The Conundrum of Diversity

Does forcing a particular racial and ethnic mix of personnel in the operations of government, academia and the workplace really make a difference anymore? Accommodations continue to be made in hiring decisions, college admissions, scholarships, charitable organizations, and an array of government services to “assist” specific minority groups to overcome unfairness and to add a perceived diversity value. It has been taken for granted that determining the race and/or ethnicity of an individual was obvious by self-identification and/or physical appearance. A biracial person was once a rarity, and if he/she was not properly identified in the above decision-making processes, it didn’t matter much to the end goal because the numbers were so small. Two things are changing this assumption in a big way:

1. A much larger percentage of the population is becoming biracial/multiracial.

2. Genetic testing can prove/disprove ethnicity claims.

These two factors are rendering obsolete a range of beliefs about what it means to be a “minority” and how government and academia are identifying these groups. Additionally, several 2020 Presidential candidates have promised to pursue the concept of slavery reparations should they be elected. Determining who would be appropriately “eligible” to receive these reparations, as well as who should pay for them, is rendered entirely impractical by the two factors above.

A Pew research study analyzing births in the US during the 1970’s found that 1% of the US population was biracial at that time. Today that number is 10%. The Census bureau has calculated that based on the rate of increase of biracial births between 2000 and 2010, the US population will be 30% biracial by 2060. In these studies, each parent was of a different race (a 50/50 split). It does not count more diffuse mixtures like ¼ of one race and ¾ of another (the newborn child of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is a prime example of this). Therein lies the bigger problem.

When a job seeker, college applicant, or a scholarship candidate fills out their respective applications, they are usually asked to self-identify their race/ethnicity. A correct answer requires two things – true knowledge of their race, and candor. You would think the first one would be easy. But apart from what their parents have told them, and any family ancestry lore, how do they know they aren’t an amalgam in some form? Even if they do know that, what is the minimum percentage of any one race necessary to classify them as a minority in the same category as an “unmixed” person of that race? For example, should a person who is 25% African American get the same benefits of minority status as a person who is 100% African American? What about the person who is 50%? The honesty question is even more interesting. How does an employer or university know if an applicant is lying about their race just to gain an advantage? Also, what if the applicant isn’t lying, but was told erroneous information about his/her ancestry by their parents and other family members? That person is not being dishonest, but they are also not correct.

The now famous case of Elizabeth Warren is perfectly illustrative of these pitfalls. She proclaimed her race to be “Native American” on her registration form for the State Bar of Texas. She admitted to listing herself as “Native American” while working as a professor at both Harvard and The University of Pennsylvania. We now know from the publicly released results of her recent DNA test that she is in fact much less than 1% Native American, no more so than the average European American.¹ Did she lie to gain an advantage as a self-proclaimed minority or was she simply reporting what she was told about her ancestry from family lore? If the latter, why did she also sometimes identify herself as “White” and not “Native American” when there was a choice?

In a soon to be decided discrimination case against Harvard University, an Asian American student claimed his application was unfairly rejected because of his race and not his credentials. Harvard’s defense in this suit shows how even a renowned intellectual institution can get trapped into an illogical argument by not considering the effects of a growing multiracial population. Harvard’s formal response to this lawsuit was that they do indeed limit the number of Asian American students accepted to maintain a precisely calculated demographic mixture in the student body that they have deemed of unique and high value in education. Two critical underlying assumptions to their argument are:

1. They have determined that a specific demographic mix in the student body provides such a strong and high value educational component that it justifies rejecting otherwise highly qualified applicants. It also must justify Harvard’s acceptance of some number of potentially under-qualified applicants in order to create the desired mixture.

2. Since it must be assumed Harvard invested a lot of research and effort into convincing themselves of the value of their chosen demographic mix (and especially to use it as a legal defense), they must also be quite confident in their ability to accurately ascertain the race of each accepted applicant. If they get this part wrong, it negates all of the science they put into defining the optimal racial mix that ensures this high value educational benefit in the first place.

So how does Harvard guarantee such accurate race determinations? Self-identification can be plagued with inaccuracy and/or dishonesty as Elizabeth Warren has aptly demonstrated. Physical appearance as observed in an interview is also far from definitive these days. Take Colin Kaepernick for example (his biological mother is white and biological father African American). If Kaepernick had applied to Harvard, which part of his genetic makeup would prevail in the all-important demographic component of Harvard’s acceptance decision?

While there are privacy, practicality, and cost issues associated with DNA testing, it would likely uncover an uncomfortable scientific reality in all of this. The odds are high (and getting higher each year) that nearly all of those who select one of 4 or 5 possible choices for “Race” on any document requesting such information, are not 100% of that race. That of course begs the question how much is enough for the particular purpose at hand? 75%? 50%? 25%?, or in Elizabeth Warren’s case 1%? What if (hypothetically) the entire student body at Harvard were DNA tested and the actual scientifically determined demographic mix was found to be not even close to the “high value” demographic mixture by which Harvard has been making acceptance decisions? Are the students therefore not reaping the promised benefit of that highly touted value? Worse, is their experience at Harvard teaching them how to interact in a demographic amalgamation not naturally occurring in any real-world workplace for which they are presumably being prepared?

