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The Affirmative Action Debate In South Africa: Similar, But Different

The New York Times has a fascinating article on a roiling debate in South Africa over race preferences. The debate was never supposed to happen. Instituting admissions preferences at the prestigious and selective University of Cape Town as supposed to heal the scars of race; instead (as looking at the United States experience would have suggested), it has done exactly the opposite.

The University of Cape Town was supposed to have settled this debate last year when its professors ? 70 percent of them white men ? supported a policy that gave admissions preferences based on apartheid racial categories to black, mixed-race and Indian students.

Instead, unease with the current approach has spilled out over the past year in fierce exchanges on newspaper editorial pages and formal debating platforms. Sixteen years after the political ascent of the black majority, the university?s dilemma resonates across a society conflicted about how best to achieve racial redress, whether in corporate board rooms or classrooms.

The South African debate is both déjà vu, painfully familiar to anyone who has followed the debate here, and yet at the same time strikingly different. One of the differences is the absence of pusillanimous, dissembling prevarication on the part of university administrators and other defenders of race preference. The South African debate is thus much more honest than ours. There is no artificial fig leaf of ?diversity? to cover what all recognize is a policy of ?racial redress.? The University of Cape Town, unlike universities here, does not dissemble. It ?has an openly stated policy of admitting blacks who have substantially lower test scores than whites....?

This policy, as does the identical but usually disguised policy here, places a difficult if not impossible burden on the best black students.

?Are we here because we?re black or are we here because we?re intelligent?? asked Sam Mgobozi, 19, a middle-class black student who attended a first-rate high school in Durban and finds affirmative action offensive, even as he concedes that poor black applicants may still need it....

Like other prosperous black students interviewed here, Mr. Mgobozi is deeply ambivalent about affirmative action. He said he would have gotten in without it, and explains, ?Black students work extremely hard just to prove we are here on the same merits as our white counterparts.?

But for many, perhaps most, of the black students that is impossible to prove because it?s simply not true. The university?s ?openly stated policy of admitting blacks who have substantially lower test scores than whites? means those students were not admitted ?on the same merits? as their white counterparts.

Another striking difference, at least on the evidence of this article, is that the South African debate does not seem to be so completely between left and right, at least in part because there are still prominent people on the left who, unlike their counterparts here, have not abandoned their traditional colorblind principles.

Prof. Neville Alexander, a Marxist sociologist who was classified as mixed race under apartheid, has roused the campus debate with the charge that affirmative action betrays the ideals of nonracialism that so many fought and died for during the long struggle against apartheid. Professor Alexander, who spent a decade imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, insists that the University of Cape Town, which is public, must resist pressure from the government to use racial benchmarks in determining how well the university is performing. ?The government under apartheid did the same and we told them to go to hell,? he said in one standing-room-only campus debate.

The role of social class in the debate there will also be familiar to American readers.

... Prof. André du Toit, who taught generations of students here the history of South African political thought, ... [says] the central question about what he called the university?s ?elitist version of race-based affirmative action? is whether it will reproduce an elitist society.

In ?The Next 25 Years,? a new book of essays on affirmative action by South African and American scholars, Professor du Toit writes that as black applicants increasingly come from the best high schools and well-off families, affirmative action will provide ?an ideological justification for privileging established black elite groups, at the expense of the African majority.?

Max Price, the vice chancellor and ?[a]ffirmative action?s champion on campus,? disagrees. The university is trying to create socio-economic proxies for race, but even if and when they are, Dr. Price contends,

race should still be considered. He estimated that about half of the most privileged black applicants would not make the cut without racial preferences.

Finally, there is one aspect of the Times article that is all too familiar to those who follow its coverage of affirmative here: an inability or unwillingness to expose the not rare incoherence of preference defenders. Thus in the sentence following Vice Chancellor Price?s prediction that half of even the most privileged blacks at the university would not have been without race preference, the Times writes:

In such a situation [preference based on socio-economic status but not race], he said, whites would dominate the top ranks of the class, while many disadvantaged blacks struggled with failure, reinforcing stereotypes.

But that is exactly what happens now, with the race preferences. As the Times article had noted earlier:

... even with extensive programs of compensatory instruction on campus to help disadvantaged students, just over half of the black students graduated in five years in recent years, while four out of five whites completed their educations in that time, university statistics show. ?We?re getting the best here and the best is struggling,? said a deputy vice chancellor, Crain Soudien.

Celia Dugger, the author of the Times article, did not point out or pursue this inconsistency, to the surprise of no one familiar with that paper?s coverage of affirmative action and other racial issues.

Full post as published by Discriminations on November 23, 2010 (boomark / email).