Affirmative action as the "checker-shadow illusion" of racism

I really like the guys who write Burnt Orange Report because they're smart and articulate and passionate.  They're also reflexively liberal, but that's easy to understand and forgive since they're college students at my alma mater, UT-Austin a/k/a Sodom on the Colorado.

I've been pondering Byron L's post expressing his outrage at the bake sale run by a campus conseravtive group at SMU that charged white males $1 per cookie, while females only $0.75, hispanics $0.50, and blacks $0.25.  Bryon's conclusion, in a word:   "Racists."

To which my response is, "Yes, exactly.  That's the whole point.  Doncha get it?"

And what this in turn brought to mind is Edward H. Alderson's wonderful "Checker-Shadow" optical illusion — I'm posting a thumbnail here, but please click the thumbnail to see it full-size to get the full benefit of it.

Block A and Block B are identical.  But how you perceive them depends entirely on context, and unless you work very hard at freeing your mind from the handcuffs of context, you will see them as being different from one another.

Racism and "affirmative action" — as that latter phrase is now used{note1} — are Block A and Block B.  You can be fooled by context into thinking they're not, and once thoroughly fooled, you certainly can honestly believe and righteously argue that they're different. 

But.  They're.  Not.

And when you start making important, life-altering decisions based on the premise that Block A and Block B are different, or that racism and affirmative action are different, you're likely to go astray.  It may be entirely innocent and for the best of motivations.  But the choices you make that are based on that premise are likely to be morally flawed.

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{note1}IIRC, as originally used, "affirmative action" began as a label for the equitable relief ordered by courts as a means of remedying incidents of proven past discrimination that could be pegged to individual plaintiffs, individual defendants, and individual scenarios.  Herman Sweatt, for instance, was refused admittance to Texas Law School in 1946 solely because he was black.  The US Supreme Court ruling that required Texas Law School to admit him was "affirmative action," but he was the personal, individual target of proven past racism on the part of Texas Law School. 

I am just old enough that one of my law school professors in 1977-1978, the late Jerre Williams (later a judge on the Fifth Circuit), was one of the Texas Law School professors who'd been ordered to split his time between Townes Hall on the UT campus and a downtown Austin location in order to teach Herman Sweatt and a few other blacks at the newly established "law school for Negroes" in the late 1940s.  Professor Williams' opinion was that because of the student-faculty ratio, students at the new school quite arguably got a better than equal education to that they'd have received at Texas Law School, but of course, there was no comparison between the prestige that would attach to their degrees regardless of who taught them and what they'd learned.  Indeed, that was the basis for the US Supreme Court's decision that there was no way that "separate" could be "equal" as a practical matter:

In terms of number of the faculty, variety of courses and opportunity for specialization, size of the student body, scope of the library, availability of law review and similar activities, the University of Texas Law School is superior. What is more important, the University of Texas Law School possesses to a far greater degree those qualities which are incapable of objective measurement but which make for greatness in a law school. Such qualities, to name but a few, include reputation of the faculty, experience of the administration, position and influence of the alumni, standing in the community, traditions and prestige. It is difficult to believe that one who had a free choice between these law schools would consider the question close.

And this decision was of course the last small step before the great leap, the conclusion that there was no way "separate" could be "equal" as a conceptual matter either — hence Brown v. Board of Education and the modern-day civil rights movement.

Fast-forward fifty-three years — a full half-century, and nearly three generations.  In this past year's Grutter v. Bollinger affirmative action case from Michigan Law School, by contrast, the "affirmative action" being upheld benefited individuals who are conclusively presumed by virtue of their race to need and deserve extra help from an institution with no history of racist discrimination against them or anyone else of their race.  The black graduate of Harvard College whose parents are PhD's with earnings in the top one percent of Americans is given automatic and very possibly conclusive preference that is denied to, for example, the daughter of Vietnamese refuges whose University of Houston night-school diploma was earned while working three part-time jobs.  I have no objection to genuinely remedial "affirmative action" as ordered in Sweatt v. Painter, but cannot justify "affirmative action" as practiced at Michigan Law School and approved in Grutter as being anything but racism.