Racial blind spots: the affirmative action path not taken.

• Author: Hood, John
• Position: The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action - Affirmative Action Around the World - Book Review

The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action, by Terry H. Anderson, New York: Oxford University Press, 320 pages, $35

Affirmative Action Around the World, by Thomas Sowell, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 239 pages, $28

I'm not againts affirmative action.

There, I said it. I've closely followed the debate about race and sex preferences in college admissions, public employment, and government contracting. I've written about it, published work from many of the leading opponents of preferences, and hosted events and forums with them. I think the U.S. Supreme Court's recent muddled decisions about preferences at the University of Michigan's undergraduate program and its law school were incoherent and harmful.

Yet I just don't agree with many politicians, writers, lawyers, and think tankers on the right who equate their opposition to government affirmative action with adherence to the rigid principle that racial and ethnic groups exhibit no important differences and merit no differential consideration or treatment at any time by anyone. In my view, while perpetuating stereotypes is unfair and our modern racial fixations are unwise, it is foolish to pretend that racial and ethnic groups don't exist or don't exhibit distinct and informative patterns of consumption, aspiration, and aesthetic preference.

In everyday life, most of us don't make that mistake. Private companies spend a lot of time and money gathering data on who is buying what and in what neighborhood, and they make key decisions with this information. I once read that Koreans were many times more likely than any other ethnic group to purchase Spam, a fact obviously of interest to the manufacturer and to grocers, and possibly to trivia buffs and would-be Monty Python lyricists. It's not obvious that we should worry about this, or about the fact that certain ethnic groups are "overrepresented" in industries such as restaurants or, ahem, solid waste disposal, or even that private individuals and institutions seek to use race-conscious remedies to address such social problems as teenage pregnancy, high school dropouts, financial literacy, or various vestiges of racism or other bigotry.

On that last point, in other words, I think there may be good reasons for me to engage in race-conscious affirmative action. The key distinction involves agency. Government institutions are purportedly "owned" by all of us and at least can be said formally to represent all citizens. Thus they have no business adopting policies that discriminate--regardless of whether they are designed to advance or to redress bigotry--unless those policies are narrowly tailored to the needs of specific jobs, slots, or contracts. (As Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute once put it, it's OK for fire departments to turn down wheelchair-bound applicants for the job of fighting fires but not for the job of dispatching the firefighters.) Private actors, on the other hand, should enjoy the latitude to associate or disassociate with others in a free society, even if they do so for...