Neolibs sometimes flirt with race-based affirmative action despite it being a political loser. But the deeper problem isn't the polling, it's that the policy fails on its own philosophical terms.

**From the article**:

Imagine two students applying to medical school in the US. Student A has excellent grades, attended a top-tier private school, and has a parent who is a physician. Student B has slightly lower grades, attended an underfunded public school, and has parents who never finished high school.

You have one seat. Who gets it?

Most people I know, across the political spectrum, would pick Student B. The reasoning is simple: Student B achieved nearly as much under far worse conditions, which is itself evidence of exceptional ability. Admitting Student B is not charity. It is a better read of the data.

Now change one variable. Student A is Black. Student B is white. Does your answer change?

If you support race-based affirmative action, you may have a problem. Your stated rationale is that race functions as a proxy for disadvantage. But in this scenario the proxy points the wrong direction. If you switch your answer because of race, you have abandoned the principle you claimed to be defending. If you keep your answer, you have conceded that what matters is disadvantage, not skin color.

Race-based affirmative action doesn't do this at all. The Black student who benefits most from preferential admissions at Harvard is, statistically, not the descendant of sharecroppers in Mississippi. She is disproportionately likely to be the daughter of recent immigrants (a Nigerian doctor, say, or a Jamaican engineer) or an upper-middle-class family from the suburbs. Meanwhile, the white student who loses that seat may be a first-generation college applicant from rural Appalachia whose family has been poor for generations.

Unequal outcomes do not automatically prove discrimination. Benatar makes this point clearly: if statistical underrepresentation proved discrimination, then men would be the primary victims of systemic bias in numerous domains. Men are 93% of the federal prison population. Men account for roughly 92% of workplace fatalities. Boys receive roughly 70% of out-of-school suspensions despite being about half of enrollment. Nobody proposes affirmative action for men in any of these categories. The logic of "underrepresentation equals discrimination" is only ever applied selectively, and that selectivity is quite revealing.

In the SFFA v. Harvard litigation, expert testimony from Peter Arcidiacono demonstrated that Asian American applicants consistently received lower "personal ratings" from Harvard admissions officers than other racial groups, despite outperforming them on academics and extracurriculars. Alumni interviewers, who met the applicants face-to-face, rated Asian Americans comparably to whites. It was the admissions office, working only from files, that rated them lower. Harvard's own 2013 internal report had flagged a statistically significant penalty against Asian American applicants.

This is what a "holistic" admissions process looks like in practice: it gives institutions the cover to penalize one minority group for the benefit of another, while claiming to care about "diversity" in general. The racial categories we use don't just sort people. They actually create new victims.

The very act of sorting human beings into racial categories for the purpose of distributing benefits is an enterprise that reinforces the social salience of the categories themselves. If the ultimate goal is a society in which race does not determine life outcomes, then a policy that requires race to determine admissions outcomes is working at cross-purposes with its own stated end.

For Harvard's Class of 2028, the first class admitted after the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions, Black enrollment fell from 18% to 14%. At MIT, the drop was sharper: Black freshmen went from roughly 15% to 5%. Hispanic enrollment at Harvard rose slightly, from 14% to 16%. Asian American enrollment held steady at 37%.

Race-based affirmative action was a well-intentioned attempt to solve a real problem. It was the right impulse channeled through the wrong mechanism. After fifty years and a Supreme Court reversal, we have an opportunity to build something better: a system that cares about disadvantage without sorting people into the same racial categories that caused the disadvantage in the first place.

The goal was always equality of opportunity. We should have the courage to pursue it with tools that don’t contradict it.

Who Counts as Black Enough?