The Affirmative Action Hoax

The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character and Other Lies by Steven Farron, 2005, is a well written book that covers the history of affirmative action laws, the reasoning that went into how institutions changed, the scientific underpinnings that are ignored, and how affirmative action impacts Whites, and a lot more. It is the best book in my opinion that covers affirmative action and the differences in academic performance between races based on innate abilities. It deals with affirmative action primarily in higher education, but the issues discussed are equally applicable to business set-asides, hiring practices, minority participation, quotas, etc.

Farron begins by noting that, “Usually it is simply assumed [that there are no differences between races in average mental ability], even though it has controlled American racial policy for over four decades, is contrary to all empirical evidence, and a priori is so improbable as to border on being impossible. Moynihan mentioned only Whites and Blacks in his study and attributed the socioeconomic gap between them to ‘three centuries of sometimes unimaginable mistreatment’ (Introduction). But from the premise of the innate equality of all groups of people, he drew the inescapable conclusion, ‘the distribution of success and failure within one group [should] be roughly comparable to that within other groups.’”

What is so absurd now, is that affirmative action also applies to East Asians (who have a higher average intelligence and income than Whites), Asian Indians who also do well economically, Hispanics even though they may be wealthy and are very often White, South Asians who are less intelligent than Whites, while North Africans and Arabs are classified as White, and do not qualify for affirmative action programs. While many Blacks in the United States are descendants of slaves, the majority of those who are counted as minorities and covered by affirmative action programs are recent immigrants. Still, after 40 years of affirmative action programs, economically advantaged Blacks still score lower than disadvantaged Whites on mental ability exams.

Farron notes that: “26% of Jewish immigrants were illiterate, compared with 1% of English and Scandinavian immigrants, 3% of Irish, and 5% of German immigrants. The population density, dirt, noise, and poverty of the immigrant Jewish neighborhoods had few, if any, parallels in the world. Nearly half lived in New York, where ‘In 1902 a survey found that only 8 percent of the city’s Jewish families . . . had private baths.’…By 1919, the proportion of Jews at elite American colleges was several times the proportion of Jews in the American population; for example, 20 percent at Brown and Harvard, nearly 25 percent at the University of Pennsylvania, and 40 percent at Columbia; and these proportions were rising rapidly.

“As I explain in Section F of Appendix III, when the average intelligence of groups of people differs, the difference between them becomes more and more pronounced at the extremes. Consequently, the problem of Jewish overrepresentation was compounded by Jewish hyper-overrepresentation among the best students. The 1918 meeting of the Association of New England College Deans was concerned largely with the Jewish problem. Dean Jones of Yale said, ‘A few years ago every single scholarship of any value was won by a Jew. I took it up with the Committee and said that we could not allow that to go on. We must put a ban on the Jews.’ Four years later, Jones observed that ‘despite the handicap of poverty and the necessity of working their way, the Jews make better average records than their Gentile fellows.’”

There is a social myth that Jews excel in education because of their social environments, but of course this is very false. As a persecuted people, they went through large swings between poverty–illiteracy and wealth–education, while never losing their innate high intelligence. When given an opportunity to compete, they outperform every other race of people with a standard deviation (about 15 IQ points) above the Western average of 100—or 25 points above the world average of about 90.

And yet, the Jews have been at the forefront of promoting the myth of equal intelligence between races—surely they must know how absurd that is! Likewise, they have been promoters of using racial bias in educational opportunities (racial quotas), while they are well aware that similar arguments were used against them in the past. My personal opinion is that unlike other minorities who do well compared to other races, Jews have a history of persecution, and are now trying to promote the idea that Judaism is a religion only, and that there is no such thing as the Jewish race.

Just like today, to get around innate intelligence, other means had to be adopted to be able to discriminate against Whites: “Columbia pursued diversity consistently. In 1945, when its anti-Jewish discrimination came under attack, it disclosed that it also discriminated in favor of Blacks over White Gentiles. Columbia showed that the Jewish problem could be solved. Other universities followed its example by adopting nebulous admissions criteria like character, leadership, and public spirit, along with the objectively definable criterion of regional diversity, since Jews were concentrated overwhelmingly in the Northeast, especially in New York.”

In summary, then, the vicissitudes of academia looks like this: Children of the wealthy and powerful were accepted by universities without consideration for intelligence. This was seen as inefficient and testing was instituted to select applicants by ability. The Jews came along, and with higher scores started displacing Whites. To correct this selection based on testing, other criteria was added to reduce the number of Jews. Then, after the soviets launched the first space satellite in 1957, the need for talented scientists made selection based on intelligence acceptable again and the Jews were back dominating academia—especially among the elite. Then along came affirmative action for Blacks and other minorities, and selection based on standardized tests have been once again replaced by such criteria as character, race, etc. in the interest of diversity. Apparently, history doesn’t really teach us much at all. Current struggles for dominance between groups will trump the facts of history and the best-known facts of science.

Farron notes that, “preference for sons of alumni was instituted for the first time, as a means of reducing the number of Jews. Between 1927 and 1936, the proportion of Yale students who were sons of alumni rose from 14 to 30 percent.” Yet this is used today for justifying quotas, without mentioning why this policy evolved—it was used to select for Whites over Jews just like similar measures are conjured up today to select for minorities over Whites. Since simple quotas are not allowed, other factors like diversity, character, etc. are used to achieve the same results as quotas.

Social economic status (SES) is still being used by most social scientists and psychologists to escape what is obvious to those in the biological sciences—SES is a proxy for the genetic intelligence of the parents and thus the average intelligence of their children. Farron notes, “As will be demonstrated, the SAT predicts academic performance with great accuracy. The College Entrance Examination Board added it to achievement tests in order to democratize college admission by opening it to students who attended high schools that did not offer a full range of academic courses. I will show that when SAT scores began to be broken down by race/ethnicity and parental education and income, it was discovered how democratic they are. We now know that performance on them is not affected by family, social background, or school attended, because the children of wealthy, highly educated Black parents, who attend upper class suburban or private high schools, do worse than the children of poor, uneducated White and Asian parents, who attend slum schools.”

Farron doesn’t discuss regression to the mean. When intelligent Blacks marry, their children will regress towards the mean of the population group that they come from. For example, if two Blacks with IQs of 100 marry, their children will have IQs somewhere between 100 and 85, or the average intelligence of Blacks in the United States (85—however, there are also regional differences in average Black intelligence just as there is for Whites). Likewise, when two Whites with an average IQ of 85 marry, their children will have—on average—IQs between 85 and 100, the average IQ of Whites being 100. Of course, in every family the IQs of each child varies greatly because of inheriting different genes from each parent. Regression to the mean then is more useful when looking at averages from a large sample of population groups.

Farron discusses why we have come so far from the meritocratic ideals, when he notes that President Nixon, who was against affirmative action, gave in to Hispanic pressure groups to have them classified as a separate minority and given preferences. He notes that many of these anti-White policy changes are imposed on the majority by minority interest groups. Most of the time, the public is unaware of these capitulations for political expediency. Since then, the number of categories for preferences has expanded greatly, with White males castigated as the cause of all evil in economics, minority advancement, hate crimes, etc.

Farron’s book is comprehensive and well researched. Leaving out numerous anecdotal stories, he has compiled the data on intelligence testing, its correlation with educational and occupational success, and how academia has distorted and manipulated the data and the rational to maintain quotas based on race. I would add that he failed to mention Linda Goffredson’s extensive work on the correlation between intelligence and many of life’s beneficial outcomes like good health, fewer car accidents, etc. Much of this material is available at her website.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Thursday, December 15, 2005 at 08:13 PM in Race realism
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