Why Affirmative Action is an inevitable disaster
Affirmative Action (AA) started out as a well-intentioned effort to increase the representation of black, then other minorities and women, at the higher levels of the American educational system. Well-intentioned, but ill-founded because it was based on the article of faith that the only reason there were fewer blacks in colleges, universities, and professional schools is the legacy of racism and discrimination.
Initially AA was defined as making every effort to find qualified minority members. The search was expanded to include even the “potentially qualified,” but when that failed, the program transmogrified into one of “goals and timetables” — a euphemism for quotas based on race, etc. This is the antithesis of the supposed objective of the Civil Rights movement, namely judging on “the content of character.”
Well, AA could have benefited from some advice from the other AA — Alcoholics Anonymous, one of whose admonitions to family members of recidivist abusers is “you didn’t make ’em that way, you can’t fix ’em.”While fair-minded commentators and the public at large have had their fill of reverse discrimination, ethnic activists continue to make every effort to enforce more and more AA until some critical mass of minorities inhabits every desirable sector of American society.
In California, citizens led by former University of California Regent Ward Connerly (who happens to be African American) passed Proposition 209, which banned “preferential treatment” of race, sex or ethnicity in admissions to California’s public universities. The box score: by fall 2006, only 250 of the 12,189 students admitted to UCLA’s freshman class were African American, roughly 2%. This is the lowest number since at least 1973 — results that could have been predicted right out of the tables and graphs in The Bell Curve.
The Bell Curve, the outstanding tome by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, shows that African Americans have a mean IQ of 85, one whole standard deviation below the white mean of 100. Even more disconcerting to AA advocates is that Richard Lynn has summarized findings that sub-Saharan Africans have a mean closer to 70.
And the devil in the bell curve is not only in the details but in the tails of the curve. The normal or bell curve describes continuous biological variation that is the result of many genes. The classic case is height, but IQ is almost the same: Most individuals fall at the middle or closely around it. The further one goes either up or down from the average, the fewer the number of individuals. The further out one goes, the greater the effect.
And this applies with a vengeance when two groups differ in their average score. The further out you go in either direction — up or down, good or bad — the greater the differences between the groups. What this means in terms of education is that as one goes from high school to junior college to college to graduate/professional school, the percentage of qualified Blacks goes steadily and increasingly down. And the ratio of qualified whites to qualified blacks goes up dramatically.
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.com/articles/NewsCommentary-BellCurve.html#BellCurve