The Telling Omissions of the NYT's Bad Argument for Continuing Race-Based Admissions

What they don't say is at least as revealing as what they do.

Three days ago, Paul wrote a devastating critique of the New York Times’ attack on the Court’s opinion holding that the Equal Protection Clause actually means equal protection, even if you’re not black. I harbor no hope of improving on Paul’s take-down of what the Times said in its editorial. Instead, I’d like to focus on what the Times didn’t say. I do this because, as I discovered in my career as a litigator, your opponent’s weakest points are the ones he just walks past, hoping you won’t notice.

I won a lot of cases by noticing.

There were five words glaringly missing from the Times editorial: “cost,” “Asian,” “teenager,” “standards,” and “endpoint.” The words and their meaning are related in a way it’s easy to summarize. There will be a cost in fairness and excellence to be paid by trying to continue the present scheme of race-based admissions, and it will be paid almost entirely by white and Asian teenagers who (1) are not responsible in any form for the racism allegedly afflicting higher education and (2) earn their own admission by working to meet high standards. And the scheme has no endpoint, because it’s not the moral imperative the Times portrays but instead has become a politically inbred entitlement its beneficiaries will be prepared to relinquish on the Twelfth of Never.

One of the classic methods of cheap advocacy is to highlight the costs of what your opponent proposes but just sweep under the rug the costs of what you propose. We see this all the time in debates about criminal justice reform. For example, reform proponents talk endlessly about the costs of a maintaining a high prison population — and indeed there are costs — but say not a word about the costs of having convicted criminals somewhere other than prison. This is because the alternative placement of criminals is back on the street, where the great majority get right back in business. Reform proponents know this, but scamper through their glib case to make you think that, if criminals aren’t incarcerated, they’ll just disappear. Part of this is just hoping you won’t notice; part is dishonesty; and part is confidence that the Left owns the public megaphone, so if you’re rude enough to point out what they’re hiding, you’ll get drowned out anyway.

All this is going on in the NYT’s affirmative action editorial. The reason race-rigged admissions (not “race conscious” admissions, as the Times and the rest of the Left say to make it sound less indigestible) lose big time in public polling is that the public sees the unfairness in favoring some people, and disfavoring others, in a matter of considerable importance, simply because of their race — something they didn’t choose and can’t change. This is the elephant in the NYT’s editorial boardroom, but, to read what their writers came out with, you wouldn’t know it exists at all.

It’s unfortunate, but at this point not surprising, that the nation’s No. 1 newspaper would blank on something this obvious and elementary. As the Times can’t help knowing — since it endlessly holds forth on matters of public policy — serious policy is nothing but making choices about which set of costs you want to bear. Pretending, by whiteout, that the choice you make has no costs at all is perhaps less dishonest than simply sophomoric.

So why does the Times present its case that way? A couple of reasons, I think. First, it lives in the Leftist echo chamber of Very Sophisticated Manhattan, and doesn’t understand that much of the country doesn’t buy its premise that Amerika is a racist cesspool. Second, the families victimized by the race-rigged admission system the Times would preserve are not in the Times’ editors’ social circle. Instead, they’re either (a) so rich they can effectively buy their way in anyway, or (b) more frequently, they’re 4-H wahoos out there in Indiana or Nebraska or Idaho or somewhere else that doesn’t count — the functional equivalent of trailer park trash, as Democratic strategist James Carville once famously put it. Third, the main specific victims — white and Asian high school seniors denied admission in favor of lower-achieving blacks — are powerless. They’re teenagers; legally, they’re still children. Because of the echo chamber effect, the Times’ editors either don’t see or don’t care that the great majority of the people they have chosen to pay for “America’s long history of racism” are kids whose own history began way back in 2006. (But next week or thereabouts, look for the Times’ five part series on how “America Is Failing Its Children”).

One other fact conspicuous by its omission is that, by admitting students whose achievement meets only lower standards, what you’re going to get is — guess what! — lower standards. Again, I suspect the Times whiffs on this, not so much in an attempt to fool us, but because the Times, as the clarion of the Left, long ago accepted deep in its psyche that lower standards are part of the reckoning a rancid America has coming. Promoting lower standards for education is of a piece with promoting lower standards for the preservation of life (hence unlimited abortion), lower standards for a strong currency (hence rampant inflation), lower standards for national solvency (hence burgeoning debt), lower standards for American sovereignty (hence open borders), lower standards for military readiness (hence feminized soldiering), lower standards for public safety (hence decarceration), etcetera, etcetera.

Finally, the Times never mentions or comes close to mentioning one facet of the debate that was key to the Court’s opinion: That Harvard’s and UNC’s racially rigged admission processes have no endpoint. That they don’t is by design, because of two factors, one supposedly high-minded in its odd sort of way and one not high-minded no matter how it might be viewed.

The theoretically high-minded rationale is that America’s racism is so thoroughly woven into its social fabric that we don’t know when it will come out, if ever. Justices Sotomayor and Jackson don’t say this explicitly in their dissents, but they come close. And of course since we don’t know when America will free itself of racism, we can hardly posit a date at which “remedial” programs can end.

That’s the polite way to put it. The candid way to put it is that we’re just going to have to accept that the constitutional requirement of Equal Protection is just a bunch of words and is never going to be enforced, not if you’re white.

May God be praised for a Supreme Court that said NO. If the Court entrusted with making good on our constitutional rights can’t say that, or is afraid to, why have it at all?

The less high-minded but more realistic view of racially-rigged admissions (and lots of other racially-rigged goodies our institutions hand out) has nothing to do with any grand vision of historical inequity. It’s simply that the goodies have become a politically supercharged grab-bag whose beneficiaries, almost entirely in league with the Democratic Party, are not about to agree to give up. Scarfing up the goodies is the real reason they want racial balancing to hang on forever — and the real reason you have to read the NYT’s moral grandstanding for what, quite shrewdly, it doesn’t say.