Promise and Dilemma: Perspectives on Racial Diversity and Higher Education

Promise and Dilemma: Perspectives on Racial Diversity and Higher Education

Eugene Y. Lowe, ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999,.206 pp., $29.95

DESPITE THE POLITICS OF BACKLASH, two core principles of affirmative action may yet prevail. First, society can and should develop systematic remedies for racial disparities, which continue to affect the life opportunities of African Americans, Hispanics, and other people of color. Second, while race has always been and continues to be a dangerous concept, it may nonetheless be necessary to rely on it to address its own effects. The first principle is the implicit premise of Promise and Dilemma: Perspectives on Racial Diversity and Higher Education. The importance of the second principle is shown in the excellent essays included in the book, especially the respective contributions of Claude Steele and Scott Miller.

The rigorous experiments of Stanford psychologist Steele regarding race and gender have shown that, even among highly talented students, African Americans and women will underperform on standardized tests if they are administered under conditions that bring out a "stereotype threat." The more talented the students, the greater the situational stress they face. Steele theorizes that African Americans and women have internalized allegations about their inferior intellectual abilities and thus fear confirming others' suspicions. His research complements related investigations by John Ogbu of the University of California, Berkeley, of persons who are hostile toward education because of, in Ogbu's words, racial subjugation.

Steele's work is significant, because it highlights the effects of racial stereotyping even in the absence of an identifiable wrongdoer who intends harm and can be assigned blame. While egregious cases of racism persist, subtle yet systematic racial bias also perpetuates the ills of racism. It is, therefore, more than explicit racial discrimination that properly demands our attention; racial patterns of behavior do so as well.

Miller, who wrote the highly regarded An American Imperative: Accelerating Minority Educational Achievement, presents data on the so-called "test gap," or differences in average performance on standardized tests that correlate strongly with race. Like the work of Christopher Jencks and Meredith Philips, Miller's commendable efforts are directed toward improving the academic performance of African Americans. That approach is compatible with attempts to address problems with the tests themselves and exaggerations of their predictive utility.

The test-gap issue is an effective response to those who assert that formal color-blindness is the only racial ideal, and an absolute one at that, because the test gap has been acknowledged by adherents of color-blindness. It serves as an effective rejoinder to ideological color-blindness, because the goal of alleviating the rest gap is race specific.

Acknowledging that goal means more than increasing the scholastic achievement of all American youngsters: a conscious effort must be made to improve the performance of African American children in particular. Both are worthwhile objectives, but to focus on a group is the essence-the highly contested essence-of affirmative action, Accepting the urgency of the test gap in a racial sense is therefore to acknowledge the propriety of affirmative action with a racial basis.

Indeed, the refusal to recognize any effects of race and racism would render it impossible to have research, much less policy, dealing with the test gap, The opponents of affirmative action, if they were consistent, would not be pragmatic. Under strict colorblindness, the test gap cannot be seen. Even if its existence is true descriptively, it cannot merit consideration prescriptively.

Those who insist on formal color-blindness continue to insist that racial diversity is not a legitimate goal and scarcely benefits higher education. Diversity is an incidental effect of dubious value. Some also argue that the free market must allow people to discriminate by race. Its operation will automatically discipline decision making that is based on erroneous generalizations. For them, any other approaches are at best economically inefficient and at worst violations of individual liberty.

Still others, however, like Nathan Glazer and Glenn Loury, who have long argued against racial preferences, have changed their minds. They have come to recognize that, contrary to Supreme Court decisions that treat all references to race as equivalent, it is possible to distinguish between the effects of race, on the one hand, and the practices of racism, on the other.

The rhetoric of "reverse discrimination" is powerful, but also powerfully misleading. It asks whether it would be wrong if an African American were turned down by Harvard because of skin color. It asks the wrong question and implies an Inapt comparison. The better question is: what ought to be done after generations of African Americans have been rejected by every institution of higher education to which they applied? The comparison obscures the reality that African Americans rejected by colleges before 1954 were turned away as a group and on absolute terms; no African American attended all-white institutions such as the University of Mississippi. The juxtaposition implied by claims of reverse discrimination also supposes that a white student who fails to gain admission to a single institution suffers a harm identical to that experienced by a black person who faces systematic bias in daily life.

Other thoughtful pieces in Promise and Dilemma include Uri Treisman's summary of his experiences teaching mathematics to African American and Hispanic students (indeed, his programs in Texas for enhancing math skills have been so successful that he should consider packaging the details for use across the nation); Chang-Lin Tien's discussion of his own experiences as an Asian American student and what they reveal about troubling racial dynamics; and Neil Smelser's analysis of what he sees as three trends in the controversies about affirmative action: shifts from substantive goats to procedural routines, from "preferential treatment to entitlement," and from economic conflicts to cultural disputes.

All the authors in this volume are well informed and thoughtful, as concerned about gross racial disparities throughout society as they are about the practical difficulties of increasing African American and Hispanic representation in higher education. None of them is dogmatic or polemical, and no one wholeheartedly accepts or rejects affirmative action as it is currently practiced.

All in all, this book should be added to the bookshelves of all faculty members and administrators interested in issues of racial justice. William Bowen and Derek Bok's Shape of the River (reviewed in the May-June 1999 issue of Academe) has properly dominated serious discussion of affirmative action since its publication. Promise and Dilemma may be regarded as a reflective supplement to that volume.

Frank Wu teaches in the law school at Howard University

Copyright American Association of University Professors Nov/Dec 1999
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