By Jason L. Riley | The Wall Street Journal
Discriminatory programs tend to benefit the well-off instead of the poor. And they never seem to end.
The Paris protesters are getting all the attention, but
France isn’t the only country where angry masses are taking to the streets to
be heard.
The Journal reported Monday that an estimated 55,000
people gathered in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur last weekend to defend
race-based policies that give preferential treatment to the majority Muslim
Malay population.
Defenders argue that ending racial preferences would
“dilute decades of affirmative action policies introduced to help Malays catch
up with the generally wealthier ethnic Chinese,” who comprise less than a
quarter of the population.
Affirmative action in Malaysia began in the 1950s, after
the British colonial administrators, who had welcomed laborers from China,
departed. Since 1971, Malays have enjoyed preferential treatment over their
Chinese compatriots in everything from schooling and housing to government jobs
and access to capital.
The government’s express goal was “racial balance,” and
to that end Malay entrepreneurs were given preference in obtaining credit,
licenses and government contracts. Developers offer Malays discounts on new
homes, and shopping centers have even banned ethnic-Chinese-owned businesses to
limit competition with Malay proprietors.
These policies were supposed to sunset in
1991,
but the country’s leaders have repeatedly extended them in exchange for
political support. “Schemes favouring Malays were once deemed essential to
improve the lot of Malaysia’s least wealthy racial group,” explains the
Economist magazine, but “these days they are widely thought to help mostly the
well-off within that group, while failing the poor and aggravating ethnic
tensions.”
To anyone who has followed the affirmative-action debate
in the U.S., a lot of this probably sounds familiar.
Like their Malay
counterparts, American proponents of racial double standards say they are
necessary to help the underprivileged, even though the beneficiaries tend to
be people who were already well-off to begin with.
Liberal politicians
defend color-conscious policies to win votes, and courts assure us the policies
will not exist in perpetuity. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of
racial preferences will no longer be necessary,” wrote Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor in a 2003 Supreme Court decision.
As it has in Malaysia, affirmative action
continues to stoke racial and ethnic tensions in the U.S., especially in
education. Harvard is being sued for discrimination against Asian
applicants. The plaintiffs say Asians are held to higher standards than other
applicants to limit their numbers on campus.
Harvard insists that more
Asians aren’t admitted because they aren’t as multidimensional as their
non-Asian peers, an argument eerily similar to the one Ivy League schools
once used to discriminate against Jews.
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio has angered the parents
of white and Asian students by pushing for racial quotas at the city’s top
public high schools.
Some 80% of black and Hispanic students in New York City’s
traditional public schools perform below grade level in reading and math. Is it
really any wonder that black and Hispanic students are underrepresented at
elite schools that use an admission test? Unfortunately, the mayor and his
supporters would rather scrap the test than focus on doing a better job of
preparing kids to take it.
While the debate domestically often centers on the
legality of affirmative action and whether it’s permitted under our
constitution, a more practical concern is whether these policies actually work
as intended—here in America or in other countries where they’ve been
implemented.
Malaysia’s racial preferences have been in place for more than
50 years, and the Malays still haven’t caught up to the ethnic Chinese, who
outperform them in school and in the workforce.
The gap has narrowed over
the past half-century, but it remains significant, and attributing Malay
progress to affirmative action is dubious.
For one thing, Malays in
neighboring Singapore, which has no affirmative action and where they are a
minority, are better off economically than the Malays in Malaysia, who receive
favorable treatment.
Similarly, affirmative-action programs in the U.S. are
regularly given undeserved credit for expanding the size of the black middle
class.
The reality is that the most dramatic declines in black poverty preceded
affirmative-action programs, which began in earnest in the 1970s. Black
incomes doubled in the 1960s—before affirmative action.
And blacks were
entering middle-class professions at a much faster clip in the decades
preceding affirmative action than they did in the decades following its
implementation.
After the University of California system ended
race-based admissions in 1996, more blacks enrolled and a higher percentage of
them not only graduated but obtained degrees in the more challenging fields
of engineering and science.
Policies intended to help sometimes do the
opposite, whether they are implemented in the U.S. or halfway around the world.
