Over the past week, the Cardinal Conservatives, a group I helped found, has been attacked without reprieve. Our opponents accuse us of supporting tacit, institutional racism, and of scapegoating minority students. Nothing could be further from the truth. We held our bake sale for one reason—stripped to its bare bones, affirmative action discriminates. And the Cardinal Conservatives deplore racism and discrimination.
Let’s start with the basics. Discrimination occurs when people are deliberately treated differently on a basis other than individual merit. Advocates of affirmative action, by artificially increasing representation of minorities in areas where they have been historically underrepresented, can only do so by deliberately discriminating solely on the basis of race.
By charging our customers disproportionately based on race, we employed the same dehumanizing logic as that of affirmative action policies. Instead of selling our goods to everyone who had the ability to pay the same, competitive market price, we distorted that market price on the basis of something which is (and ought to be) irrelevant to a meritocratic system: skin color.
In contrast with our critics’ claims that we did not research Wesleyan’s stances on affirmative action policies, we calculated these intentionally distorted and unfair prices based on Wesleyan’s admissions rates for minority and non-minority students.
The fact that this metaphorical pricing mirrors an actual policy that is employed nationwide, let alone with Wesleyan’s Office of Affirmative Action, is unacceptable. Abraham Lincoln spoke of America as a country “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned the day when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” William Faulkner added a poetic spin to the matter: “To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like living in Alaska and being against snow.” To all these voices, we add our wholehearted agreement.
But we also agree with Justice Powell, who, writing the opinion of the court in “Regents of the University of California v. Bakke,” stated, “If petitioner’s purpose is to assure within its student body some specified percentage of a particular group merely because of its race or ethnic origin, such a preferential purpose must be rejected not as insubstantial but as facially invalid. Preferring members of any one group for no reason other than race or ethnic origin is discrimination for its own sake. This the Constitution forbids.”
In every case of discrimination, someone loses. If an admissions policy favors certain races, then others—even if they are equally qualified—would be penalized for not being born into those groups. Our critics have argued that we did not provide evidence that Wesleyan has admitted undeserving students. This, too, was intentional. We did not ask for evidence of individual minority students’ qualifications because affirmative action asks for no proof that its beneficiaries are underprivileged, but assumes that they are because of their skin color.
Affirmative action is not limited to education: in the case “Ricci v. Destefano,” 19 firefighters brought charges against the New Haven Fire Department for rejecting the results of a promotions test, because only seven whites and two Hispanics would be eligible since no blacks made the cut. By throwing out the test entirely, the Fire Department indicated its willingness to sacrifice merit for political correctness. If you were trapped in a burning building, who would you rather come to your rescue: firefighters who had demonstrated their merit, or only the second best?
Also, must race be the only factor for diversity? Not according to Justice Powell, who cites the following as qualifications that could benefit the community: “exceptional personal talents, unique work or service experience, leadership potential, maturity, demonstrated compassion, a history of overcoming disadvantage, ability to communicate with the poor.” Are none of the above considered decent indicators of merit when compared with skin color?
Finally, we object to the practice of creating artificial proportions of races. We fear that groups benefiting from affirmative action will carry the stigma of being inherently inferior, for the policy implies that minorities are incapable of accomplishing goals on their own when they are clearly capable of doing so.
In short, nobody should be given an advantage, or put at a disadvantage, because of race. By charging different races different prices at the bake sale last Thursday, the Cardinal Conservatives demonstrated that affirmative action policies do just that: they treat different races differently, valuing some over others without regard for the individual merits of each of those people. Chief Justice Roberts once said, “The best way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.” Let’s give that a try, shall we?
Yeung is a member of the class of 2014 and tbe President of Cardinal Conservatives.