Michael Barone: Time to junk racial quotas in higher education

“It’s time for enlightened America to hit reset on affirmative action once and for all,” writes Columbia linguistics professor John McWhorter in The American Interest. By affirmative action, of course, he means the racial quotas and preferences that most selective colleges' and universities' admissions departments employ.

“The reason America can never truly come together in understanding racial preferences is not benighted racism rearing its ugly head as always,” he goes on, “It’s because the rationales simply no longer make any damned sense.” Forty years ago, they were arguably needed to reverse anti-black discrimination. Today, beneficiaries tend to come from upscale households or from among new immigrant families never subject to discrimination here.

The weakness of the case in favor of racial quotas and preferences—which are, literally, racial discrimination, otherwise banned by the Fourteenth Amendment and the 1964 Civil Rights Act—is illustrated by a Washington Post column by the thoughtful liberal Charles Lane, subtitled “Why restart the war?”

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