unz | The
phrase “angry white males” has been around awhile, but Donald Trump’s
election has pushed it to the forefront. Indeed, at least for some, it
is central to Trump’s election. As Steven M. Gillon put it in The Washington Post,
“Donald Trump has tapped into this anger and manipulated it to his
political advantage. The bond between President Trump and his white
followers is not based on policy but on grievance. They both reject the
cultural changes over the past half-century, and Trump’s Make America
Great Again slogan signals his intent to unravel them.”
Whether
this anger is somehow justified is, of course, a question of immense
complexity but let me offer three observations that explain its scope
regardless of its justification. My point is that affirmative action and
other egalitarian social engineering nostrums inescapably
spreads antagonisms beyond those immediately affected by the policies.
And the anger will only grow as government keeps pushing the egalitarian
fantasy.
First,
violating the merit principle, whether in college admissions or hiring
police officers guarantees disgruntled white males far in excess of its
true victims. Consider hiring five firefighters strictly according to
civil service exam scores. Let’s assume that a hundred men apply for the
position and can be ranked by test scores. The top four are white and
are hired. Now, thanks to a Department of Justice consent decree, the
fire department must hire at least one African American from the list
and if the highest ranking black scores at 20 in the array he will be
hired despite his middling score.
How
many white males have actually lost their job to a black? The correct
answer is exactly one, the fifth ranking applicant. But how many whites
will mistakenly believe that they lost out to an affirmative
action candidate? The answer is 14 since this is the number of rejected
white candidates between 6 and 19 and, to be honest, all can make a
legitimate claim of being passed over to satisfy the diversity bean
counters. Further fueling this anger is that each of those fourteen
“unfairly” rejected applicants may complain to family and friends and
thus tales of the alleged injustice multiply though, in fact, only a
single white applicant lost out to a less qualified black.
Affirmative
action is thus a white grievance multiplier if this information is
public (as is often the case in university admissions and in reverse
discrimination litigation). No doubt, every Spring when colleges and
professional schools such as law and medicine mail out their
acceptance/rejection letters, millions of white males can honestly
complain that they would have been admitted to their first choice if
they had only been black or Hispanic and judged exclusively by test
scores. Of course, if the university admitted all those whites who
exceeded the scores of the least qualified black, the university would
have to dramatically increase the freshman class, a policy that possibly
tantamount to admitting nearly every white applicant.
Second,
the greater the pressure to increase “diversity” via adding additional
under-qualified blacks and Hispanics and not expanding enrollment, the
greater the visible gap between affirmative action admittees and all
others. Again, everything is purely statistical. For example, in the
pre-affirmative action era only a few blacks attended college, nearly
all of whom got there on merit. Whites (and Asians) would likely view
them as equals, no small benefit in a society obsessed with expunging
“racist stereotypes” regarding black intellectual ability.
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