As a Black professional, over the years, I have been called on to give an "opinion" on Affirmative Action.
I have heard comments like: "It just Black racism","Don't we want to hire the best?","They don't deserve to go to Harvard", or "it only helps middle class Blacks"
So, I have developed two common arguments to support affirmative action. You cannot really change anyone's minds, but you can ask them to understand someone else's position. That's the best you can hope for.
So I usually start with "I am not asking you to accept affirmative action, just understand why other people might support it."
The best counters against the idea of perfectly determined "merit" are two following arguments:
1. What sort of society do we want to live in?
2. What is "merit" and who gets to decide?
Appiah argues that you cannot value one persons life over another. Society should provide the opportunity to flourish and lead a happy life to everyone including those who are not as successful in the "merit" game. His main ideas are: We should respect each others life choices and we should be expanding the pie of opportunity, not fighting over scraps
Mystal argues our definition of merit is wrong and favors the existing, educated classes not the people who most need the opportunity.
Read further for a deeper discussion
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1. What sort of society do we want to live in?
Kwame Anthony Appiah in the Guardian believes our current definitions of merit are damaging society. Merit is creating classes and cementing inequality the same way money, education, networks and power did in the previous century. Instead we want to create a society that values everyone including people who do not perform well on the merit "test".
He wants people to live their happiness lives, achieve their full potential and flourish. People should have the full opportunity to compete on merit and no stigma when they fail.
He also discusses how merit removes responsibility to help other and becomes self justifying.
Another great quote from the article: "Still, a significant portion of what we call the American white working class has been persuaded that, in some sense, they do not deserve the opportunities that have been denied to them."
"we also need to apply ourselves to something we do not yet quite know how to do: to eradicate contempt for those who are disfavoured by the ethic of effortful competition."
"We cannot fully control the distribution of economic, social and human capital, or eradicate the intricate patterns that emerge from these overlaid grids. But class identities do not have to internalise those injuries of class. It remains an urgent collective endeavour to revise the ways we think about human worth in the service of moral equality."
2. What is "merit"? Who decide what is meritorious, what is valuable and how is it calculated.
Elie Mystal writes a great discussion of defining "Merit" in the Above the Law website. How do we define merit and who get's to define it.
Here are some great quotes from the article:
"For the Class of 2022, Harvard received 42,749 applications and admitted 1,962 people or 4.6%."
"No matter what those 4.6 percent, and their parents, want you to think, getting into Harvard or any other top university is not all about “merit” so closely and illogically defined. The 4.6 percent who get in are not objectively “smarter” than the other 40,787 applicants. A school with an overabundance of choice is going to look at any number of factors in order to come up with a first year class. "
"A totally non-comprehensive list of factors could include: quality of high school, improvement over time, leadership opportunities, engagement with your civic or religious community, teacher recommendations, athletic prowess, artistic prowess, personal essay, geographic diversity, international diversity, alumni connections, criminal records, likelihood of matriculation, likelihood of dropping out of Harvard to start your own multi-billion dollar company, and also probably whether your Instagram is covered with Confederate Flags. "
"Perfect test scores are nice… but they are “one factor among many.” One would hope that Harvard would turn down a Brett Kavanaugh type: a kid with sterling academic credentials and a propensity to go to gang rape parties, if they had credible information about the latter."
"No honest person can say that admissions to top universities is solely about academic merit, whether those universities consider an applicant’s race or not. And no decent person would want them to be. If you can not see the “merit” of an applicant with a middling GPA who happens to be a world-class pianist, or the “merit” of an applicant who performed merely decently on a standardized test she prepared for under the hallway light at the homeless shelter, then your definition of “merit” makes you unworthy of admission to the Harvard Extension School, much less the undergraduate college."
