TGS Live: Amy Wax on Affirmative Action and the Two Race Realisms
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit glennloury.substack.comI was joined on last Friday’s livestream by my friend Amy Wax, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Carey School of Law, who offered a characteristically provocative engagement with issues of affirmative action, race, and intelligence. After I reviewed last Tuesday’s election results with Robert Patton-Spruill and Mark Sussman, Amy and I had a long conversation about the some of the most controversial topics out there.The Glenn Show is almost entirely audience-supported, so to those of us who are already full subscribers, let me extend a heartfelt thank you. And if you’re not yet a full subscriber, please consider becoming one. The Glenn Show can only do what it does through the generosity of viewers and listeners. For a mere $6/month or $50/year, you’ll get access to weekly livestreams, monthly Q&A episodes with John McWhorter, commenting privileges, access to the full Substack archives, and other exclusive bonus content.Those who haven’t been paying close attention to affirmative action since the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision will want to watch the show’s second segment closely. In it, Amy runs through a litany of issues involving schools, admissions criteria, and institutional practices that suggest the Court’s prohibition of race-conscious university admissions has hardly put the controversy to rest. The formal rules may have changed, but underlying conflicts over merit, racial representation, and equality continue to play out in schools, communities, and courts.I’ve long argued that affirmative action is a poor substitute for investments in development. Racial preferences at the point of selection obscure deeper problems in development processes prior to selection. The most salient issue is not who gets into what school but the processes and networks that create students who are prepared to flourish in whichever schools they attend.And there are other factors further complicating our understanding of opportunity, development, and achievement, like the incompletely understood relationship between development and inborn capacity, or “nature versus nurture,” if you like. And that can be an even touchier subject than affirmative action, as it raises the possibility that group disparities in performance may indicate empirical but yet-to-be isolated biological factors. Just ask a race realist how guarded people can get when that topic comes up.Self-described “race realists” often lament that they’re shut out of mainstream social and scientific debates before their ideas are subjected to disinterested analysis, or even before anyone bothers asking what a “race realist” is. So I asked Amy what she means when she describes herself with that term. Her answer was illuminating. She proposed a distinction between two facets of the paradigm, which she labeled “race realism 1” and “race realism 2.” The first involves acknowledging an empirical fact: average scores on tests of cognitive ability differ across racial groups. The second addresses the causes of those differences. To what extent do they reflect genetic inheritance, and to what extent do they arise from environmental circumstances and processes of human development?Amy accepts the first proposition but remains agnostic about the second. Acknowledging differences in measured cognitive performance, she emphasized, does not require endorsing any particular explanation for their origins. Maintaining that distinction is crucial, since merely pointing out group differences is sometimes regarded as a dog-whistling endorsement of innate racial hierarchies.We have incomplete knowledge when it comes to the scientific issue of intelligence and heritability. We have good evidence that genetic factors influence differences in cognitive ability between individuals, but establishing that observed differences between racial groups have a genetic origin would require disentangling environmental influences from inheritance. That is an extremely complicated problem, one we have only gone only a little way toward solving. Accordingly, epistemological modesty—admitting what we don’t know—is the wisest posture at present, though we must remain open to further scientific developments.Still, I do not think we can hand the entire debate about race and intelligence over to geneticists, no matter what they find. As a social scientist, I’m more interested in considering the consequences of measured differences between groups than I am in pursuing the origins of those differences. How we educate our young people and nurture their abilities, and how we respond to the obvious fact that some people are smarter than others are fundamentally social questions.My own work has emphasized that human development takes place within networks of relationships, institutions, and expectations. Understanding the distribution of abilities across populations is not merely a matter of innate endowment, because abilities realized in the classroom or the workplace aren’t bestowed at birth. They’re cultivated by families, friends, teachers, and the skeins of signification embodied by individual identities.Should genetics eventually explain why some people develop extraordinary cognitive abilities while others do not, those explanations would leave a host of crucial questions unanswered. How should we distribute educational opportunities? Are there conditions under which racial preferences are justifiable? Are we obliged to provide those without highly rewarded abilities some subsidizing benefits?While democratic principles do not require that we treat everyone as though they possess equal abilities, they do require that we respect the dignity of each person equally. They require that we maintain the moral proposition of the equal worth of persons even while acknowledging that talent is unequally distributed. In time, science may be able to expand our understanding of the unequal distribution of ability, a development we should welcome. But that would not resolve complex questions about the development of our capacities, how we accord moral recognition, and how we reward those who realize their potential.In other words, scientific knowledge regarding the origins of human ability can aid in the improvement and maintenance of a decent society, but it cannot do so on its own. Our traditions, our institutions, our communities, and our commitments to one another knead raw human material into its final shape. Only a small portion of that molding process can be captured by standardized test results.Yet we cannot afford to ignore or suppress scientific truth in the name of a superficial morality. When and if the evidence about innate cognitive differences between groups comes in, we’ll do ourselves no good behaving in ways that contradict it. Accepting the evidence will almost certainly lead to a certain degree of discomfort, but we cannot act as though science absolves us of our responsibilities to each other. Maintaining those responsibilities even in the face of hard evidence about group differences may well, at some future date, provide a monumental challenge to our society. We must prepare ourselves now. Engaging in good-faith discussions, like the one I had with Amy, is a good first step. If we cannot even do that, we may well be setting ourselves up for disaster.
