Backfire: A Reporter's Look at Affirmative Action

by Bob Zelnick

"Make no mistake, this is going to be a controversial book. Bob Zelnick, a first–class journalist who is also a lawyer, has looked beyond the successes and well-meaning goals of affirmative action and found a bureaucratic morass that seems to have been designed by Kafka and implemented by Lewis Carroll. If our goals are fairness and racial harmony, we are obliged to address and answer the questions Zelnick raises."

— Ted Koppel , ABC News

415 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1996

Reviews

[Steven H · Rating 3 out of 5]

A SHARP REJECTION OF AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PROGRAMS

Bob Zelnick is a former ABC News Correspondent; more recently, he is a Professor of Journalism at the Boston University College of Communication. He received two Emmy Awards for his Moscow and Pentagon reporting.

In the first chapter of this 1996 book, he summarized, “*Affirmative action is the practice of racial discrimination against whites of other nonfavored ethnic groups. *It favors the less qualified over the more qualified. *It is a systematic attack upon objective merit selection criteria. *… increasing black enrollment at selective universities … had brought few employment, educational, or income benefits to those most in need of help, and has distracted attention from the real causes of misery among inner-city blacks.*… it has proven impervious to overwhelming evidence that it is counterproductive. *It…. Panders to the darker instincts of racial animosity. *It has been broadened for political purposes to include beneficiaries who lack the historical claim of blacks for relief. *It has shown a marked lack of success in other societies.” (Pg. 18)

He asserts, “The dirty little secret is that affirmative action doesn’t work. It is not a secret to those who study such matters for a living. Virtually every objective study, from academe, government, or professional sources, reaches the same conclusion: for all the fuss over affirmative action, the enormous impositions of government power, and the anger generated, the benefits to black workers are marginal at best. Affirmative action—i.e., efforts to require the minorities be hired in numbers approximating their ‘availability’ the relevant labor force---have virtually no effect on black unemployment of wage rate. In the larger scheme of things, this suggests that the effect on employment may even be negative. After all, this costly, intrusive effort has drained billions of dollars from the corporate sector over the years, money which otherwise might have gone toward such job-creating activities as research, capital formation, marketing, product improvement, and expanded plant capacity.” (Pg. 23-24)

He notes, “Experts differ on the contribution proportional representation of minorities on police forces could make to fighting crime and making inner cities safer. The weight of opinion is that as long as there are enough minority police to serve as ambassadors to the minority communities and to work as undercover agents, training, experience, intelligence, integrity, and good judgment are far more important than skin pigmentation.” (Pg. 117-118)

He acknowledges, “the boozing WASP frat boys of our grandfathers’ generation lost something when their Ivy League schools limited Jewish enrollment to 2 percent---by any objective standard, many times that number should have been… admitted---and those who matriculated in the 1950s and early 1960s would have had a more rounded college experience had they more blacks and Hispanics as classmates… And one could argue that study at the nation’s premier institutions of higher learning is o enriching that it would be good were it to permeate, if only by osmosis, all strata of our society.” (Pg. 157)

After noting the low graduation rates at Historically Black Institutions [HBI], he suggests, “The reason for the abysmal matriculation rates is that the admissions standards at HBIs are so low that few candidates are screened out even if the prospects are dim that they will ever perform college level work satisfactorily.” (Pg. 207)

He argues, “a bank applying traditional race-neutral criteria to loan applicants may say ‘no’ to a black relatively more often than to a white although both may have equal incomes and seek to purchase homes of approximately the same value because there is a CORRELATION between race and various factors that address the question of creditworthiness. But correlation is not CAUSATION…” (Pg. 329-330)

This book will appeal to some looking for critiques of Affirmative Action programs.

[John Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The notion that all citizens are entitled to equal standing under the law is one of the principal tenets of American law. The principle of equal protection was recognized in the Declaration of Independence, wherein Jefferson declared it self-evident that all men were created equal, and given Constitutional status when the Fourteenth Amendment with its Equal Protection Clause was passed in 1865.

