Crash Course: Political Theory

Affirmative action in college admissions is over.

Thats per a 2023 landmark decision from the United States Supreme Court.

In his concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that race-based admissions, quote, fly in the face of our colorblind Constitution."

This ruling overturned decades of laws and policies put into place during the Civil Rights movement that tried to repair the harms of racial discrimination in American life, and came to be known as affirmative action.

As a professor, I think repairing these harms and overcoming racial discrimination in college admissions is essential.

But is there a world in which Justice Thomas is onto something?

Is our Constitution colorblind?

And does that mean our laws should be?

I'm Ellie Anderson, and this is Crash Course Political Theory.

[THEME MUSIC] I knew that affirmative action was divisive.

Folks on the right often argue that laws should be race-neutral in order to be fair, while those on the left tend to argue for race-conscious laws to balance the historical scales.

But what I didnt know until I started digging was that the seeds of this debate can be traced all the way back to the founding principles of our democracy.

In episode 2, we introduced liberalism a political philosophy based on individual rights.

To be clear, this isnt about liberal or conservative politics; its about the broader concepts of freedom and liberty.

You know, the stuff we celebrate with fireworks and hot dogs and bald eagle paraphernalia.

Anyway, the philosopher John Locke was a big influence on early American politics.

His idea of the social contract is baked right into the Declaration of Independence.

Basically, it says that liberalism relies on a trade-off: the government protects the peoples rights, and in return, the people agree to be governed.

Bear with me, Im getting back to affirmative action.

It turns out that this OG version of American liberalism does rely, much like Justice Thomas said, on what political theorists call identity blindness.

It suggests that rights for one protect rights for all, so we dont need to factor in social identifiers like race, class, and gender.

It assumes that we all start from the same place.

But because the people who came up with liberalism were 17th-century white guys, this version of liberalism assumes we all start from that place.

To which, Im gonna have to say: au contraire.

Hold on, Im gonna need a double for this one.

Much better.

Lets go.

It turns out, Im not the first to object to this idea.

An author I often turn to, the British political scientist Carole Pateman, gave a major clapback.

In her 1988 book The Sexual Contract, Pateman points out that the social contract was created by men, for men.

For women to have truly equal rights, she argued, the social contract needed a major feminist overhaul.

And in a similar spirit in 1997, Charles Mills argued in The Racial Contract that the white guys who created the social contract werent talking about race at all because they assumed the white perspective to be universal.

This, he argued, was white supremacy right there in Americas founding document.

But that still doesnt really answer my question.

Whos right?

If the goal is to protect peoples rights, does that require us to carefully consider or to intentionally pay no mind to race, gender, and other identities?

And to be fair, some earlier philosophers did think about these questions, like John Stuart Mill back in 1859.

Well, sort of.

I dug up his essay On Liberty, which says we all have the fundamental right to be ourselves, to forge our own path in life, so long as it doesnt interfere with others ability to do the same.

He thought society would be better off if people got to choose how to live according to their own version of happiness, rather than making everyone live the same version of the good life. Think: funky thrift shop jacket rather than mass-produced graphic tee.

He called this right to explore experiments in living. Sure, individuals are unique, but by trying out different ways of living, we can probably come up with some baselines for happiness things like having a roof over your head or access to healthcare.

But Mill was talking about diversity of thought, behavior, and lifestyle.

He wasnt talking about how identity might be related to politics.

So, the question remained for me: how is identity related to politics?

Well, I can think about it in terms of equal opportunitywe all want to have the same chances of getting into college, getting a job, buying a house.

And we expect those decisions to be made regardless of our race and gender, how we feel about religion, whether were disabled or non-disabled, and so on.

And its equal opportunity laws that theoretically put everyone on the same playing field and squash threats of bias.

But even with those laws in place, bias continues to be an enormous problem in this country, and this is where proponents of identity politics come in.

They say, hey, if inequality still exists even when we try to avoid bias, maybe we should stop turning away from identity and start paying more attention to it.

