Just as we cannot presuppose continuing control over the scope and duration of preferential
policies, so we cannot simply assume what will actually happen to those designated
as the preferred group or groups. Neither they nor the non-preferred groups are inert
blocks of wood to be moved here and there according to someone else’s grand design.
Both confront laws and policies as incentives and constraints, not as predestination,
and react in their own ways. These reactions include redesignating themselves,
altering their own efforts and attitudes toward achievement, and altering their attitudes
toward members of other groups. Designation and Redesignation
One of the reactions of members of non-preferred groups has been to get themselves redesignated
as members of the preferred group. This can be done either individually or collectively.
Some individuals of mixed ancestry who have been regarded and selfidentified as members of group A
may choose to redesignate themselves as members of group B, when group B is entitled to preferential
treatment and members of group A are not. In the United States, during the Jim Crow era,
some light-skinned blacks simply “passed” as white, in order to escape the legal and social
disadvantages that went with being designated black. Later, during the era of affirmative
action, whites with traces of American Indian or other minority ancestry likewise redesignated
themselves, in order to take advantage of preferential policies for disadvantaged groups.
These have included blond-haired and blue-eyed individuals with official papers
showing some distant ancestor of another race. The number of individuals identifying
themselves as American Indians in the U.S. Census during the affirmative action era
rose at a rate exceeding anyone’s estimates of the biological growth of this population.
Moreover, a breakdown of Census data by age cohort shows that the number of American Indians
increased over time in the same age cohort—a biological impossibility made possible on paper
by redesignations of the same individuals. For example, the number of American Indians who were
aged 15–19 in 1960 was just under 50,000. But, twenty years later, when these same
individuals would be in the age bracket 35–39 years old, there were more than
80,000 American Indians in that cohort. In other words, more than 30,000 people in the
same cohort who had not designated themselves as American Indians in 1960 now did so in 1980,
causing more than a 60 percent increase in the number of American Indians in that cohort.
A similar pattern emerged among the Aborigines in Australia.
A study in that country found that there was “a 42 percent increase in the size of the
Aboriginal population between the 1981 and the 1986 censuses”—virtually a demographic
impossibility in five years, except by redesignation of the same individuals
with different ethnic labels. As an Australian scholar has noted:
The dramatic increase in numbers has much to do with record keeping, increasing intermarriage
and the growing availability of substantial subsidies to people of Aboriginal descent... The
definition of ‘Aboriginal’ includes many persons of predominantly non-Aboriginal descent, who might
with equal or greater genetic justification designate themselves as non-Aborigines.
It was much the same story in China where, in the 1990s, more than 10 million Chinese
proclaimed their ethnic minority status, in order to gain preferential treatment, such as college
admissions. Even China’s draconian restrictions on having more than one child did not apply to
ethnic minorities as they did to the majority Han Chinese: Article 44 states that, “in accordance
with legal stipulations,” autonomous areas can work out their own family planning measures.
As a result, urban minority couples generally may have two children, while urban Han are restricted
to one. Rural minorities may have two, three, four or even more children, depending on their
ethnicity and location. An official of China’s State Nationality Affairs Committee commented:
“Some people would try all means to change their nationality because they wanted to
make themselves eligible to enter a university with lower scores or to stand a better chance
than their colleagues when it comes to promotion.” As in other countries, people with mixed ancestry
had the option of choosing how to designate themselves.
Some “traced their ancestry back hundreds of years to prove minority blood” and claim the benefits.
Another individual response to preferential policies has been to use someone genuinely of the
qualifying ancestry as a “front” for businesses seeking preferential treatment in the awarding of
government contracts or other desired benefits. This practice has been so widespread in both
Indonesia and Malaysia that it has acquired a name—“Ali-Baba enterprises,” where Ali is the
indigenous individual who ostensibly owns the business and is legally entitled to government
benefits, while Baba is the non-indigenous person (usually Chinese in these countries) who actually
controls the enterprise and essentially pays Ali for the use of his name and ancestry.
Similar arrangements have been uncovered in the United States and elsewhere.
Anti-Semitic policies in Poland during the years between the two World Wars
likewise led some Jewish businesses there to operate behind Gentile front men. Decades later,
under preferential policies in Kenya, Africans served as fronts for Asian-owned businesses,
as they likewise served as fronts for Lebanese-owned businesses in Sierra Leone.
Members of some non-preferred groups can also get themselves redesignated collectively.
