What does a successful multiracial society look like? Is acute consciousness of race the ideal? Or is the ideal one that strives for colour-blindness?
The U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to strike down or, at the very least, sharply curtail the long-standing use of race-based affirmative action in American higher education. The decision will land almost exactly one year after the court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that created a constitutional right to abortion.
By eviscerating Roe, a mostly Republican-appointed court achieved a long-standing Republican goal – and provoked voter backlash against Republicans. It lit a fire under Democrats, while leading to measures, including in Republican-run states, to ensure continued access to abortion.
Could the affirmative-action decision, with a conservative-majority court likely driving a stake through yet another cherished progressive cause, have the same impact?
Don’t bet on it. Most Americans favour some degree of access to abortion. Views on affirmative action – known in Canada as employment equity – are considerably more ambivalent.
On abortion, Republican voters are more liberal than their leaders. Look at Kansas. It has a huge Republican majority in its state legislature, and in 2020 its voters favoured Donald Trump by 15 points. But last summer, by an 18-point margin, they voted down a state constitutional amendment that would have given their legislature the power to make abortion illegal. Something similar happened in reliably Republican Kentucky and Montana.
Democrats may be in for a comparable shock when it comes to the level of popular support for affirmative action. It would not be the first time.
In 1996, Californians voted 55 per cent in favour of Proposition 209. It forbids the state government from considering race (or sex) in public employment, contracting and education. As such, it banned public universities from giving any degree of preferential admission based on race.
A few years later, California became a majority minority state – a place where there is no racial majority. It has become more so with each passing year. What other places are majority minority? Toronto. Vancouver. And, within a few years, all of Canada’s big cities.
According to the most recent U.S. census estimate, 40.3 per cent of Californians identify as Hispanic or Latino, 34.7 per cent are non-Hispanic whites, 16.3 per cent are Asian, 6.5 per cent are Black and 4.3 per cent are two or more races.
As California’s voters became more diverse, they also became more Democratic. Ronald Reagan won the state handily on his way to the White House; in this century, Republican presidential candidates barely even campaign there. President Joe Biden won the state with a whopping 30-point lead over Mr. Trump, and Democrats control 78 per cent of the state legislature’s seats.
And yet in 2020, when California’s multiracial, Democratic electorate was asked to overturn Proposition 209, they said no. The state’s cultural, business and academic elite supported ditching Prop 209, as did the Democratic Party. Backers outspent opponents by 19 to 1. Yet 57 per cent of Californians voted to keep the status quo, under which college admission based even partly on race – the subject of the cases the Supreme Court is about to decide – is against California law.
A recent analysis of that vote by The New York Times is a healthy reminder that lumping everyone who isn’t white into a single category of “minority” or “racialized,” and assuming they see themselves and vote that way, is a huge mistake.
White Californians were split on race-based affirmative action, with a slim majority voting against. Hispanics were in favour by a slim majority. Asian-Americans were overwhelmingly opposed. Black Americans were the only group strongly supportive, with 78-per-cent backing. But for every ethnicity, the share of those backing affirmative action was miles below the percentage who voted Democrat.
Just like Republicans on abortion, the Democratic Party is more popular than one of its favourite policies.
Universities outside of California have been fighting to continue using race as a factor in admissions. A big part of the pushback, in the courtroom and out, has come from Asian-American students. Where admission is almost solely determined by academic performance, Asian-Americans have, in recent years, tended to be overrepresented. The evidence suggests that Harvard, one of the defendants in the cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, would have admitted more Asians had it not been attempting to achieve a racially representative student body.
California’s public universities do, however, offer preferential admission in one respect – based on class, not race. They can’t give a leg up in admissions to, say, Will Smith’s kids, but they can for a kid from a poor family. Preferential admission on the basis of immutable characteristics such as race is not allowed, but considering a changeable circumstance such as poverty is.
The result is that, though Hispanic and Black enrolment in the University of California system dropped after 1996, it has since grown. Hispanics are still underrepresented – as are whites – but they’re well represented in the less-competitive California State University System.
California has long been on the bleeding edge of the future, in business, tech, culture – and in trying to figure out how to live together in an increasingly diverse society. Maybe they’re on to something.