Who deserves what?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/07/2023 (951 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Affirmative Action was recently outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in two of America’s most prestigious colleges, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, ending 60 years of actions in the U.S. to erase discrimination on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.” The fundamental argument was that Affirmative Action is unfair, or unjust.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a beneficiary of Affirmative Action himself, argued that the focus should be on “individuals as individuals” rather than the idea that Americans are “all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society.” He joins a growing chorus exploiting a current cult of victimhood, meanwhile denying systemic racism and any responsibility for its consequences, a feverish pastime of many Americans today.

This squares with his privileged membership in the 1947 Horatio Alger Association, a scholarship granting foundation which predates civil rights acts, whose purpose is “to dispel the mounting belief among our nation’s youth that the American dream was no longer attainable.” This ruling is unlikely to give hope to millions of marginalized young people.

The American Dream (Oxford English Dictionary) is “the ideal that every citizen of the United States should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination and initiative.” Chief Justice John Roberts, in summing up, suggested that if race could somehow be tied to “courage and determination,” it might merit consideration, re-introducing negative attitudes and stereotypes debunked decades earlier.

All the above arguments see fairness as justice resting upon some notion of merit, in other words, “who deserves what?”

Affirmative Action was based on a notion of fairness as justice, legislating racial quotas for post secondary admissions in response to the view that Black Americans were being denied access based on their colour.

People of colour are still underrepresented proportionally to population, a situation highlighted by the civil rights movement, street violence and political activism. Access and opportunity are still out of reach for many today and, along with voter suppression, removing Affirmative Action creates more barriers and further undermines a sense of collective responsibility to make things better.

I am reminded of President John F. Kennedy’s words just before his assassination, uttered just a year before Affirmative Action saw the light of day. He linked the insatiable greed, extreme materialism, and irresponsible selfishness of the day to the injustices of poverty, U.S. wars abroad and racial discrimination, decrying the ever-increasing disparities between the rich and the poor amid a growing sense of individual entitlement. His response was an appeal to civic pride, asking people to think not about what the country could do for them but what they could do for their country.

“Victims” of Affirmative Action decry their loss of opportunities for advantage and prestige, claiming to be unfairly disadvantaged by public institutions. They call for meritocracy, an appeal to contentious judgments about rewards, to support their prejudices.

In his 2009 book, Justice: What’s The Right Thing To Do? moral philosopher Michael Sandel outlines how meritocracy, who deserves what, is perceived by Americans as both fairness or honour.

He then proceeds to theorize how people use these two arguments to justify their own agendas, and that democratic justice is a shared, not individual matter. The Court’s decision suggests that honour, translating into privilege, prestige, and power beat out fairness in this latest legal and political battle for justice. Both the American dream and American democracy are taking a hit.

It is hard to argue that racial prejudice which severely discriminates against people of colour is not a serious social problem. It is equally clear that many deserving, and resulting successful, people would not have attended universities and colleges were it not for Affirmative Action policies. Predictions are that outlawing these policies will have increasingly deleterious effects on post secondary access and participation by Blacks and Latinos in the U.S.

There is the added problem that there exist no reliable tools for judging who deserves what. Evaluating people’s worth by the same criteria assumes equivalent personal circumstances that simply do not exist. Linking individual merit to special rewards is a moral minefield, a constant and imminent threat to mutually beneficial co-existence with diverse others.

In delegitimizing Affirmative Action, the U.S. Supreme Court seems to have consciously and deliberately undermined the civic virtues and personal obligations required for people to encounter each other as equally worthwhile humans together creating a caring society — the very things democracy, and its public institutions, assert we all deserve!

John R. Wiens is dean emeritus at the faculty of education, University of Manitoba.