From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
March 06, 2024One of the stranger aspects of the long-running American affirmative action debate is that both supporters and critics of racial quotas seldom admit in public how scarce blacks would be in cognitively elite institutions without the now traditional massive thumb on the scale in their favor.
Liberal racial preference advocates tend to argue as if black representation in prestige positions in percentages close to their share of the population (12 percent or 14 percent, depending on whether or not you count individuals who identify as black and another race) merely requires tie-breakers favoring African-Americans among extremely equal applicants. They present an image of affirmative action as resembling the baseball rule that “a tie goes to the runner”: In the rare instances when the baserunner (black applicant in this analogy) and baseball (nonblack applicant) arrive exactly simultaneously, the umpire is obliged to declare the runner safe.
Who could object to something so trivial?
Racists, that’s who!
Similarly, conservative opponents of Diversity Equity Inclusion programs frequently imply that banning them would not cause a major falloff in the numbers of blacks qualifying for the best colleges and best jobs because blacks could just buckle down and work a little bit harder to make up the no doubt tiny difference.
Read the whole thing there.
