Demographic Changes Upset Affirmative Action

Race-based affirmative action is doomed. Not because of the Bush administration’s recent ma- neuvering on the subject. Nor because the U.S. Supreme Court may reverse its 1978 Bakke decision allowing universities and colleges to consider race as a factor in admitting students. Rather, its demise is more the consequence of last week’s historic announcement by the Census Bureau that Latinos have officially surpassed African Americans as the nation’s largest minority.

Just as the civil rights movement derived its moral authority from specific historical circumstances, so too did its programs owe their political viability to a demographic calculus. In the 1960s, non-Hispanic whites made up more than 85% of the U.S. population, and blacks, the sole group for whom affirmative action was initially intended, made up one in 10 Americans.

But as enormous post-1970 immigration ethnically diversified America, the traditional divide between black and white evolved into one between whites and nonwhites. In the early 1970s, Mexican Americans, who had long been officially classified as “white” by the federal government, gained new status in the courts as “identifiable minorities.” They, too, were included in affirmative action programs. At that time, the addition of Mexican Americans was largely justifiable on the grounds that a majority of them were third- or later-generation Americans. Furthermore, many Mexican Americans, particularly in Texas, suffered from a legacy of school segregation and unequal educational opportunities.

But 30 years ago, no one could have imagined how a generation of large-scale immigration would redefine the Hispanic American experience. Once an overwhelmingly native-born population, by 2000 nearly two-thirds of adult Latinos nationwide were foreign-born. Within a decade, a program designed to remedy past discrimination began to benefit recently arrived immigrants and their children.

As the civil rights umbrella sheltered more and more groups, the rationale for affirmative action shifted. No longer was it primarily considered a remedy for past discrimination. Instead, affirmative action programs targeted contemporary discrimination. By the late 1990s, political battles forced universities to develop yet another rationale for racial preferences. The University of Michigan, whose admissions policies will be reviewed by the Supreme Court in April, justifies its affirmative action program on the grounds that it promotes “diversity” on campus, which reputedly makes for a richer education environment. Once merely a means to a noble end, diversity became the end.

Over the past generation, the wholesale inclusion of Latinos in the category of “protected minority,” combined with an official reluctance to reconsider the program’s original intent, has muddled the moral justification for affirmative action. Adding the Latino immigrant population to the program also subverted the racial calculus that once made affirmative action politically viable among whites.

It was thus not surprising that the first states in which affirmative action was abolished -- one by referendum, the other by the courts -- were the two with the largest Mexican American populations. Texas and California are collectively home to half the country’s Mexican Americans. In these states, Latinos not only significantly outnumber African Americans, but they also swelled the percentage of the population eligible for affirmative action. By 1990, more than a third of residents of California and Texas were considered “underrepresented minorities” under traditional affirmative action policies. Predictably, as this minority population grew, whites’ view of affirmative action soured.

In 1996, white voters overwhelmingly supported California’s Proposition 209, which eliminated state-sponsored affirmative action programs, because many of them felt that the playing field had begun to tilt against them. Though polls show that whites generally support programs that aim to remedy the effects of discrimination, they will withdraw their support if those programs threaten their families’ opportunities. It is debatable whether California’s white voters would have been as vehement in their opposition to affirmative action if it had benefited only the 7% of the state’s population that is black.

Indeed, two years after voters approved Proposition 209, several Native American tribes appealed, in part, to white guilt in their initiative campaign to allow Las Vegas-style gambling in Indian casinos. Overlooking the serious potential for corruption and some troubling labor issues, white voters overwhelmingly approved the measure, which benefited less than 1% of the state’s population.

Some conservative activists created the myth that whites oppose affirmative action -- both at the ballot box and in the courtroom -- out of some deeply held belief in equality. But the angry white students who have sued to overturn affirmative action programs were not motivated by the idealistic pursuit of equality. Like any other group of Americans, they wanted to protect their interests.

The continuing growth of the Latino population across the country will probably further erode the appeal of affirmative action among whites. In 1999, for example, Florida, another state where Latinos outnumber blacks, abolished its affirmative action programs in college admissions. For all the talk last week about how the reversal of affirmative action would hurt minorities, nearly two-thirds of U.S. Latinos live in states where state-sponsored affirmative action has already been banned. Put another way, the Supreme Court’s eventual ruling in the Michigan affirmative action case, the most significant in a generation, will primarily affect the very group for which the program was originally designed.

Unfortunately, there are more activists fighting over the legal future of affirmative action than there are thinking about new ways to ensure diversity in postsecondary education. President Bush’s defensive endorsement of a race-neutral solution illustrates just how difficult it is to change the subject.

The freshest thinking on college-level educational opportunity came after the 1996 Hopwood decision, which outlawed the University of Texas’ consideration of race in its admissions policies. Historian David Montejano, then-director of the Center of Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, devised the university’s current plan: the top 10% of each high school’s senior class is automatically admitted. “It is a great framework from which to create alternatives to affirmative action plans,” says Montejano, now an associate professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. “Together with outreach efforts, the 10% plan is working just great for Texas.”

But last-minute efforts to salvage postsecondary diversity don’t make up for a generation of avoiding the hard question: Does our society still owe remediation to African Americans for a history of slavery and segregation?

In last week’s Newsweek, Lee C. Bollinger, the former University of Michigan president listed as the defendant on the anti-affirmative action suits before the Supreme Court, implores Americans not to lose “the largeness of vision that defined the best of the civil rights era.” But the idea of affirmative action that grew out of the civil rights era has been undercut by the country’s changing demographics. Furthermore, it faces a hostile crowd in the Supreme Court.

What’s needed instead is a thorough reconsideration of our collective notion of fairness and our society’s duty to uphold it. Critics have attacked the race-neutral top-percentage-of-the-class admission plans for not always matching a minority’s representation in a university with that of its share in society at large. But is fairness simply a numbers game? And what if, as in the case of Jews and Asians, some groups are disproportionately represented in universities? Is that unfair?

For a generation, Americans have viewed issues of fairness almost exclusively through the lens of race. But in the more demographically complex post-civil rights era, there is no longer a coherent vision or a collectively held rationale for addressing social inequity.