Liberals often try to defend affirmative action as fair compensation for historical injustice. To put their argument crudely and briefly, they say that whites got ahead unfairly for centuries, and now it’s time to help blacks get ahead.

Regardless of its philosophical merits or demerits, this argument is incredibly controversial. On its face, it allows an analogy to be drawn between historical discrimination against blacks and the proposed discrimination for blacks, and against whites, in the present. In other words, this argument is vulnerable to cries of “reverse discrimination” and “reverse racism,” and to calls for stopping discrimination altogether.

But the historical-injustice argument is not the only or the best argument for affirmative action. Liberals do better when they argue that affirmative action is justified as a remedy for current discrimination. They need to show how affirmative action is not the enemy of “merit,” but its protector.

For decades, conservatives have argued that affirmative action subverts merit by helping less qualified minorities and hurting more qualified whites, whether in college admissions, employment decisions, government contracts, etc. They have assumed the existence of impartial tests and procedures, e.g. the SAT or the written firefighting exam at issue in Ricci v. Destefano, whose results affirmative action ignores or shortchanges. When these tests show wide gaps in performance between the races, conservatives shrug their shoulders and say that’s too bad. After all, it’s not our fault blacks don’t do as well on these tests. Or, if it is, then the proper solution is better education (which, of course, means school vouchers) and better parenting. Whatever you do, though, you can’t just throw out the results of an impartial test of merit.

This argument is susceptible at its very roots. What if the tests aren’t impartial? What if they’re not predictive of future performance? What if they have a hidden bias that helps whites and hurts blacks?

That’s why the finding that the SAT “favors one ethnic group over another” is so potentially huge, if further studies verify it. As Daniel Luzer of the Washington Monthly summarizes:

[The study's] core findings suggest that disadvantaged black students do better on hard questions, which contain large words with unambiguous meanings. Students can learn these words in practicing for the SAT. Black students do worse, however, on easy questions, which are mostly made up of simple words. “Simpler words tended to have more meanings, and in some cases different meanings in white middle class neighborhoods than they had in underprivileged minority neighborhoods,” according to Matthews.

Now, this is just one study and it seems to be very controversial within the field of people who study such things. But it is one more reason for liberals not to accept the paradigm that makes them out to be the enemies of merit. Merit is a very difficult thing to measure, and conservatives have assumed for too long that merit is fully captured by historically contingent tests and procedures.

Maybe we’ll never have a definitive answer on whether the SAT is as fair as it could be. But it seems to me that, given what we know, you have to make one of two assumptions. Here’s how I put it last month, in response to the Stephanie Grace brouhaha:

In order to justify assessments of “merit” where blacks and whites perform differently from one another, you have to assume that they perform differently because they actually are different and immutably so: because blacks are dumber, or less cut-out to be firefighters, or what have you. In order to critique those assessments of “merit,” you have to assume that blacks and whites have basically equal capacities, and that differential outcomes on certain assessments are attributable to differences in cultural background, education, social class, etc.

So, this latest study on the SAT is just one datum in favor of the latter assumption. But the more important point is, look how revolting the former assumption is. Yet, what other assumption could underlie the right’s defense of the sanctity of test results, its insistence that merit is totally and exclusively measured by the likes of the SAT?

Affirmative action isn’t the privileging of “justice” or “compensation” over “merit.” It’s part of the search for merit, taking account of the fact that we live in a race-conscious society with a lot of historical baggage.

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