Affirmative

The invaluable Walter Russell Mead, musing on one of the implications of the Supreme Court decision that came down on Tuesday:

Historical justice is in any case an impossible thing to define—much less to administer. What does an Irish person, descended from a long line of dispossessed peasants who suffered generations of discrimination and exploitation under British law, deserve today by way of compensation? What reparations should Russia, as the successor state to the Soviet Union, pay citizens of the Baltic republics for fifty years of brutal misrule? What should the innocent Jewish victims of Arab anti-Israel frenzy, often expropriated and driven out of their homes across the Arab world following the establishment of the State of Israel, get as compensation? How much do modern Americans owe the Cherokee—and on and on and on?

I would wager that the vast majority of Americans have ancestors who were under the heel of some form of tyranny. I am the great-great grandson of a German-speaking Catholic who left Bavaria to avoid being conscripted into the Prussian army, where he would have had the opportunity to be cannon fodder in a war against the French. My great-great grandfather left everything behind and settled in Wisconsin, as did thousands of other people. I am also of Irish ancestry, and my ancestors fit the description of dispossessed peasants; some of these ancestors arrived in the Midwest directly from County Cork, while others were the descendants of Irish indentured servants who had come to Canada as indentured servants in the 1700s. If you search your ancestry, you're likely to find a similar story.

Having said that, Mead also cautions that we ignore or minimize the effects of racism at our peril:

There’s a basic point that should not be forgotten in dealing with anything touching on race: The place of African Americans in the United States is a uniquely difficult and charged question. The history of slavery, segregation and entrenched racism in the United States cannot be denied and should not be minimized. The effects of this history are still very much with us today, and while the overwhelming majority of Americans repudiate racist ideologies and beliefs, the continuing presence of racist ideas, prejudices and emotions in this country is a reality that policy makers and people of good will cannot and should not ignore.

It is naive to think otherwise, and any look at how our system works and any thoughts about whether it works fairly have to include a serious and honest reflection on the fading but real potency of race.

He's right, of course. The devil is in the details, though, as in this example:

Affirmative action programs in college admissions often have perverse results. A young woman of Korean ancestry, for example, is likely to have to do much better than her African American or Latino peers (both female and male) to get a spot at the University of California. Yet this Korean girl in no way enjoys unfair advantages in American life due to past anti-black racism. Indeed, she is a victim of racist immigration legislation; anti-Asian immigration laws placed barriers in the path of her ancestors’ immigration to the US. She perhaps would be from a much wealthier family if her great grandparents hadn’t been barred by US law from settling here.

It seems perverse and grotesque that someone who played no part in any racist history, a first generation immigrant from a hard working family, should suffer discrimination in an effort to remedy past injustices and one can hardly complain when voters tell their state governments that such policies must stop.

We've been pretty involved in the college admissions game lately. We're now at the point where many colleges are having trouble attracting male students, for a variety of reasons. If you were to ignore everything that happened before and address the current state of higher education in this country, if the proverbial man from Mars were to look at the issue, the conclusion would be that girls, especially white girls, have an unfair advantage, because in many schools the male/female ratio is approaching 40/60. Given the historical context of sexism, would you want to limit the opportunities of young women?

There aren't easy answers to these questions. This much seems certain -- by deciding that the state of Michigan can make its own decisions, the Court recognizes that social reform is always going to be problematic.