Racial Word Games
“Misperceptions” vs. Illogic.

Mr. Clegg is general counsel at the Center for Equal Opportunity.
August 1, 2001 9:30 a.m.

n Monday's Washington Post, columnist William Raspberry writes about the keynote address delivered on Sunday by the National Urban League's Hugh Price at the organization's annual conference this year in Washington. That speech is most interesting when juxtaposed with the Post's own interpretation of a recent survey on race relations.

The theme of Mr. Price's speech was that African Americans have won two revolutions — the first, in the 19th century, abolishing slavery, and the second, in the 20th century, that transformed theoretical rights into public practice. What's needed now, says Mr. Price, is a third revolution that will achieve economic development. And, he declared, "This revolution must emanate from the inside out" — it cannot be bestowed by outsiders.

Earlier this month, however, the Post made clear that, in its view, African Americans can hope to make progress if and only if the white man agrees to award it to them. The Post published yet more results from a series of survey projects conducted jointly by it, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University. This is the eighth; no word on how many there will be. The front-page, above-the-fold article on this survey — headlined, "Misperceptions Cloud Whites' View of Blacks" — is perhaps the worst in the series so far.

The thesis of the article is the following syllogism: (1) white Americans believe blacks are better off than in fact they are; (2) white Americans overwhelmingly oppose racial and ethnic preferences (a.k.a. "affirmative action"); therefore (3) white Americans oppose affirmative action because they overestimate the progress blacks have made.

It is, to begin with, not so clear that white Americans really are so badly misinformed about the status of African Americans today. For instance, the survey found that 71 percent of whites say that blacks have "more or about the same opportunities in life than whites have." It is not Clintonian to point out that whether this belief is a "misperception" depends on how you define "about the same." Likewise with the belief by only 20 percent of whites that there is "a lot of discrimination against African Americans in our society today," and the belief by more whites than blacks that African Americans are "just about as well off" as whites when it comes to access to health care, income, types of jobs, and education. "A lot" and "just about" are pretty subjective terms. And, looking at the world and history as a whole, it is not at all clear that the answers given by most white Americans to these questions are wrong.

But even if it were the case that most white Americans overestimate the progress that blacks have made, it would not follow that, if they were better informed, they would change their minds about the use of preferences. Indeed, the Post's own figures found that, even among whites "with fewer misperceptions," 90 percent still opposed considering race or ethnicity in hiring, promotions, and college admissions, and 84 percent opposed such considerations in redistricting (among those "with more misperceptions," the numbers were 97 percent and 94 percent, respectively).

An interesting side note: Polls that even mention affirmative action are likely to sour respondents' views on African Americans, as sophisticated surveys by Stanford professor Paul M. Sniderman have shown.

Believing that American society remains hostile to blacks may be a necessary condition for supporting preferences, but it is certainly not sufficient. That is, the exhortations of the "diversity" industry to the contrary notwithstanding, few really believe that racial and ethnic preferences can be justified on any basis except as a corrective to past or present discrimination. So if you don't believe that opportunities are systematically denied any more on the basis of skin color or ancestry, you are also unlikely to believe in the use of systematic preferences to favor groups.

And even if you believe that "a lot" of discrimination still exists, it doesn't follow that you will believe the best way to fight it is with more discrimination. You might believe, instead, that the best way to fight discrimination is by enforcing the antidiscrimination laws on the books. You may also believe that preferences are actually counterproductive, insofar as they lead to resentment, stigmatization, lowered standards, a victim mentality among the so-called beneficiaries, and hypocrisy — in addition to being unfair and setting a dangerous precedent that discrimination is acceptable so long as it is for a "good reason" (discriminators always have a "good reason").

Finally, you might believe that the reasons African Americans are worse off in terms of access to health care, income, types of jobs, and education have little to do with ongoing discrimination and will not be addressed by pretending that they are. Perhaps you believe that lowering illegitimacy rates (seven out of ten black births are out of wedlock), improving public education through school choice, and fighting the belief that studying and working hard are "acting white" would be the better course.

Those are not "misperceptions" — and, in fact, are shared not only by many whites but by many blacks, Asians, Latinos, and American Indians as well. They would, in particular, appear to underlie Hugh Price's theme in his keynote address. Discrimination still exists, yes, but it is no longer the principal or even a major barrier to black advancement. Mr. Price has figured that out; the Post's reporters have not.