The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (16 page)

Cohen:
Most certainly not. These students—I happen to know them—are not claiming that they have a right to enter the University of Michigan. What they’re claiming very clearly is they have a right to have their credentials viewed in a race-neutral system. They have a right not to have the color of their skin counted against them.

Moderator:
Let’s bring our audience now into the debate.

Question:
My question is for Professor Cohen. If you believe that race should be eliminated as a specific preference in college admissions, do you
also
believe that race affected factors like legacy students, or geography even, should also be somehow altered to reflect the race-neutral idea that you seem to be advocating? Is that something that you would also support?

Cohen:
I would support the elimination of these other preferences. But you really have to see that they are quite a different kettle of fish from race, because race has a role—the Constitution speaks to race in a way it doesn’t speak to legacies, it doesn’t speak to athletics or to playing music. But I happen to believe, in fact, that the legacy is a bad sort of preference, and I think we probably ought to eliminate it. But it’s not something which is constitutionally required.

Question:
In view of the fact that I feel as though we are still suffering the consequences of the African Holocaust, which was called slavery, which lasted for over 300 and some odd years, how is it that you could have affirmative action for such a short period of time and feel as though it has solved everything? And quite often there are situations where there is not a painless solution, where some people might be inconvenienced. But when you look at the greater majority of the people that were inconvenienced strictly on race, how is it all of a sudden race should not matter?

Moderator:
Carl, I think that’s for you.

Cohen:
No one will deny that there has been a long history of racial oppression in our country. The issue before the Supreme Court is the use of race preferences for admission in universities. And even the University of Michigan does not argue that those preferences can compensate for the long history of oppression. The only issue before the Court is whether the diversity of the class can justify special preference by race.

Dyson:
If you look at the rhetorical legerdemain deployed by Professor Cohen—who continues to talk about racial preferences,
not
in regard to white supremacy, or racial preferences to white men—what’s interesting [is that] he avoids your question by engaging in what they call in philosophy a logical fallacy. He refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of your claim by suggesting that what’s before the Court is only a narrow consideration. That he’s absolutely right about. But what’s interesting is that in the broader picture of justice in America, of course . . . the legitimacy of talking about the African Holocaust, or the incredible discrimination that was suffered by African-American people, is already ruled out. I too will focus my comments upon diversity, which for me, is a compelling interest. But let it be noted that the broader picture cannot be talked about, simply because those who dominate the conversation are the very people who have historically been responsible for putting us in the position we are in, in the first place.

Question:
Given that one of the goals of affirmative action is supposedly to bring disadvantaged students access to higher education, I wonder if you both could comment on the argument that the policies wrongly focus on race when they should actually be focusing on class, for example.

Dyson:
What’s amazing to me is that many Americans who have been selfconfessed conservatives, even, become Marxist when it comes to race. All of a sudden the incredible outpouring for poor white people—I’ve never seen it [before]. The incredible upsurge of, “Oh, we’re concerned about the poor.” [Yet we] devastate them every day; refuse to reinforce their communities with economic policies that can uplift them. But when it comes to race, all of a sudden there’s a historic legacy of pitting poor whites, and working-class whites, against poor blacks and working-class blacks. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

Cohen:
Whether we should give preference on the basis of socioeconomic disadvantage as the question asked, is an important question. Certainly there is no constitutional objection in doing so. There is a constitutional objection to giving preference on the basis of race.

Moderator:
Carl, let me ask you this: Even if this is not the question of the past, and the question of, let’s say, slavery, cannot be an argument before the Supreme Court, on some level, isn’t that still the point? Blacks and whites don’t yet have a level playing field. Affirmative action in higher education might not be the first or best place to close the gap. But isn’t it in some way the last chance for justice?

Cohen:
In the first place, those who get advantage from preference in admission to universities are not those who have been damaged by the tradition of history. The advantage goes to the wrong people. And those who have been damaged never get to apply to the law school at the University of Michigan, so that the instruments do not address the issue of injury in the first place. And the second reason is that these programs are instituted by universities, and universities are not competent, they have not the authority, to decide who has been hurt, and who shall be remedied. I mean, Justice Powell in the
Bakke
decision made it clear that you can only award compensation after a court or a legislature has made a finding that there has been a constitutional injury, and universities are not in a position to do that. The University of Michigan understands all of this very well, and therefore does not make the compensatory argument at all.

Moderator:
Let me ask Michael a question also. If diversity is critical to a college education, how much diversity is optimal? When you say diverse, don’t you really just mean black? For example, why shouldn’t a Vietnamese-American applicant be given the same number of points as an African-American or Latino?

Dyson:
Well, first of all, I believe in a diversity of diversities. I believe in a cosmopolitan view of complex integration. But secondly, all diversities
are not equal. Vietnamese people, who have certainly been subject to historical forces of oppression, have not in this country been slaves, seen as three-fifths human, [and] used as chattel to reproduce the mechanisms of capitalism, and furthermore, to underwrite the very leisure to engage in white supremacist thinking that slavery provided.

Question:
When I think of getting rid of affirmative action, it’s not that colleges shouldn’t be able to decide who they want and who they don’t want. If the college wants more black people, then they accept more black people. They already do that. They shouldn’t get an automatic point that makes it a rule that the college has to follow. It’s not up to the college anymore.

