The Chronicle of Higher Education May 31, 2011 Affirmative Action Is About Helping All of Us[cid:image001.gif@01CC1F6C.F232DB50][cid:image002.jpg@01CC1F6C.F232DB50]William Brown for The Chronicle By Elizabeth Anderson It's no secret that race-based affirmative action in higher education faces a crisis of legitimacy. It has been banned in California, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Arizona, and Nebraska. Even as the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of affirmative action in 2003 in Grutter v. Bollinger, the justices expressed an expectation that the policy would soon no longer be needed, practically inviting relitigation. Although the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently upheld affirmative action at the University of Texas-in Abigail Fisher v. State of Texas-the forthcoming appeal may give the conservative Roberts court an opportunity to end it once and for all. One might expect colleges to rise to the challenge of forcefully articulating a clear case for their policies. Instead we find the same tired arguments on the left, and critiques of affirmative action on the right that reflect ignorance of the realities of race in America. We need new arguments for affirmative action. We can find them by resurrecting the ideal of integration from the grave of the civil-rights movement. Colleges defend their policies by vaguely appealing to the educational benefits of diversity, while failing to present a frank discussion of how racial identities matter. That leaves the public wondering how diversity in skin color or ancestry could have any educational relevance. Or are institutions suggesting with their multiculturalist rhetoric that racial diversity is a form of cultural diversity? That raises more questions than it answers. Why, uniquely among "diversity" factors, like having lived abroad or practiced an unusual religion, is racial diversity so important? If the diversity that affirmative-action beneficiaries bring is cultural, why don't colleges prefer to admit students from Africa and Latin America over African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos, given that the former would bring even more cultural diversity to campus than the latter? If race is a proxy for diverse ideas, why not admit students directly on the basis of their ideas? If diversity of ideas is important, why can't course materials represent it just as well? If institutions are free to practice "reverse" racial discrimination in the name of educational goals, why can't institutions practice segregation if they judge that students learn better in more comfortable, racially homogeneous surroundings? Outside the ranks of university administrators, advocates are more attracted to the argument that racial minorities are entitled to compensation for past discrimination. At least that defense has the merit of tying affirmative action to a compelling interest in justice. Moreover, it highlights the weakness of what many observers feel is the strongest objection to affirmative action-that the policy burdens innocent whites. Wherever there is wrongdoing, innocents suffer. The only question is whether the costs of wrongdoing should be concentrated on the victims or shared more widely. That the costs should be shared is the premise of all systems of justice administered by public agencies and financed by general taxation. The real weaknesses of the compensatory defense lie elsewhere. When the injustices to be compensated for are located in the past, the case for compensation fades as those injustices recede from memory. People wonder why affirmative action's beneficiaries don't overcome adversity on their own, as they imagine that previous victims of discrimination, like Jews and Irish-Americans, did. Absent a frank discussion of continuing racial injustices, the image of the undeserving black or Latino beneficiary of affirmative action looms large. The compensatory rationale also represents affirmative action's beneficiaries as passive consumers of a benefit rather than as actively contributing to the educational mission of colleges-and thereby earning their places on their merits. Higher education needs a rationale for affirmative action that fits the weight institutions assign to it, a rationale that clearly explains the contributions racially diverse students (not just their ideas) make to education and thereby represents its beneficiaries as meritorious, and that ties educational goals to urgent requirements of justice rather than to past events or optional educational goals. To forge such a rationale, we need a clear understanding of how profoundly race still structures life in America, especially in the ways it continues to determine access to advantage, and how that affects people's ideas. And we need to tie such an understanding to the fundamental mission of higher education. That requires a shift of focus: from the good that higher education does for the people who receive it, to the good that those who receive it are supposed to do for everyone else. One of the fundamental missions of higher education is to train leaders-an elite who will occupy professional, managerial, and political positions-to effectively serve people from all walks of life. A competent elite needs to be so constituted that it is systematically responsive to the interests and problems of people in all sectors of society, to be disposed to serve those interests, and to be able to respectfully interact with people across all sectors. Most opponents of race-based affirmative action grant that sectors of society are defined in part by class and region. We hear virtually no complaints about affirmative-action preferences for the poor, or about the preferences that public institutions extend to in-state applicants. The point of those preferences is not simply to offer educational benefits to the