Personally, I think you are understating the effect here.
People like to think that Affirmative Action programs work with a handful of people that are all equally qualified and a minority candidate gets 1 point added to the scoring system so they get whatever they are applying for by virtue of a slim margin. But that’s hardly ever the way it works out.
I had this discussion with a group of people about 20 years ago and as we put the pieces together, it seemed to fit.
Take, for example, a typical high school kid getting ready to graduate. Let’s call him “Johnny”. Johnny doesn’t come from a “well to do” family. They aren’t poor, just average. Let’s say he goes and takes the ACT test in order to get ready to apply to colleges and he scores a “27”. (For those not familiar with the ACT, the scale is 1–36 and the average score is usually just over a “20”. ) That 27 is a pretty decent score. Not outstanding but if you map the ACT score results on a bell curve, a 27 puts you in the top 25% of the pack.
Johnny’s family can’t really afford to send Johnny to college so Johnny heads down to the local military recruiting office to find out about getting an ROTC scholarship. So the recruiter starts filling out paperwork and asks for Johnny’s ACT score and Johnny tells him.
Now, if Johnny fills out the form and checks off that he is “white” and “male”, he needs a minimum score of 28 to be accepted into the program. If he checks of any other choices he only needs a 21 to be accepted. That may not seem like much (It’s only 7 points, right?) but if you line up everyone that is eligible, that 7 points represents 400,000 people that just stepped in line in front of Johnny just based on that one qualifying factor alone. And they ALL happen to not be white males. So Johnny doesn’t get into the ROTC program.
And then Johnny starts applying to schools on his own hoping for scholarships. The same thing with watching thousands of people that aren’t white males step into the line ahead of him happens with both the acceptance and the scholarship programs.
But Johnny finally ends up at a tier 3 school that he can afford to attend and graduates 4 years later with a 3.7 GPA. He moves back to his hometown, writes up his resume and starts submitting to job postings. He goes to interviews and every time he’s put in a room with other candidates to await their turn.
And he looks around that room and sees his former classmates that happen to be minority candidates that got that ROTC scholarship, got accepted at a tier 1 school and graduated with a lower GPA than he did and now he’s competing against them through another Affirmative Action program to get the one open position.
And when Johnny doesn’t get the job and gets frustrated and complains about it he’s told that he shouldn’t be bitter because he has all the advantages and privileges of being a white male. So here he is at age 22 or 23 wondering exactly which advantages he’s had all along here because for every major event he’s had in the last 5 years, he’s been shot down because of his race and/or sex.
If he’d been passed over at one stage by 1 point, people like Johnny would probably shrug it off. But after a while when you see people stepping in line ahead of you at every line you go to, at some point Johnny has to start wondering when he gets to compete on even terms. But the answer to that from affirmative action advocates is “never”.
You saw it happen once and you kind of shrugged it off which, I think is pretty normal. Would you have the same response be if that was the 30th time you’d seen it? And what would be your response if each time you saw it happen was a building block towards another future event? Isn’t that what we refer to as “systemic”?