Now consider the case for slavery reparations. In the abstract, a general argument can be made that reparations for slavery would be just and proper given the barbarism of the practice. However, accurately identifying who should receive these reparations more than 150 years after slavery ended adds additional intricacy to the already complex multiracial puzzle described earlier. Not only must the government determine the minimum percentage of African American ancestry a person must have, and also how to accurately measure that percentage, but whether or not that ancestry included slaves. Not all African Americans living in the US were slaves during the time slavery existed in the US – 500,000 African Americans living in the US in 1860 were never slaves. Further, many African Americans came to the US after 1865, when slavery had legally ended. An obvious example is the ancestry of Barack Obama himself. Only his paternal ancestors, who were born and lived in Kenya, are of African heritage. His father came to the US in 1959 – 94 years after slavery ended. In Obama’s case, there is no ancestral link back to slavery in the US.² There is one other curious aspect to the case for reparations which once again is best illustrated in the case of Colin Kaepernick. For starters, very little is known about Kaepernick’s biological father apart from the fact that he is African American. He left shortly after discovering Kaepernick’s white biological mother had become pregnant. How would one go about determining Kaepernick’s African American ancestry at all, let alone if it linked back to any former slaves? Let’s say that somehow it could be ascertained that Kaepernick does have some percentage of slave ancestry and would be a candidate for reparations. Would the fact that Kaepernick currently has a net worth of over $20 Million dollars have any impact on the decision to pay him those reparations? All of the 2020 candidates advocating slavery reparations also believe the government should be taking more money from the wealthy (via taxation), not giving them more.

There is one other aspect of today’s the “check the box” system for race/ethnicity that makes it increasingly invalid/inadequate. If a child’s genetics define him/her to be Asian or Hispanic, but that child is raised entirely in an Americanized home, primarily speaks English, goes to American schools and participates in typical American social groups, events, and sports, what “culture” is that child identified with? If the goal of these organizations was to infuse a student body or employee workforce with a diversity of cultures, they are fooling themselves if they don’t take this increasingly common situation into account. It leads to the possibility that even if genetic testing were used to create a desired demographic mix in any group of people, the primary result would simply be an assemblage of individuals with different physical appearances who don’t really have much, if any, diversity in their cultural experiences.

Finally, there is the honest question about what the real end goal is for continued “forcing” of a pre-defined demographic mixture in any group today. Throughout our history we can certainly point to examples of ethnic/racial groups who were not afforded the same educational and job opportunities as others. That inequity needed to be corrected, and if this was the basis for any program with the label “diversity” in its title, it would clearly be justified. But is there still such a sizable opportunity gap today for which these measures remain necessary? At universities, If unequal opportunity for admission among minority groups is a problem, and minority admissions are artificially boosted to compensate, it would be reasonable to expect the graduation rates of those minority groups to be the same (or better) as non-minorities. They aren’t. In a report released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center using a sample size of nearly 3 million college students, the graduation rates of minority groups varied widely from the average. Hispanic Americans and African Americans graduated at rates much lower than the average and Asian Americans at rates higher than the average. No amount of diversity “compensating” at the front end in the college admissions process will change this. A hard truth is that artificially altering admission criteria to create a certain demographic proportion in universities is not leading to equivalent degrees of success (here defined as graduation) in the target groups. And no matter why, if the practice fails, why does it continue to be so staunchly embraced?

Harvard’s own admissions data, released as part of the lawsuit against them, showed that admitted Asian American students, a minority group representing 5% of all high school students, have a higher average SAT score and lower rate of admission than any other racial group. It also revealed that Asian Americans would make up 43% of Harvard’s admitted class if only academics were considered (Asian Americans make up 20% of Harvard’s student body today).³ This result isn’t because Asian American students are benefiting from more opportunities than other minority groups. It’s because knowledge, aptitude, and motivational differences always have and will continue to exist in students competing at the highest level. Trying to “help” lower performers compete by limiting the number of higher performers isn’t the answer and is regressive. Addressing the reasons for lower performance and trying to improve it is the more difficult but progressive answer.

Time to face the reality that race/ethnicity is naturally becoming meaningless as a “selector” for special treatment and nearly impossible to accurately measure.

¹ Both of us have had a genetic analysis. Tom has slightly more Native American ancestry than Elizabeth Warren.

² There is also the question of who should fairly pay for slavery reparations. The presumption in all the proposals thus far is that the reparation money would come from taxpayers. But some taxpayers today have no possible link back to the slavery period in the US. In Paula’s case, all her ancestor’s arrived in the US after 1920. Why should she pay for slavery reparations?

³ A 2012 study by Liliana Garces, an associate professor of education at the University of Texas at Austin who studies diversity in higher education, found that legal decisions prohibiting affirmative action (forced diversity) in Texas, California, Washington and Florida reduced by about 12 percent the average proportion of graduate students of color in every field she evaluated, including engineering, natural sciences, education and the humanities”. At Harvard specifically, experts predict that if a ban on affirmative action were imposed, the number of black and Hispanic students at the university — who currently make up about 15% and 12% of the freshman class, respectively — would drop significantly.