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11 Affirmative Action: Relevant Knowledge and Relevant Ignorance Joel J. Kuppertnan Affirmative action is one of those disturbing issues of our time, like that of abortion, about which reasonable people can disagree. The issue never is resolved, partly because what look to some like brute facts turn out to be highly interpreted; and the interpretations can be called into question. Part of the reason also for the stubbornness of disagreement is that essentially contestable terms, such as "right" or "justice," are part of what is being contested. The struggle is philosophical as well as political and ideological. Nevertheless, progress of a sort can be Inade simply by becoming clear about the obstacles to progress and about the character of the best arguments on both sides. The worst miscoIlception about affirmative action is that it is primarily concerned witrl redress or compensation for individual human beings who have been victimized. Robert Simon is surely correct in suggesting that the best justification is as a means of strengthening the position of disadvantaged groups. The best case in favor of affirmative action must be understood in relation to the empirical requirements of a kind of social enlgineering. This case then, as Simon also points out, is vulnerable to empirical doubts. Will the desired consequences actually come about? The victimization of a group can take a variety of forms. At one extreme , a large number of members of the group can actually be killed. The group can be repeatedly exposed to llostile words and deeds. Groups also can be denied opportunities, kept in isolation, treated with contempt, deprived of opportunities for initiative, "treated like children," and so on. None of these forms of behavior is excusable, and perhaps all call for compensation. But rnany of these raise issues that are far removed from the territory of affirmative action. What 182 Joel J. Kupperman Turks owe Armenians and Germans owe Jews has nothing to do with any claim (absurd on the face of it) that Armenians and Jews have been placed at a competitive disadvantage in modern industrial society or that there is a systematic cultural legacy of discouragement. The discouragement that is connected with demands for affirmative action is typically rooted in experiences of contempt and avoidance rather than hostility and confrontation and indeed is compatible with traditions of being the objects of benevolent, patronizing, and dismissive attitudes. If we look at data such as, for example, the significantly higher school dropout rates among Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans than among Cuban-Americans, it is tempting to form the following hypothesis. Some groups, because of historical factors (the circumstances in which they found themselves in America and their early treatment here), carry around sociological and psychological baggage that impedes their educational and economic performance. Two facts about this hypothesis should be noted immediately. One is that it might seem to the careless reader like a claim of victimization that calls out for compensation. But that is to read in a one-dimensional way the account of the group's misfortune; whatever happened to MexicanAmericans in this country was bad but certainly not as bad overall as genocide (although in one or two limited respects related to affirmative action it was actually much worse). Furthermore, the damage is not evenly distributed, and in any affirmative action program the first to benefit will be those individuals who were hardly damaged at all. Second, insofar as a group's baggage is linked to low group selfesteem , which can be counteracted in part by group pride, there is a conflict between the things the group will want to report as supporting a need for affirmative action and the things in its past that the group will want to dwell on. A careful account of the psychological and social damage wrought on the black family by slavery and Jim Crow will provide, on my view, strong support of the need for affirmative action. But the account itself, to the extent that it is persuasive, will also be demoralizing. Conversely, African Americans have a strong need for narratives of slaves who asserted their autonomy, slave revolts, slave families that held together despite obstacles, and so on. Those outside a group may underestimate how important it is for the group to have a version of the past that can ground positive developments in the future. But they may also underestimate how a different version of the past grounds persistent failures within the group. The empirical data that support the hypothesis that...

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