By Mona Charen
Monday, December 14, 2015
There are few more repugnant spectacles among the liberal
elites of this country than the festivals of smugness that follow any comment
by a conservative public figure that can be twisted into a racial slight.
This week it is Justice Antonin Scalia’s turn. In an oral
argument over affirmative action, Scalia said:
There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans
to — to get them in the University of Texas where they do not do well, as
opposed to having them go to a less advanced school, a less — a slower-track
school where they do well.
Sure, maybe Scalia should have said “some”
African-American students, but frankly, he shouldn’t have to. After a career in
public life, he doesn’t need to prove his bona fides to anyone. Everyone is, in
effect, on notice that this brilliant jurist is the farthest thing from a
racist.
But you know how this game works. A conservative says
something that can be misinterpreted, and the self-righteous, bad-faith
denunciations pour out like sewage in a flood. On the set of Meet the Press, Ted Koppel compared
Scalia to the hapless Al Campanis, and said:
I was thinking both of them have the same problem, it’s generational. He
really doesn’t think he is saying anything untoward. This is the kind of thing
that someone of Antonin Scalia’s generation has been saying all his life. Al
Campanis did the same thing. But the key thing is being a Supreme Court Justice
means never having to say you’re sorry.
The rest of the crew on Meet the Press chimed in with similar head shaking and invocations
of bad popular fiction. Now, leaving Mr. Campanis aside (I have my doubts that
he was a racist either; he got caught up in one of America’s fits of righteous
indignation), who does Koppel think he is? First of all, he’s almost exactly
four years younger than Scalia, so spare us the generational snobbery. Second,
he (like the other panelists) is clearly unfamiliar with the argument Scalia
was referencing. Molly Ball of The
Atlantic, Jerry Seib of the Wall
Street Journal, Helene Cooper of the New
York Times, and of course, Chuck Todd himself then regretted that Scalia
can “get away with it” and noted that this explains why Scalia opposes cameras
in the Supreme Court.
Who pays these people for their commentary? This is
risible. Supreme Court oral arguments are fully available to the public in
print and audio form. Is Scalia trying to hide his racism by having it only
unavailable on video? Quite a strategy.
The usual people issued denunciations and everyone had a
good “two minutes hate” as George Orwell might have put it.
But Scalia has nothing for which to apologize (though his
critics do). He was referring to a perfectly plausible theory about the effects
of affirmative action. He was not saying that all African-American students are
slower than others, merely that the widespread practice of accepting black
students into colleges with much worse grades and scores than the majority of
students has certain unfortunate effects. As Stuart Taylor Jr. and Richard H.
Sander explain in their book, Mismatch,
there is a good deal of evidence (and more has been produced since the book’s
publication) that black students who “benefit” from affirmative action in
admission and thus attend schools for which they are less prepared than their
peers, are less likely to major in difficult but remunerative subjects like
engineering and science, more likely to wind up in the bottom 10th of the
student body, and, most important, less likely to graduate than their peers.
What the Mismatch
authors and others have described as the “cascade effect” means that at every
level of college except for the very top, black students are more likely to
attend colleges for which they are unprepared and thus, many are set up to
fail. That might be important, right Ted Koppel?
One of the most telling statistics that is rarely
mentioned in this debate comes from California, where Proposition 209 banned
racial preferences by law in 1996. Advocates of affirmative action note that
minority enrollments dropped thereafter. Yes, but graduation rates increased.
Perhaps the mismatch theory is wrong. Perhaps the
benefits of attending more prestigious schools than you are prepared for
outweigh the disadvantages (though this leaves unaddressed the constitutional
problem of discriminating by race at all). But surely this is a worthy debate
for people of good will to have.
If we had people of good will.
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