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Saturday October 26, 1996

Jews should oppose quotas as destructive and immoral

Eugene Volokh

Each year, 300 to 500 students are turned away from U.C. Berkeley because of their race.

If admissions were color-blind, these students -- Asians, whites, Jews, non-Jews -- would be going to U.C. Berkeley. But because of the color of their skin, they are turned away. In 1990s California, the state government has been intentionally, openly keeping students out of a university because they are the wrong race.

Imagine your son or your daughter telling you: "I just learned that I was denied admission to U.C. Berkeley because of my race." What can you say in response?

Do you say, "Well, that's too bad for you, but it's OK because it's good social engineering?" Do you say, "People whose skin was the same color as ours have oppressed people with a different color skin, so today it's right to penalize us and give a preference to the others?" Is that justice?

Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, is based on a very simple principle: Discrimination based on race, ethnicity and sex is immoral and destructive. As Jews, we should wholeheartedly endorse this principle.

We've faced discrimination. We've been kept out of schools because of our ethnicity. We sympathize with people who are discriminated against.

But we've always known that the right answer is equal treatment -- not preferences. We have wanted to be treated the same as others, not better than others. Sure, there's been a lot of discrimination to make up for. But we've known that you can't fight discrimination with discrimination. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Some people say that without affirmative action, blacks and Hispanics won't be able to succeed. That's nonsense, and patronizing nonsense to boot.

Lots of groups have been victims of fierce discrimination: Asians, Irish, Italians, Jews. But we've overcome this, by working hard and by demanding that we be treated without regard to our ethnicity. Many blacks and Hispanics are succeeding the same way today. We owe it to all groups to expect of them the same thing that we expect of ourselves.

Of course many ethnic groups have had it hard in America. We must never forget the indescribable cruelty of slavery, or the shame of state-sponsored segregation.

The kids who are applying to U.C. Berkeley today, though, have never been slaves. One hundred forty years ago, some of their ancestors may have been slaves.

But how does that justify race discrimination today? One hundred forty years ago, many of our ancestors were living in shtetls and being victimized daily by anti-Semitism. Some of our ancestors were serfs in Russia. The ancestors of many Asians were practically serfs in Asia.

What kind of twisted logic is it to penalize white and Asian kids today for the misdeeds of white slave owners, or even for the misdeeds of the more recent white segregationists?

Besides being immoral, race preferences are also deeply, powerfully corrosive of our society. Think about the lesson that race preferences teach. One day, the kids who were turned away from U.C. Berkeley might themselves be employers or school admissions officers. The government of California will tell them: "Remember, you must treat all applicants equally. Discrimination based on race or ethnicity is one of the worst things you can do."

Will they listen? When they know that the very same government is practicing race discrimination? When they know that they've been hurt by this discrimination, and that their children could be hurt by it, too? Or will they laugh at the government's duplicity, and forever forget the lessons of the civil rights movement -- that we must treat people the same regardless of the color of their skin?

Here's what I fear many of these kids will do if we don't stop race preferences today. They'll decide that, if the pie is being split among ethnic groups, they had better have the most powerful ethnic group around. That they'd better get together with people who look like them, vote for people who look like them, hire people who look like them, acquit people who look like them, and convict people who don't. After all, that's what it takes to make sure that their group is helped by the next round of preferences rather than hurt by them.

That is the logical outcome of race preferences: A California as bitterly divided into warring ethnicities as any Klansman or Nazi could dream. A place in which no group -- Jews, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, whites -- could sleep securely.

California is entering the 21st century more ethnically mixed than ever before. That can be a source of enormous strength for us. But if we set up policies that discriminate among us instead of uniting us, it can be a disaster.

Let me return for a moment to the U.C. system, this time to UCLA undergraduate admissions. As with any system that processes thousands of applicants each year, it's mostly tables, formulas and boxes. Academic credentials go on one axis, overcoming economic and educational adversity goes on another.

And then the final variable in the formulas -- race.

All applicants fall into four groups. Group I gets the biggest preferences, three points on the scale; that's blacks, American Indians and Chicanos. Group II gets two points; that's Latinos other than Chicanos. Group III gets one point; who's that? Filipinos. Group IV gets no boost -- that's "others."

Group I, Group II, Group III, Group IV. All of us neatly sorted into convenient pigeonholes by the bureaucracy of race. Is this the kind of California that we'd want our children to live in?

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