Dyson:
Sure. When we talk about points, you say automatic. It’s not automatic. This is something that has been historically fought over for a long time. The University of Michigan case has used a system of granting points along a continuum, and that’s the point I’m trying to reinforce here, that race is but one consideration. If I saw white Americans who were equally outraged at the fact that we have a president who himself has been the recipient of legacy, geographical distribution—with patent mediocrity, and yet is the president of the United States—if we had the ability to acknowledge that . . . and go equally as aggressively after that unfair distribution of a social good like an education and an admission slot, I would say I would be much more willing to listen to the argument [against considering race]. Unfortunately, for many of our white brothers and sisters, they are not equally aggressive in pursuing litigation against those who have been treated to unfair advantages that only reproduce their already unfair advantage.

Moderator:
Carl, Michael, what do you think about economic figures [cited by Ted Cross of the
Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
, who argues that for the last forty years, the median income of black families has been 60 percent of whites, but that when blacks hold a college diploma, their income is 90 percent of whites, so that college is the engine of racial equality in the country]? How would you comment, Carl, on what Ted said?

Cohen:
We have a fundamental social and economic problem, of course. And we’re going to change that only when we transform the education of minorities in the public schools. We’re not going to change that by putting a thumb on the scale, as you put it, in admission to a University of Michigan or similar universities. That’s just a Band-Aid which is not going to do any real good at all. And, in fact, is going to create hostility and division within the universities, and more tension for the minorities than would otherwise be the case.

Moderator:
Michael.

Dyson:
Well, I think what those statistics reveal—and they have been derived from Oliver and Shapiro’s study of the difference between black wealth
and white wealth—reinforces the perception that affirmative action is part of a larger piece of the pie here. When black students get an education, they’re still making only 90 percent of what whites are making. What that statistic didn’t tell you is that sometimes college-educated black people still make less than what white people who have only gone to high school and graduated make. So what it suggests to me, however, is that equaling the playing field by a compelling interest in diversity is not only good for diversity as an inherent educational good; it’s also good for redressing the historic legacy of inequality in the society at large. And if we can get two birds with one stone like that, what an amazing thing to do.

Question:
During slavery, a system of classification was begun that established that one drop of black blood rendered one black, and so I want to sort of explore the ambiguity of the racial categories that affirmative action sort of enforces. And I was wondering how black or Latino one must be to garner the benefits of affirmative action.

Cohen:
It is in fact a dreadful consequence of systems of preference by race that the public institution is placed under the burden of deciding who
is
a member of the minority being preferred. And indeed,
what
minorities ought to be preferred, and whether they are to be preferred in equal degree. How much to each? And how many drops of blood make one a member of this or that race? That is the ugly and disgusting quality of divisions by race that has permeated our society lo these many generations, and that is what we must transcend. No longer attending to whether your grandfather or your great-grandfather, or your great-great grandfather was black or Hispanic or whatever, or Hispanic from Spain, or Hispanic from Argentina, or Hispanic from Mexico. It’s crazy to draw distinctions of that sort in a country of this sort and allow them to weigh in admission to universities.

Question:
Paul Dickler. I teach at University of Pennsylvania and Nashaminy High School. Professor Cohen, you seem to be opposing the Michigan plan because you see it as a quota plan. You have indicated before that you do approve of some affirmative action plans. I’d like our two speakers to give an example of an affirmative action plan that they both agree with, whether it’s the state of Texas plan or some other.

Cohen:
Well, that’s easy. There are many affirmative action plans that I have supported from the outset. Affirmative action is concrete steps taken to eliminate discrimination. When President Johnson and his executive order insisted upon affirmative action for federal contracts, he insisted that the contractors say that they will not discriminate by race, to eliminate residual discrimination. So, for example, [the nation was encouraged to begin] eliminating examinations which are inappropriately biased. Or eliminating old boy networks, which inappropriately keep people out, or engaging in all sorts of activities, which under the table discriminate by
race. Such elimination is affirmative action, honorable and right. What affirmative action is not, is deliberately using race. Affirmative action was originally intended to eliminate the vestigial uses of race, the remnants of race, and that honorable spirit I supported from the outset.

Dyson:
Martin Luther King Jr. said, if the nation has done something special
against
the Negro for 200 some odd years, the nation must now do something special
for
the Negro. And I think . . . affirmative action . . . was to address both the vestigial remnants of racial oppression, but also to address concrete examples of
present
forms of racial discrimination, to prevent them from poisoning the pool of resources from which minorities could draw now in order to represent more equality in the country.

Moderator:
What do you both think about programs like in Texas and Florida that essentially take a percentage of the top students in high schools, and therefore try to get a balance that way?

Dyson:
Well, I think that on the face of them,
prima facia
evidence suggests that that’s an interesting [approach]. It may be a
supplement
to affirmative action programs, but not a
substitute
for [them]. There’s a kind of resegregation afoot in this country, and I think what we’re not addressing here is that the re-segregation of black and brown students in poor schools that don’t have equal resources only reproduces the very thing he’s worried about—that is, students who are not competent or capable of competing or performing in our broader educational system. So I agree with him in this sense, that we must not simply start at the higher educational level, we must begin at K–12 to fix the system. But, again, it’s a both/and, not an either/or.