Coleman Hughes

The diversity trap

Quotas mean discrimination. We must not repeat America's mistake

Britain seems to be following America down a dangerous path. There’s your politician David Lammy accusing Oxford and Cambridge of racial bias — and refusing to listen when they point out they simply accept whoever gets top grades. Then there’s the author Lionel Shriver, pilloried because she dared to suggest (in this magazine) that privileging identity quotas over talent might be a mistake. It seems the UK is succumbing to the same madness over diversity and quotas that has plagued the US for half a century. The hope is that quotas lead to a fairer, more tolerant society, but the reality is very different. 

Across the Atlantic, American institutions have enshrined diversity and inclusion as their guiding principles. From university admissions to life-or-death professions such as air-traffic control, we have sanctified diversity so completely that many treat the idea of choosing applicants based on merit as if it were tantamount to nailing a ‘whites only’ sign to the door.

Despite its seeming popularity, affirmative action has always presented a problem for even its most ardent supporters: it is a racist policy. There is no other way to describe it. Almost ten years ago, a Princeton study found that racial bias had already crept in: Asians and whites had to score far higher on their SAT exams — 450 and 310 more points respectively, from a total of 1,600 — to have the same odds of being admitted into elite universities as black students. As a black American, I don’t use the term ‘racist’ lightly. But intentionally making it harder for people of a specific race to enter a certain sphere of society is the definition of racial discrimination.

Racial discrimination is not an unfortunate side effect at Harvard – it is the policy

That this is racist would be a banal observation if not for the fact that supporters of affirmative action see anti-racism as central to their identities.

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