Harkness Tower on Yale University’s campus in New Haven, Conn., Sept. 9, 2016.
Photo: Beth Harpaz/Associated PressIn this unusual summer of love, our new rulers—those tolerant folk who now control the physically decaying streets of major cities alongside the intellectually decomposing common rooms and newsrooms of many universities and media companies—have instructed Americans to work on developing their race-awareness.
If you haven’t yet checked your white privilege, identified the roots of your own oppression or made valiant efforts to ensure that Black and Brown Americans are given proper lexicological distinction over white Americans, then you haven’t been paying attention. For a diverse nation that has strived, not always successfully, to make a reality of the ideal of “E pluribus unum,” the risks of fragmentation from such an explicit call to ethnic self-consciousness are stark.
To invite Americans to place such emphasis on race and the various grievances and privileges that flow from it is to sow division as effectively as any racist trope about immigrants or minorities.
Kamala Harris, who may soon be president-regent in the administration of a visibly deteriorating Joe Biden, has been a talented exponent of this identity-first politics. You’ll recall how just last year she rounded on Mr. Biden in a Democratic debate, accusing him of having spent much of his career befriending racists and pursuing policies that were designed to hurt people like her.
It’s promising that Ms. Harris has evidently now found it in her heart to forgive Mr. Biden, thereby offering a shining example to us all that conciliation rather than confrontation is the way to go. Only a cynic would suggest her motives stem from anything other than a belated and welcome recognition of the power of togetherness.
In sidelining the many economic, sociological, behavioral and other factors that contribute to inequality, the narrow focus on race risks exciting unreasonable expectations about what can be achieved through race-based measures. And in ascribing inequality to discrimination and oppression, rather than a complex array of factors (of which discrimination is surely one), the activists will produce results that will do nothing to further the ideal of equality.
We didn’t have to wait long for evidence of how this would play out in practice. Last week the Justice Department made legally explicit what everyone has known for a long time: that Asian-Americans especially, but also whites, are discriminated against by the nation’s top universities. The department is threatening to sue Yale over its admissions practices. It seems that the university founded by one of the most viciously cruel 17th-century slave owners has been trying to expiate its original sin in part by favoring candidates from certain ethnic backgrounds over those from others.
If you believe Yale and its ideological soul mates in the media, the case is wholly without merit. In a masterful piece of willful self-deception, the journalistic equivalent of putting a telescope to a blind eye, the New York Times last week suggested there was no discrimination: “The Trump administration’s charge that the university discriminates against Asian-American applicants was disputed by many Asian-American students.”
The evidence for the claim that there is no discrimination was—stay with me here—Asian-American students who had been successful in their applications to Yale. The inconvenient testimony of the many more Asian-American students with outstanding academic records who didn’t get in was largely overlooked.
Racial preferences have been a longstanding source of neuralgia for universities. I’m reminded of the story a colleague once told about a California professor who defended the state’s affirmative-action program at the time by saying that if places were awarded purely on the basis of test scores, “97% of our admits would be Asian. The other 3% would be Jewish.”
Most reasonable people applaud efforts to build a more representative student body, and ultimately perhaps a more equitable world, by making accommodations for those of historically disadvantaged backgrounds, including underrepresented minorities. But a brief glimpse at the political landscape suggests that the measures tried so far have not been wildly successful. Doubling down on race-based preference risks only increasing the resentments and frustrations felt by a large and diverse group of disadvantaged Americans.
There are other hints that the elevation of race-consciousness is having some unintended political consequences. Even as President Trump continues to lag Mr. Biden in the opinion polls, his support among Hispanics has risen to about one third of that ethnic group. There are a number of reasons for this, but it seems possible that some Hispanic voters may be viewing with caution the Democratic Party’s apparent identification with black lives above others.
It isn’t only so-called white fragility that sees threats in the assertion of racial identity as the prime route toward progress in redressing inequality. The already fragile fabric of the nation’s larger patchwork identity is at risk.
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The Dangerous Consequences of Putting Race First - The Wall Street Journal
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