Equally consistently, powerful forces have sought to deny this principle of equality. Earlier in the nation's history, this denial was not surprising. Prior to 1776, either chattel slavery or something very close existed almost everywhere in the world, and had existed for thousands of years. Jefferson's stirring words in the Declaration of Independence marked a profound break with previous world history, and it took time for this break to become solidified.

Thus, in this country, slavery remained legal in those states which chose to authorize it. Even after the nation fought a bloody civil war which was triggered primarily by the South's desire to continue its "peculiar institution" of slavery and the North's desire to end it, equality under the law was not achieved. Segregation remained common in many cities and institutions, and a comprehensive system of Jim Crow laws arose in the South.

Over time, this system of legalized discrimination gradually broke down. Employers gradually began to hire qualified black employees. (As Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker showed, there is a cost to every act of discrimination, whether it be overlooking the best-qualified person because he or she is the "wrong" race or granting special preferences such as higher pay to those of the "right" race. As a result, the free market is very hostile to those who would discriminate.) Important institutions such as the United States Military desegregated. The economic and social standing of black Americans gradually improved through 1960, and in 1964 a comprehensive civil rights act outlawing most forms of racial discrimination took effect.

At that point, the fight against legalized racial discrimination essentially had been won. Those who would discriminate had no remaining legal refuge, and it was only a matter of time before any remaining discrimination was eliminated. (Mr. Zelnick, the author of the book being reviewed, states that the socioeconomic well-being of blacks continued to improve for about a decade as residual discrimination was eliminated.) Indeed, it had become politically unacceptable even to argue against equal protection under the law regardless of race.

At this crucial point in history, the political left fractured. Throughout the 1960s, Radical leftists of all stripes had attacked the Democratic Party and liberals in general for being insufficiently revolutionary, and after the 1968 Democratic Convention was engulfed in chaos liberals more or less surrendered to their illiberal colleagues. (The old joke that a liberal is congenitally unable to take his own side in an argument carries a large dose of truth.)

One result was that the Left reversed its position on equal protection. Whereas the Left previously had sought an end to racial discrimination, it now demanded racial quotas, preferences, an end to objective standards of merit, and the like. Whereas the Left previously had championed free inquiry on university campuses and robust debate on public issues, it now demanded that all non-radicals bow down in shame before its demands, with no dissent being acceptable. Leftists continued to couch their demands in the language of equality - the victory of the principle of equal protection under the law was too complete to be openly opposed. The substance of the new left-wing politics, however, amounted to a u-turn away from increasing equality under the law - the first time that had happened in centuries, and, indeed, perhaps millenia.

In this book, Bob Zelnick, a reporter and lawyer, examines the state of "affirmative action" as it existed in the mid-1990s. Although over twenty years have passed since the book was published, one of the depressing things about the political left's culture war on America is that nothing ever really changes, so Mr. Zelnick's insights remain as valid today as when they were written.

Zelnick notes that the strategy of "affirmative action" advocates tends to follow the same pattern, over and over:

* Fly a false flag. Advocates of "affirmative action" quotas and preferences usually begin by insisting what they want is equal treatment under the law, even they actually are demanding the precise opposite.

* Lie. Advocates of "affirmative action" generally concede that discrimination and quotas are reprehensible and claim they never would support such programs, even though they actually do precisely that. "White" lies also are common, such when a person claims he or she never would support racial quotas, but seeks to implement a program that is substantively identical to a quota.

*Obfuscate. As many of the people interviewed by Zelnick note, the czars of "affirmative action" often try to hide the discrimination they are perpetrating by making the program as complicated and opaque as possible. The result is a bureaucratic morass worthy of dystopian science fiction.

Of course, "affirmative action" most commonly is justified as a means of lifting poor blacks out of poverty. Mr. Zelnick describes many of the means - quotas, preferences, an end to ability testing, and on and on - used to implement these programs. Yet, as he accurately states, the socioeconomic standing of blacks vis-a-vis other Americans has not risen since "affirmative action" became entrenched in the 1970s. The reason seems clear: actual, identifiable discrimination against blacks had been almost entirely eliminated by that time, making "affirmative action" a remedy in search of a problem. Instead, "affirmative action" has become an entitlement for privileged blacks who already are relatively well off and well-positioned to exploit set-asides in government contracts and preferences in college admissions, while doing little or nothing for the poor blacks whom these policies allegedly are intended to benefit.

