Race Relations
Helping by Hurting
Imagine two kids trying out for the school basketball team. One of them is a great shooter and works hard every day after school. The other one is not quite as good but gets a spot on the team anyway because of who his family is. Now imagine how both kids feel. The first kid is angry because he was passed over for reasons that had nothing to do with basketball. The second kid wonders, deep down, if he really belongs there. And the team is not as good as it could be.
That is pretty much what happens when schools, businesses, and the government pick people based on their race, sex, or other group identity instead of their skills and hard work. These programs go by different names. You may have heard of Affirmative Action, or DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The people who created these programs wanted to help groups they thought were being treated unfairly. But the road to a bad destination is often paved with good intentions. These programs, whatever their intentions, cause real harm to everyone they touch.
The Badge That Says "You Did Not Earn This"
In 1954, the Supreme Court decided a famous case called Brown v. Board of Education. Black children had been forced to go to separate schools. The Court said that even if those schools had the same buildings and books, separating kids by race put a kind of invisible badge on Black children that said they were less than everyone else. That invisible badge hurt them in ways that went far beyond the classroom.
Here is something important to think about: does a lower standard do the same thing?
If a college tells a Black student, "We will accept you even though your grades and test scores are not as high as we normally require," what message does that send? It tells that student, and everyone around that student, that they needed special help to get in. It plants a seed of doubt. Did they earn their place, or were they given it? That doubt can follow a person their entire life. When they graduate and get a job, people may wonder: "Were they the best person for this, or were they hired to fill a quota?" That doubt is not fair to the student who worked hard. And it is a badge of inferiority just as surely as a separate school building ever was.
Lower Standards Hurt Everyone
Here is a simple truth: when you lower the bar, you change what the bar means.
A college degree used to signal something important. It meant that the person who earned it had passed a serious test. Not everyone could do it. When only 15 or 20 out of every 100 people could get a college degree, that degree opened doors. Employers knew it meant something real.
Today, many colleges no longer require students to take the SAT or ACT entrance exams. Some medical schools and law schools have dropped their tests too. Supporters say the tests are unfair to certain groups. But there is a big problem with that argument. Students who come from Asian countries, many of whom learned English as a second language and grew up in a completely different culture, actually score higher on these tests on average than students born and raised here. If the tests are so biased against people who are not white, how do we explain that? The "bias" argument, when you look at the evidence, does not hold up.
What happens when almost anyone can get into almost any college, as long as they belong to the right group? The degree stops meaning what it used to mean. It stops telling employers anything useful. Everyone loses, including the graduates who worked hard and truly earned their degree, because now their diploma is mixed in with degrees that were handed out for reasons that had nothing to do with ability.
The Worst of It: Real Lives at Risk
Some decisions are just about jobs or school seats. But some decisions are about life and death.
Think about a firefighter. When a building is on fire and someone is trapped inside, the firefighter who goes in has to be strong enough, fast enough, and trained enough to bring that person out alive. If the firefighter was given the job because of their race or sex rather than because they passed the toughest tests and training, the person trapped in that building may pay the price. Nobody in a burning building cares what the firefighter looks like. They care whether that firefighter can get them out alive.
The same is true for pilots. When a plane is coming in to land in a blizzard with almost no visibility, the passengers are not thinking about whether the pilot represents any particular group. They are thinking about whether that pilot is the very best at what they do, tested and proven over years of rigorous training.
The idea that "I want someone who looks like me" as a doctor, a pilot, or a firefighter sounds nice on the surface. But it is dangerous when it means putting someone in a role they did not fully earn. The standard should be simple: who is the best person for this job? If that turns out to be all one group or all another group, so be it. But that decision must be made on skill and training alone, not on what anyone looks like.
It Has Failed Everywhere It Has Been Tried
The United States is not the only country that has tried programs like this. The economist Thomas Sowell spent years studying what happened in countries around the world when governments set aside special benefits for particular racial or ethnic groups.
One of the most striking examples is Malaysia. Starting in 1970, the Malaysian government created a program to give the Malay majority group preferences in college admissions, jobs, and business contracts. The program ran for more than 30 years. What happened? The promised improvement in Malay performance never really came. The best Chinese and Indian students, who faced discrimination in their own country, left Malaysia and went somewhere else to get their education and build their careers. Businesses found ways to cheat the system. The groups the program was supposed to help were left behind, while the well-connected people at the top benefited most. And after three decades, the Malaysian government had to quietly admit that their system was not producing enough skilled graduates to keep the country competitive. They started moving back toward merit-based standards.
That is not a success story. That is a cautionary tale.
What Actually Works
None of this means we should ignore genuine unfairness when we find it. If a school system in a poor neighborhood does not have good teachers or up-to-date materials, fix the school. If a child grows up without access to tutoring or a quiet place to study, help that child. Attack the problem where it actually exists, not at the finish line.
Giving someone a college seat, a job, or a promotion they did not qualify for does not fix the problem that made them unqualified in the first place. It just moves the problem somewhere it can cause more damage. And it leaves behind everyone who did qualify but was passed over for reasons that had nothing to do with their abilities.
The right goal is a world where every person is judged by what they can do, not by what group they belong to. That is not just fair to individuals. It is what makes the whole country stronger.
Every great athlete, surgeon, pilot, teacher, or engineer who got their position because they were the best person for it can walk into that role with their head held high. That confidence matters. And every person who benefits from their work, their care, or their skill deserves to know that the person serving them earned that role fair and square. That is not asking too much. It is the very least a just society owes to everyone in it.