More on affirmative action

My musings on affirmative action prompted a friend to reply that she opposed it for two reasons:

 

A) The benefits of affirmative action are increasingly going to immigrant blacks, not African-Americans -- see the article below, which highlights the fact that 40.6% (!) of blacks on Ivy League campuses are from immigrant families.

 

B) Affirmative action serves to paper over the massive failure of our society, public schools and minority families/communities to properly educate minority children.  Ending affirmative action (and the resulting plunge in minority enrollment at top schools that are affected), exposes the underlying problems in all of their raw ugliness, triggering action to address them.

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The Immigrant Factor

http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/01/black

 

At a reunion of black alumni of Harvard University in 2003, Lani Guinier set off a discussion on a sensitive subject: whether black immigrants are the beneficiaries, perhaps undeserving, of affirmative action.

 

Guinier, a Harvard law professor, was quoted in The Boston Globe at the time as saying that most minority students at elite colleges were “voluntary immigrants,” not descended from slaves. “If you look around Harvard College today, how many young people will you find who grew up in urban environments and went to public high schools and public junior high schools?” she said. “I don’t think, in the name of affirmative action, we should be admitting people because they look like us, but then they don’t identify with us.”

 

The comments sparked much discussion among educators nationally about whether Guinier’s observations were accurate and — if so — what they said about affirmative action. When The New York Times explored the issue the next year, it noted that a major study of students at elite colleges was finding that a disproportionate number of black students were from immigrant families...