The Fourteenth Amendment to India’s Constitution,
like the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States,
provides for equal treatment of individuals but India’s Constitution provides explicit exceptions
for benefits to the untouchables, disadvantaged tribal groups outside the Hindu caste system
and “other backward classes.” This last proviso, especially, has
created opportunities for many other groups to get themselves collectively designated as being among
the “other backward classes.” Eventually, this miscellaneous classification provided
more individuals with the coveted rights to preferential treatment than were provided
to the members of the untouchable and tribal groups for whom the preferences were created.
In 1997, organized efforts were also begun to seek preferential treatment for India’s
15 million eunuchs, though obviously they were not the descendants of other eunuchs,
and so could not inherit historic group disadvantages. Redesignations of individuals
and groups, like the spread of preferences from given groups to other groups, take preferential
policies further and further away from the initial rationales on which they were based.
No historic sufferings of blacks in the United States can justify preferential benefits to
white women or to recently arrived immigrants from Asia or Latin America who happen to be non-white,
but whose ancestors obviously never suffered any discrimination in the United States.
Similarly, the painful history and continuing oppression of untouchables in India
can hardly justify preferential benefits to local majorities in particular states,
such as Assam, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh.
Yet these local majorities and members of “other backward classes” outnumber
the untouchables and are often in a better position to take advantage of the preferences.
Thus quotas for government jobs or university admissions have often remained unfilled by
untouchables, while this has seldom been the case for members of the “other backward classes.”
The spread of benefits from group to group not only dilutes those benefits—especially
when more than half the population of the country becomes entitled to them,
as in both India and the United States—it can also make the initial beneficiaries worse off
after the terms of the competition are altered. For example, in the United States, where hiring
and promotions decisions are subject to review by government agencies investigating discrimination,
objective criteria may be used increasingly by employers for legal self-protection,
even if the relevance of these criteria to the job are questionable.
If these criteria are met more often by one of the preferred groups than by another—if
white women have college degrees more often than black men, for example—then
one preferred group may be no better off, on net balance, than if the preferences did not exist.
It is conceivable that they can be worse off. Such a situation is not peculiar to the United States.
An official report in India in 1980 noted that the advancement of one preferred group tended to
“push back” another, creating “greater tension between structural neighbors in this hierarchy
than between the top level and the bottom level.” That continued to be so in the 1990s, with violent
clashes in several Indian states being found to be more common among competing poorer groups than
between these groups and the more elite castes. In 2001, a rally was held in the state of
Rajasthan, protesting the inclusion of new groups among the backward classes
and demanding “separate fixed quotas for original backwards” so that “new entrants” would not be
able to reduce the existing benefits enjoyed by those for whom the preferences were created.
Calls have been made for a “quota within quota” to deal with such situations. In so far as
affirmative action policies are aimed particularly at offsetting existing economic disadvantages,
their rationale is undermined when the benefits of these policies go disproportionately to those
individuals within the designated groups who are the least disadvantaged—or perhaps are in
more favorable positions than members of the country’s general population.
In India’s state of Tamil Nadu, for example, the highest of the so-called “backward classes”
legally entitled to preferences, constituting 11 percent of the total “backward classes”
population in that state, received almost half of all jobs and university admissions
set aside for these classes. In Malaysia, where there are preferences
for the indigenous “sons of the soil” majority, Malay students whose families were in the top 17
percent of the income distribution received just over half of all scholarships awarded to Malays.
In Sri Lanka, preferential university admissions for people from backward regions of the country
appear likewise to have benefited primarily students from affluent families in those regions.
This should hardly be surprising, nor is it necessarily a matter of corruption. Preferential
access to education or jobs is just one factor in getting the education or the job. Obviously,
those people who have more of the other factors required are better able to turn preferential
access into actual success. Pre-existing prosperity provides more of those other factors.
Those American minority business owners who participate in the preferential program called
business “set-asides” under Section 8(a) of the Small Business Act average a personal net worth
that is not only higher than the average net worth of the groups they come from,
but also higher than the average personal net worth of Americans in general.
A scholarly study of group preferences in India pointed out that preferences that benefit
more fortunate members of less fortunate groups
“borrow legitimacy from the national commitment to ameliorate the condition of the lowest,”
while at the same time “they undermine that commitment by broadcasting a picture of
unrestrained preference for those who are not distinctly worse off than non-beneficiaries.”
Just as specifying the scope and duration of affirmative action policies has proven illusory,
so has the designation of the beneficiaries in accordance with the rationales of these policies.
Both attempts suffer from assuming far more comprehensive knowledge and control
than anyone has been able to exercise, in any of the
countries in which preferential programs have been instituted.
What has also been over-estimated is the extent to which the attitudes resulting from such
programs can be assumed to be beneficial to the groups concerned or to the country
at large. These attitudes tend to respond to incentives, rather than to rationales.