Kevin Carey's latest post is about affirmative action, and most of it is sensible. I'm unsure if what you'll read here are positions that Carey has previously espoused on this topic, and I'm not going to traipse off on some fishing expedition to find out. Suffice it to say that Carey, who is a good sport for joining our podcast last week (and who has, a little Gadfly told me, even befriended ["friended," as the kids say] Thomas B. Fordham through facebook), is at least this morning on the blog-related up-and-up. But wee problems remain. He writes:
I'm in favor of racial preferences in college admissions as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools and have to live with legacy of historical racism along with discrimination that still exists today. But somehow affirmative action has gotten turned around so that the primary justification is now that it's good for white people. [emphasis mine]
Now, look. Affirmative action hasn't just somehow changed, somehow morphed, into a policy by which privileged whites can expiate past wrongs and rid themselves of guilt. Nor has affirmative action been somehow warped such that now??its justification is to produce on campuses a perceived racial diversity that allows privileged whites to feel, you know, better about things. These are what affirmative action has, in fact, always been about. Carey supports racial preferences "as long as the goal is to help minority students who come from substandard K-12 schools" and who live day-to-day with discrimination--and that's a fine, if arguable, position to take. It is not fine, though, to survey the country's obsession with race in education and be shocked, shocked that the policies we have do little for the station of poor blacks and lots for the esteem of rich whites.