With affirmative action suddenly coming under political attack from many directions, and with
even liberals backing away from it, we need to question not only its underlying assumptions
but also what some of the alternatives are. At the heart of the affirmative action approach is
the notion that statistical disparities show discrimination. No dogma has taken a deeper
hold with less evidence—or in the face of more massive evidence to the contrary. A recent story
in the Wall Street Journal revealed that more than four-fifths of all the doughnut shops in
California are owned by Cambodians. That is about the same proportion as blacks among basketball
stars. Clearly, neither of these disparities is due to discrimination against whites.
Nor are such disparities new or peculiar to the United States.
In medieval Europe, most of the inhabitants of the towns in Poland and Hungary were neither Poles nor
Hungarians. In nineteenth-century Bombay, most of the shipbuilders were Parsees, a minority in
Bombay and less than one percent of the population of India. In twentieth-century Australia, most of
the fishermen in the port of Freemantle came from two villages in Italy. In southern Brazil, whole
industries were owned by people of German ancestry and such crops as tomatoes and tea have been grown
predominantly by people of Japanese ancestry. Page after page—if not book after book—could
be filled with similar statistical disparities from around the world and down through history.
Such disparities have been the rule, not the exception. Yet our courts have turned reality
upside down and treated what happens all over this planet as an anomaly and what is seldom
found anywhere—proportional representation—as a norm. Why are such disparities so common?
Because all kinds of work require particular skills, particular experience,
particular locations and particular orientations. And none of these things is randomly distributed.
Local demagogues who thunder against the fact that Koreans run so many stores in black ghettoes
merely betray their ignorance when they act as if this were something strange or unusual.
For most of the merchants in an area to be of a different race or ethnicity from their customers
has been common for centuries in Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa, the Caribbean, Fiji,
the Ottoman Empire and numerous other places. When German and Jewish merchants moved into Eastern
Europe in the Middle Ages, they brought with them much more experience in that occupation than that
possessed by local Eastern European merchants, who were often wiped out by the new competition.
Even when the competition takes place between people who are racially and ethnically identical,
all kinds of historical, geographical and other circumstances can make one set of these people
far more effective in some activities than the others. Mountain people have often lagged
behind those on the plains below, whether highland Scots versus lowland Scots or the Sinhalese in the
highlands of Sri Lanka versus the Sinhalese on the plains. The Slavs living along the Adriatic coast
in ports like Dubrovnik were for centuries far more advanced than Slavs living in the interior,
just as coastal peoples have tended to be more advanced than peoples of the interior
hinterlands in Africa or Asia. Some disparities of course have their roots in discrimination.
But the fatal mistake is to infer discrimination whenever the statistical disparities exceed
what can be accounted for by random chance. Human beings are not random. They have very pronounced
and complex cultural patterns. These patterns are not unchanging. But changing them for the better
requires first acknowledging that “human capital” is crucial to economic advancement. Those who
make careers out of attributing disparities to the wickedness of other people are an obstacle to the
development of more human capital among the poor. There was a time, as late as the mid-nineteenth
century, when Japan lagged far behind the Western industrial nations because it was lacking in the
kind of human capital needed in a modern economy. Importing Western technology was not enough,
for the Japanese lacked the knowledge and experience required to operate it effectively.
Japanese workmen damaged or ruined machinery when they tried to use it.
Fabrics were also ruined when the Japanese tried to dye them without understanding chemistry.
Whole factories were badly designed and had to be reconstructed at great cost. What
saved the Japanese was that they recognized their own backwardness—and worked for generations
to overcome it. They did not have cultural relativists to tell them that all cultures
are equally valid or political activists to tell them that their troubles were all somebody else’s
fault. Nor were there guilt-ridden outsiders offering them largess. Affirmative action
has been one of the great distractions from the real task of self-development.
When it and the mindset that it represents passes from the scene, poorer minorities can become
the biggest beneficiaries, if their attention and efforts turn toward improving themselves.
Unfortunately, a whole industry of civil rights activists, politicians and miscellaneous hustlers
has every vested interest in promoting victimhood, resentment and paranoia instead.