Why Affirmative Action is counterproductive

I write this post as the admissions policies of the esteemed Harvard University are on trial in federal court for disfavoring Asian Americans. Regardless of its outcome, this case will certainly not be the last one brought to a court’s attention questioning the legality of Affirmative Action, especially with a conservative-leaning Supreme Court seemingly hostile to such policies. However, I am not writing here to opine on the legality of Affirmative Action, something I am decidedly not qualified to do.

The non-Constitutional scholar, that is the layperson, tends to make passionate arguments for or against Affirmative Action on a basis of morals. The argument in favor tends to make any of three points: 1) Affirmative Action seeks to right past wrongs, such as slavery and discrimination1, 2) Affirmative Action seeks to make up for current inequalities of opportunities between racial (or socioeconomic) groups, such as inferior schools, lack of extracurricular and enrichment programs, less education-focused neighborhoods and weaker family structures2, and 3) Racial diversity is, in and of itself, desirable, especially within a classroom3.

The primary argument against Affirmative Action (and the one being litigated in the Harvard University case) tends to be of the variety, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” That is, discriminating for one group, by definition equates to discriminating against another group. And that, opponents of Affirmative Action contend, is equally unfair.

Having said all that, just as I am not addressing its legality, I am not going to discuss in this short article whether I believe Affirmative Action to be morally right or wrong (though I provide a few thoughts in the footnotes). What I am here to write about is the following. Whether or not the purposes of Affirmative Action are morally and ethically justified, whether it is well-meaning or not, its implementation is counterproductive. Stated more bluntly, Affirmative Action promotes racism, not mitigates it.

The reason for this, however, is not necessarily the obvious one, that of resentment. To refer to the current Harvard case, I do not believe that Affirmative Action promotes racism because Asian Americans who do not gain admission resent the applicants of racial minorities who are favored. If anything, they resent the (mostly white) members of Harvard’s admissions staff who discriminated against them.

No, the reasons that Affirmative Action policies in education (and professionally) promote racism are twofold. First, by having a lower academic standard for individuals that share something in common (i.e. their skin color or their heritage), schools actively promote the belief that, on average, individuals who share that skin color or heritage are less skilled and less qualified.

Say, for instance, I am in a class of 100 students with two members of a minority group that are, on average, equally qualified as the other 98. Yes, I may acknowledge that there are fewer students of that minority than others but this is likely a passing thought. More importantly, I have every reason to believe based on my experiences with my peers, that in the general population, different groups or races are generally equal, with similar abilities and qualifications.

On the other hand, let’s now propose I am in a class of 100 students with 10 members of a minority group, of which 2 are as equally qualified as any others, but eight are clearly below average. I still may have the passing thought that there are fewer students of that minority than others, but now, based on personal observations, I am likely to conclude that my peers of that minority are less qualified than average. And importantly, I am naturally inclined to extrapolate that conclusion beyond the classroom to the general population, a much more pernicious viewpoint. This is especially likely to be the circumstance if these are my first close experiences with that minority group (as is often the case given how segregated most communities are within the United States).

The second reason that Affirmative Action breeds racism is that by devaluing the meaning of the credentials of an organization, it forces me to consider race when evaluating an individual with that credential. Let’s say I am a hiring manager reviewing resumes from Harvard University students. If Harvard did not employ Affirmative Action4, then I could safely assume that, on average, all students that I am considering for employment are more or less equally qualified. That is, the Harvard degree means the same thing for all Harvard graduates.

But with Affirmative Action, I must consider the fact that students of certain minority groups have lower qualifications. Hence, when reviewing a resume, I am effectively forced to look at the student’s name, his or her club affiliations, etc. to try to determine whether the applicant is of minority group status5, and adjust my resume evaluations accordingly.

In other words, by having separate sets of admissions criteria, Affirmative Action breeds racism by forcing a hiring manager to consider race. And this, of course, makes a hiring manager less likely to hire members of that minority group, at least absent further Affirmative Action within the hiring organization.

To reiterate, Affirmative Action promotes racism because firstly, it encourages students to both think about racial differences and to draw pernicious conclusions from those differences. Second, it essentially forces hiring managers to consider race as an employment factor. Affirmative action is bad policy, not because of its morality (or lack thereof), but because of its outcomes. Affirmative Action inevitably promotes the kinds of stereotypes that its well meaning proponents are desperately trying to eradicate. A policy designed to reduce and mitigate racism and other forms of bias breeds and strengthens exactly those biases and that racism.


1 You cannot make up for yesterday’s wrongs experienced by thousands or millions by helping a handful of their descendants today. This solves nothing except to make members of the majority feel less guilty.

2 If you want to close the achievement gap between different minority groups and the majority, you must do so at the youngest ages, not in college. As difficult (or impossible) as this may be, this is where efforts should be devoted.

3 Diversity in the classroom is enormously overrated because classroom discussion is enormously overrated. Students should not be in school to listen to their uneducated peers pontificate. They should be in school to learn from their educated teachers. I realize this is probably an unpopular and minority viewpoint, but in my many years of education (as both a student and a teacher) I have found classroom discussion almost always to be a colossal waste of educational time.

4 Schools like Harvard should put an end to all forms of Affirmative Action, including for athletes, the highly wealthy and legacies. Our education system, including higher education, is abysmal. One of the (many) reasons is the amount of resources spent on things other than education, such as athletics.

5 Opponents of Affirmative Action correctly point out that this significantly disadvantages the minority students that are fully qualified and who would have gained admittance regardless.