Whichfinallybrought me back to affirmative action in college admissions.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s made discrimination based on race illegal, so colleges started changing how they admitted underrepresented students.

Some schools, like Harvard, took a holistic approach.

They considered race as one of many factors in a persons application.

And they hired student recruiters to visit high schools around the country and encourage their peers to apply, especially low-income and first-generation students.

Other schools, like UC-Davis, put a racial quota in place they set aside sixteen out of one hundred spots for, quote, qualified minorities.

Neither of these approaches sounds perfect to me, and thats because they arent.

Figuring out how to codify fairness isnt easy.

But college admissions experts report that when schools try to consider factors other than race to boost their numbers of students of color things like family income or GPA nothing works as well as when they take race into account.

Hold on.

[ding] I think I smell important documents.

In 1963, before affirmative action was signed into law, only one percent of Harvards student body was Black.

Kinda feels like maybe there was some systemic discrimination going on.

Almost sixty years later, Black students made up over ten percent of Harvards class of 2022.

And in case youre wondering, Black people accounted for about 14 percent of the U.S population that year.

Those in the identity politics camp would argue that this growth wouldnt have been possible without race-conscious admissions.

And I should point out here that diversity in student bodies doesnt just benefit historically underrepresented groups research shows that all students benefit from racial diversity on campus, from academic achievement to preparing for the workforce and even improving intergroup relations down the road.

But the people who disagree with Harvards long-standing practice of race-conscious admissions and it was Harvard who got hauled to the Supreme Court, along with the University of North Carolina point back to liberalisms identity-blindness to make their case.

To take any identity factors into account, they argue, is fundamentally unfair.

But fairness isnt the only issue raised by critics of identity politics.

Some worry that when you reduce complex people into a set of simplified traits what youd call identity essentialism you risk misunderstanding and maybe even stereotyping them.

Its like saying that everyone who studies philosophy isnt fun at parties.

(Ill have you know, Im very fun at parties.

Especially when karaoke is involved.)

But the point is, in any group of people, regardless of what they share in common, youll find differences in their worldviews and experiences, and even in how strongly they identify with their group.

And when you essentialize based on race, well, that can start to look like racism.

Other critics of identity politics worry that when people focus too much on what makes them different, they lose sight of the common good.

We should think about our shared destiny, they argue, rather than divide ourselves into various identity groups.

And still others warn that all this focus on identity can stoke what social scientists call tribalism, where identity groups pull more tightly together and become defensive against those they consider outside.

In practice, this sometimes creates a sort of pendulum effect, where progress for one group triggers backlash from another.

For example, when the Ku Klux Klan emerged during the Reconstruction Era, it was largely in response to Black Americans gaining more rights after centuries of enslavement.

I think we can all agree that enslaved people are not responsible for the rise of the KKK, but this example shows that theres a lot at stake, whether or not we intentionally bring identity into politics.

But here, maybe, is something like a happy medium.

The political theorist Iris Marion Young agreed that identity politics can get in the way of pursuing the common good.

But she didnt think we should scrap it altogether.

She argued that we should take a more sophisticated view of identity politics, one she calls a "politics of difference. Instead of a bunch of identity groups competing for their own specific interests, a politics of difference lets us look at how individuals relate to the social structures around them.

Its not identity that matters, this theory says, but the reality that some social groups are disadvantaged compared to others.

This avoids identity essentialism, and it allows us to drill down and address specific social issues based on specific differences within specific contexts.

Which helps us handle identity more concretely, rather than talking abstractly about "individuals, like classical liberalism does.

So what did I figure out?

Well, the identity-blind liberalism put forward by John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls is a version of politics where everyone leaves their identity behind, supposedly for the sake of neutrality and preventing bias.

But for people whose identity doesnt match the dominant group, or whose first name isnt John, that can feel impossible.

Which gave rise to critics like Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, who offered an alternative view: that all of us have identities, and we shouldnt have to check them at the door in order to do politics.

And this context gives me a more nuanced lens for thinking about affirmative action, and so much more.