long but also expanded.
Just as preferences for blacks
in the U.S. eventually spread to other groups, including Hispanics and women,
Malaysia’s racial and ethnic spoils system has grown to include other
indigenous populations deemed worthy of special consideration.
Racial
preferences have lowered standards at public universities as non-Malay students
and professors have fled to merit-based private institutions. And Malay
students who know that their job prospects don’t depend on academic performance
feel less pressure to study hard.
The Malay government is well aware that these policies
have resulted in an “entitlement culture,” but the political imperative is to
do what’s popular today, regardless of the consequences tomorrow. That, too, it
seems, is a global feature of affirmative action policies in practice.
