Written by Bo Winegard.
You can support affirmative action and DEI. But if you do, you own the consequences.
Although polling shows mixed support among the populace, left-leaning elites still embrace affirmative action and other DEI-style preferences for Blacks and other underrepresented minorities. Many of these elites thus condemned the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, predicting a precipitous decline in Black students at elite universities. They were not wrong to worry about such a decline.
Whites and Blacks have different average levels of cognitive ability.1 In a more honest society, this would be accepted without much fuss. In ours, merely stating it out loud is an egregious breach of etiquette. Yet this simple fact is crucial when thinking about DEI. There is a roughly 15 IQ point or one standard-deviation gap between Blacks and Whites, a large and consequential difference that shows up on all standardized tests.