And it all looked so good on paper.

The class I TA for just covered affirmative action, and as a result I had to listen to some of the students weigh in on the topic. One student found the admission policies of one school to give excessive weight to race; 20 points out of a possible 150 point system. Race, he said, is not something one can help; and therefore, it is wrong to admit anyone on anything other than “the merits.” He was also annoyed with giving points for poverty, since he failed to see how this relates to anything.

Another student responded that poverty and minority status have a high correlation, and so it is wrong to suppose that a merit based system is really colorblind considering the poor quality of schools in inner-city neighborhoods. But her opponent insisted that wealth, unlike race, is mutable, and so should not be taken into consideration (this would imply that he reversed his original reasoning about why race shouldn’t be considered, but they didn’t plan this out, clearly).  She asked how one gets a good job when you can’t go to college? He retorted that you work hard for a while and then you go. Much to my relief, this drew aghast laughs from about a third of the class.

But I do extend some sympathy towards his position, not because it is right, but because it is quite seductive. I only vaguely remember my views on affirmative action when I was an undergraduate, but considering my conservative political outlook at the time it probably ran something much like that. The injustices of the past are in the past; to take them into consideration and reward those for their skin color is to perpetuate the old injustice in a new direction, and if anything encourages racism and discourages merit. The idea is so simple, so pure; so how can it be wrong? Who could argue against a “merit based” system?

The problem with this is that it assumes a merit-based system has, or ever could exist. It never has, it never will. That is not to say that someone with nothing to show for his high school education can make it into a quality university – hard work and dedication usually do play a role in the outcomes of our endeavors. However, I wonder if the student against affirmative action ever stopped to ask himself how he managed to do well in high school. It probably had something to do with going to a good school, because he grew up in an affluent suburb. It probably had something to do with having parents who not only could provide him food, clothing, and education but whatever else he needed to keep himself ahead of the game. It probably had something to do, in short, with not growing up in a broken neighborhood filled with crime and steeped in a culture which offers no encouragement to bright students. And I then wonder if he figures he deserved all of this from the start, from the moment of his birth, if he earned his privileges and advantages. The obvious answer is that he did not. From the beginning of his life, everything about his circumstance gives the lie to the idea of a “merit based” world.

Some people would continue to insist, of course, that the lack of an equal starting line is just a part of the great American struggle; hey, the Asians overcome racism, so really you’re not fully American until you accept the status quo while simultaneously triumphing over it.  But the problem with the self-made man is that he is quite rare – more rare than our politicians and media machines would like you to think. If you think it happens all the time, that’s because those are the stories you hear about – you hear about the Colin Powells of the world and not, as it happens, the millions of others who don’t happen to have extraordinary talent or inspiration on hand. And that’s why I would characterize the conservative excuse of “pull yourself up by your own boot straps” as absurdly unrealistic. How it is that an essentially negative view of human nature couples with an insistence that we organize society around the exceptional few is beyond me. It is just plain inconsistent; and it does not offer any effective solution for dealing with reality, in the meantime, of humanity on both the aggregate and individual level.

But that’s all an aside. For the student in the class, it is all still perfectly clear. It’s all about merit, man. And if the supposed “merit based” system without any affirmative action just happens to be of benefit to the people with privilege built-in, then all the better. How convenient that philosophical purity backs up class and racial purity as well.