Mr. Zelnick also devotes chapters to several newer aspects to the problem which were becoming prominent when the book was published, for example, racial gerrymandering, "affirmative action" privileges granted to immigrants who never had suffered any discrimination and in most case had come to America because it offered them a better deal than their home countries, and the Clinton Administration's efforts to bludgeon banks and insurance companies into issuing mortgages and writing policies by racial quota, without regard to normal underwriting criteria such as income, credit ratings, and risk. It is worth noting that these heavy-handed government policies contributed to the accumulation of non-performing mortgages, which reached critical mass and came close to causing the entire banking system to melt down in 2007 - 2009. Meanwhile, blacks who had been lured into buying larger homes than they could afford were left with no homes and cratered credit scores.

All these issues and more are discussed in Mr. Zelnick's book. The depressing thing is how little circumstances have changed since the book was published in 1996. The Emperor wears no clothes, but too few people in power are willing to acknowledge the obvious: there is a better way, and that better way is to return to the principle of equal protection under the law recognized in the Declaration of Independence, enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and slowly brought into common practice before the crack-up of the late 1960s.

[Tucker]

Right off the bat, this book defines “affirmative action” as the explicit policy of preferentially awarding job opportunities to applicants based on their race even if applicants in other racial categories meet higher benchmarks on other “objective” qualification tests, when that decision is intended deliberately as “reverse discrimination” submitted in partial rectification of collective past discrimination.

Zelnick distinguishes workplace discrimination (not clearly defined, but having something to do with explicit prejudices of individual white people) from the effects on non-white people of their own “education, scores on achievement tests, family structure, drug use, involvement with the criminal justice system, the attempt by many able women to accommodate both home and career, and language facility.” He sees affirmative action as an attempt to address only the former situation which he believes to be rare in the United States as of the 1990s and not any of the latter conditions which he says are more significant social influences. He thinks affirmative action increases racial tension and “corrupts the values it purports to serve.”

There is a lot to argue with here. If one wanted to get into details, one might question whether any particular entrance examination is relevant or objective and why it was ever instituted in the first place. More substantially, taking a giant step back to survey the landscape of this thesis, there is a need to examine the assumption that all “discrimination” is properly understood as one-off actions that are the effluence of individual white people with some consciousness and intent behind their racism — and that if white people are not aware of their racism then it doesn’t exist — while all other social conditions and behavior trends of non-white people bear no relationship to anything one might reasonably call discrimination or racism but is something that just happens because those people choose to do those things and be that way for whatever reason that has nothing to do with white people's behavior or with any system that white people have control over. Today, anyway, it is common to refer to racism of a systemic or institutional kind. Much is written on that subject and would help explain the connection.

This was published in 1996. I bought a used copy in 2003 because I had an intended purpose for it at that time, but I never opened it until 2017. I only got through the first 50 of nearly 400 pages (and therefore, out of fairness, as I don’t want to rate a book I haven’t read completely, I choose not to leave a starred rating on Goodreads but rather only this verbal comment). I was hoping for more philosophical examination but this appears to be entirely devoted to statistics and anecdotes that will buttress the author’s claim that affirmative action is unfair and failing to meet its own stated goals. It’s broken into chapters about different kinds of affirmative action. I’d be open to reading and learning from the data, except that the opening philosophical assumptions are so bothersomely flawed that I cannot find the time and energy to begin unpacking and repacking everything. If you do not like the philosophical assumptions described above, this book will hold little for you. You will have to do a lot of work to identify and unpack the underlying assumptions because that’s not the level of discussion to which this book devotes itself. I tried to skip ahead to the book’s conclusion to see how everything is resolved but it appears there is no concluding chapter.