poor and to the taxpayers who finance state colleges. We rightly accept that the poor bring firsthand knowledge of the challenges of poverty that is vital for elites to know. We rightly grant that states have an interest in training leaders who will serve their residents, and that their colleges should select students whose geographical origins make them more likely to stay in the region-an argument that gains strength the more regions are underserved. Now consider the core reality about race in America today: We live in a profoundly racially segregated society. When I was looking for housing in the Detroit area some years ago, I was struck by the stark racial segregation of neighborhoods. Landlords repeatedly assured me that they were collectively holding the line against black entry into "their" neighborhoods. One showed me a home with a pile of cockroaches in the kitchen. He was confident that a white woman like me would rather live with cockroaches as housemates than with blacks as neighbors. So blacks and whites overwhelmingly grow up in different neighborhoods. Latinos, too, are moderately segregated from blacks and whites. Different regions are delineated by race-black Detroit, white suburbs. Moreover, racially segregated regions differ sharply in the socioeconomic advantages and disadvantages they deliver to their residents. Most Americans know about inner-city ghettos. Opponents of affirmative action imagine that blacks and Latinos, upon attaining a middle-class occupation and income, escape the disadvantages of segregated neighborhoods. In reality, as the sociologists Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton have documented in American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard University Press, 1993), levels of black segregation hardly decline as income rises. That means that blacks are far less able to convert a middle-class education, occupation, and income into socioeconomic advantages for themselves and their children than are whites. In numerous metropolitan areas, middle-class blacks live in neighborhoods with lower housing values than whites, making less than half their income. Thus they suffer from worse city services and schools, and higher poverty, crime, and tax rates than lower-income whites. Massey and his colleagues have shown in The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America's Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton University Press, 2003) that even among the most privileged minority students-those attending an elite university practicing affirmative action-half grew up in segregated or racially mixed neighborhoods, a condition that gave them starkly different experiences than those of their white peers. Those largely middle-class black students, along with their similarly segregated Latino peers, are vastly more likely to have witnessed gunshots, muggings, and other social disorders, and to have known homeless people, prostitutes, and gang members than their white peers. My point is not that because even middle-class blacks and Latinos suffer socioeconomic disadvantages as a result of their race, they are entitled to compensation in the form of affirmative-action preferences. It is that they bring firsthand knowledge of racial conditions that is essential for elites to know if they are to be able to competently serve disadvantaged, racially segregated sectors of society. Growing up in closer contact with disadvantaged people than many whites do, many minority students bring practical competence in establishing rapport and respectful interaction with the less privileged. And, as Miriam Komaromy and colleagues have shown for minority physicians, and Timothy Bates has shown for black business owners, they are far more likely to serve racially segregated, grievously underserved communities, and to employ their residents, than are their white peers. All of that makes a vital contribution to higher education. >From Glenn Loury to Gary Orfield and Xavier de Sousa Briggs, most scholars who study segregation emphasize how it deprives the less advantaged of the knowledge and skills, including social and cultural capital, they need to advance. It is high time to consider how segregation also deprives the more advantaged of knowledge. They are less likely to understand the problems faced by those from whom they are segregated. They are more likely to form stigmatizing stereotypes of the latter, less likely to feel at ease interacting with them, more likely to perpetuate segregation by avoidance. A largely homogeneous elite constituted by those advantaged by racial segregation thus suffers from cognitive deficits. If segregation is a cause of ignorance, incompetence, and unresponsiveness on the part of an elite, then integration is a remedy. The presence in higher education of groups disadvantaged by segregation, and not just their ideas, is needed-not only to foster respectful interaction among groups, but because there is nothing like the presence of members of other groups standing on equal terms with everyone else to inspire a vivid sense of accountability in those others. An integrated elite is a smarter, more responsible elite. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor understood that when she wrote in Grutter v. Bollinger, "Effective participation by members of all racial and ethnic groups in the civic life of our Nation is essential if the dream of one Nation, indivisible, is to be realized." Let's not kid ourselves. We live in a nation deeply divided by race. Integration is needed to create "one Nation, indivisible." Elizabeth Anderson is a professor of philosophy and women's studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her most recent book, The Imperative of Integration, was published last year by Princeton University Press. SANDRA M. 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