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A Response to Ilya Somin on Racial Profiling

by Noah Carl
20 July 2023 11:00 AM

In a landmark decision on June 29th, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions violate the Civil Rights Act. This means that universities like Harvard cannot discriminate against white and Asian applicants in favour of black and Hispanic applicants.  

Responding to the Supreme Court’s decision, legal scholar Ilya Somin wrote an article for Reason titled ‘What it Will Take to Make Government Colour-Blind?’. He argues that “if we truly want a colour-blind government, we will have to go well beyond banning affirmative action in universities”.

“The discriminatory government policy that affects the most Americans is probably not affirmative action,” Somin notes, “but racial profiling by law enforcement.” In his view, anyone who wants a “colour-blind government” ought to oppose both affirmative action and racial profiling.

Defenders of racial profiling claim it’s justified “because membership in a racial or ethnic group may correlate with criminality”. But for Somin, “this kind of use of race-as-proxy is similar to affirmative action, whose defenders have long argued that being black or Hispanic correlates with being a victim of discrimination or a contributor to ‘diversity’”.

I don’t think Somin’s analogy works. Affirmative action and racial profiling are not “similar” in the way he suggests.  

The purpose of a university is to advance knowledge through teaching and research. To fulfil this purpose, it must admit the students who can benefit most from the teaching it offers. The fairest and most objective way to identify these students is by looking at grades and test scores. Students with the best grades and test scores should be admitted first, regardless of their race or ethnicity.

A university that decides to admit students who have been “victims of discrimination” or who “contribute to diversity” is not fulfilling its purpose. (It is fulfilling some other purpose, like social engineering.) If such a university receives taxpayer funds, as almost all universities do, it is not providing value for money.

By way of analogy, if government-funded hospitals hired heart surgeons because they were “victims of discrimination” or because they “contributed to diversity”, rather than because they were good at heart surgery, there would be justified outrage. People expect the taxes they pay for the health sector to go towards maximising people’s health, not towards social engineering.

And it’s just the same with education. People expect their taxes to go toward maximising the advancement of knowledge, not towards social engineering.

What about racial profiling? Rather than being analogous to affirmative action, as Somin contends, it’s actually analogous to the opposite – i.e., selecting students on merit. A colour-blind government therefore should racially profile.

Just as the purpose of a university is to advance knowledge, the purpose of the police is to prevent crime. And for whatever reason, some groups commit more crime than others. So if the police want to fulfil their purpose of preventing crime, they should profile some groups more than others.

Everyone accepts this when it comes to age and gender. No one would seriously claim the police should profile elderly women just as often as young men. The reason is that elderly women commit very little crime, whereas young men commit a lot of crime. And it’s no different with race or ethnicity.

If the police ignored race or ethnicity when deciding whom to profile, they would not be maximising public safety and would not be giving taxpayers value for money.

Note that criminals are a minority in every racial group and most crime is intra-racial, so by failing to racially profile, the police would be failing to protect the law-abiding majority in groups with above-average crime rates. (For example, by failing to racially profile black men, the police would be failing to protect their victims – who are disproportionately black.)

In summary, Somin is wrong to claim that opponents of affirmative action should oppose racial profiling. Instead, they should support racial profiling. When groups commit crime at different rates, racial profiling is what’s required by a colour-blind government.

Tags: Affirmative actionCrimeRacial profiling

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14 Comments
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transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago

Very well put. The US left is hell bent on stirring up a global race war, and the global left is hell bent on filling Europe with non-Europeans. Unless both of these things are stopped in their tracks, we are done for.

47
0
RW
RW
1 year ago

Abstractly defined groups don’t commit crimes, people do. The purpose of the police is to ensure crimes get punished which is supposed to reduce crime because would-be criminals can realistically expect to get punished. It’s far from accomplishing this and molesting people who are members of certain groups instead is not conductive to accomplishing it.

8
-21
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  RW

The original purpose of the police in the UK was to prevent crime and to keep the peace. As Peter Hitchens is fond of pointing out, the police cannot un-burgle you. Prevention is best, though a good way to prevent crime is to catch criminals and imprison them, which is probably easier if stretched police resources are targeted where they are likely to find the most incriminating evidence.

24
-1
RW
RW
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Without making a couple of sweeps of the whole populaton while stopping the world to look for incriminating evidence, the police doesn’t (and cannot) have any idea where incriminating evidence was most frequently found in the past. Assuming it knew that, this wouldn’t guarantee that most incriminating evidence will still be found there in future, especially when nebulously defined groups are being targetted like people who are – according to someone’s entirely subjective on-the-spot assessment – negroid-looking enough.

There’s also a self-fullfilling prophecy in here: Police looks harder for black criminals => police finds more black criminals, or, as a past aquaintance of mine (former colleague) used to put it: I can commit (minor) public order offences with impunity because I don’t look like the kind of people the police usually targets.

Last edited 1 year ago by RW
1
-7
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  RW

Are you saying that the huge disparity in crime stats in the US (and probably here though I know less about them here) along racial lines is because the police and the justice system are racist?

8
-1
RW
RW
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

I’m saying that – judging both from personal experience and more general concerns (laid out above) – the ability of the police to judge who’s likely to be a criminal is nil and that they’d better work with objective facts (like reported crimes) than with their own past prejudices projected onto the future.

3
-8
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  RW

Black people commit a lot more crime, proportionately. Especially young black men. Probably young white men are next on the list. I prefer preventative policing that can stop me being a victim, so I will not be voting for you as a crime commissioner or whatever the hell they are called.

11
-1
RW
RW
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

Black people commit a lot more crime, proportionately.

This is a wrong statement. The corrected version would be: According to someone’s patchy records, the frequency of criminals among the arbitrarily defined (ie, there’s no objective way to make this assessment) group of black people was higher in the past than the frequency of criminals among the (equally arbitrarily defined) group of non-black people.

That you would prefer if the police was able to predict the future (me too, by the way) doesn’t cause the police to acquire this ability.

1
-12
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  RW

It’s nothing to do with the police. Crime stats in the US point to hugely different rates of crime by race, consistently, in every state, since records began. It’s either accurate, or somehow there is a massive amount of unsolved and often unreported crime committed by white people.

11
-1
varmint
varmint
1 year ago
Reply to  transmissionofflame

I often hear “there are not enough police”. —————–But what is the point of more police when the criminals that the current police actually catch are not dealt with firmly enough? Unless ofcourse you swear at a minority person.

10
0
transmissionofflame
transmissionofflame
1 year ago
Reply to  varmint

Indeed.

5
-1
D J
D J
1 year ago

Medical schools also have diversity targets. Most people don’t know about this and so are not outraged.

16
0
varmint
varmint
1 year ago

The heart surgeon analogy is a good one. People want the best surgeon to work on their heart, not the “colour blind” choice of surgeon. ——-In other areas, eg acting, it is maybe not so clear cut. But imagine the spitting fury if George Clooney were chosen to play Nelson Mandela in a film. The same people who would have blood spitting from their eyes if Clooney took this role have no problem with black people all over period drams in the 18th century where in reality no black people were around at that time. It would be like making a film about Red Indians with Chinese actors. But the woke are apparently fine with that.

17
0
GMO
GMO
1 year ago

Generally I agree with news/analysis here but in this case I disagree.

Affirmative Action is wrong because it judges people on race and not on merit alone.

Racial profiling is also wrong because it judges people on the basis of race and not on merit or character alone.

If the police stop people to ask questions based upon suspicious activity and not on race then that is different.
If those stopped and questioned by the police skew towards or against certain races, then that is acceptable because it’s based on criteria other than race (suspicious activity).

0
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