Who Cares about Racial Inequality?

I have been known over the years as a critic of affirmative action policies. However, in the wake of a successful ballot initiative banning affirmative action in the state of California, I now find it necessary to reiterate the old, and in my view still valid, arguments on behalf of explicit public efforts to reduce racial inequality. In doing so, I want to stress that I am not defending racial quotas, or race-based allocations of public contracts, or racial double standards in the workplace, or huge disparities in the test scores of blacks and whites admitted to elite universities. These practices are deservedly under attack. But, I do defend the U.S. Army’s programs to commission more black officers, the public funding of efforts to bring blacks into science and engineering, the attempts by urban law enforcement agencies to recruit black personnel, and the goal of top universities—public and private—to retain some racial diversity in their student bodies. The mere fact that these efforts take race into account, I will argue here, should not be disqualifying.