Critics of affirmative action often worry that if people are advanced for any reason other than merit, efficiency and quality will decline. If students are assigned places in higher education on the basis of race or geography, classes may be dumbed down to accommodate their lesser abilities. A physician friend of mine asked if I would like to be treated by a doctor who was admitted to medical school on the basis of race ahead of other medical aspirants with better credentials.
The reply in favor of affirmative action is that one method of its implementation has been the examination of traditional credentials to improve competence. In the case of medical school, the traditional credential for admission has been performance on courses in organic chemistry. The human body is filled with organic chemicals whose interactions affect our health. But excellent grades in organic chemistry reflect the ability to memorize more than anything else, and doctors seldom use their knowledge of organic chemistry in clinical settings.
Doctors need much more than good memories to perform well. They need to think creatively when presented with unusual cases. They need also to have a personality to which patients can relate. They need to have the humility to work as members of a team rather than as autocrats whose “orders” must be obeyed without question, because research shows that teams of interdependent members whose views are respected produce better patient outcomes. These additional skills aren’t included in any of the traditional tests for admission to medical schools.
Admission to police academies traditionally featured physical requirements concerning size and strength. But the notion that every member of the force must be large and brawny excluded most women and, in past generations, a disproportionate number of candidates from some minority communities. Studies showed that more effective policing could be produced by officers with whom community members could identify, and that women are statistically better able to diffuse situations of violence than big brawny men are able to quell it with force. Police academies have opened their classes to a greater variety of people and improved police performance with community policing.
Computerized tests, such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the LSAT for law school were introduced two generations ago with the goal of identifying students with the best aptitude to succeed, regardless of race, religion, national origin, or family background. This was a noble idea, but doesn’t work as intended. Success on the LSAT predicts accurately how students will perform in the first year of law school, but not how successfully they will perform as attorneys. What’s more, the SAT and similar tests are culturally biased. They require knowledge of cultural matters considered important by those who devised the tests. But such knowledge is irrelevant to most aspects of academic aptitude and disadvantage many members of minority communities with equally rich, but different, cultural backgrounds.
In addition, studies show that our society’s racism is often internalized by people of color so they have lower expectations of themselves when race is brought up. For example, in several studies black students were divided into two groups. One group just took a standardized test. The other group read about racism and then took the same test. Reminded of racism, the second group regularly performed worse than the first. Again, standardized tests don’t single out the most promising candidates.
The US military found during the War in Vietnam that a much larger percentage of enlisted men than of commanding officers were black. This created difficulties of discipline which reduced force effectiveness. Like casting the part of Jackie Robinson in a play or movie, sometimes race itself is important for effective performance. The same holds to a large extent for doctors, lawyers, teachers, and many others. People will identify with those of their own race, ethnicity, or gender, confide in them more, and thereby enable those professionals to be more helpful.
In addition, people of a variety of ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds in positions of prominence and prestige motivate others in those groups to aspire to similar positions. This increases the number in those groups preparing themselves for such roles and thereby the pool of applicants from which training programs and businesses can choose. Consider the improvement in football since it became acceptable to have black quarterbacks.
Most organizations perform better when their decision making is influenced by people with a great variety of professional and personal backgrounds. Most Latinos, for example, take offense at being referred to as “Latinx,” so marketing to them suffers when that term is used. More Latinos in upper management would have improved marketing to members of that group.
Conservatives say that they oppose affirmative action in order to get jobs done well, but the effect of reducing affirmative action programs is often poorer performance.
Comments