In his review, Carl Cohen calls Affirmative Action Around the World, by Thomas Sowell, “exactly what its title announces: an empirical study of what the consequences really are, and really have been, in the five major nations in which affirmative action — the term now commonly used to denote ethnic preferences — has been long ensconced: India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and the United States.” And what are the consequences? “Intergroup hostility, dishonesty, and further proliferation in spite of manifest failure.”
India’s story:
In India, ethnic preferences have been established longer than in any other nation. “Positive discrimination” goes back to British rule, and was built into the Indian constitution in 1947. Originally intended to last for only twenty years, the preferences have been extended repeatedly in time. Originally devised to benefit only “untouchables” (a now forbidden term, replaced by “scheduled castes” or “Dalits”), they have been repeatedly expanded in reach. The benefits are no longer regarded as transitory; the beneficiaries, including members of many other “backward classes,” now comprise more than three-quarters of the Indian population.Preferential quotas have been limited by Indian courts to 50 percent of the available places at universities and elsewhere; but making use of those quotas requires “complementary resources” of education that the intended beneficiaries simply do not have. Therefore, the quotas for the most seriously deprived in India often go unfilled. On the other hand, quotas for “other backward classes” rarely go unfilled. Upshot: the great majority of the reserved places go to those who deserve them least.
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Race preference does not wind down; it winds up. Proliferation is the rule.
In Malaysia, Chinese laborers were first brought to the peninsula to work the rubber plantations:
The Chinese, adopting a frugal style and investing heavily in the education of their children, pulled themselves from the plantations and built businesses across the country; they have come to dominate retail establishments in Malaysia, of which they owned 85 percent by 1980. Corporate ownership by Chinese has also soared. Chinese incomes are double those of Malays.In 1965, Malaysians willingly divested themselves of a great mass of powerful Chinese by expelling Singapore, which became a separate country and remains very largely a Chinese city — and greatly prosperous. But, although the expulsion of Singapore made the Malay majority politically secure, and somewhat reduced its economic domination by the Chinese minority, it did not stop the intellectual advance of the Chinese who remained. In 1969, more than half the officers in the Malaysian army were ethnic Chinese; as long as university admissions were determined by examination results, only 20 percent of the places went to Malays, and most of the rest to ethnic Chinese.
The majority, competing unsuccessfully, had to be protected. The Malay government set out to achieve racial balance in employment, giving formal preferences to Malays in hiring. But there seemed no alternative to continuing reliance on the better-educated Chinese and Indian minorities in fields where their technical skills were needed. And so admission to universities was altered as well. Group membership was emphasized over individual performance, and, to increase the number of Malays yet further, the Malay language became the only medium of instruction in schools as well as in universities.
The ethnic preferences that have pervaded Malaysia in recent decades were not designed to pull an oppressed minority from the depths; their purpose was to protect the relatively less competent majority from the intellectual and economic advances of more competent ethnic minorities. What, then, do we learn from Malaysia? We learn that the inferior performance of some ethnic groups is not always a consequence of discrimination against them. On the contrary, even the imposition of discriminatory advantages favoring a majority cannot obscure the fact that some groups prove less competent than others.
In Sri Lanka, preferences led to bloody slaughter:
Sri Lanka, in the second half of the 20th century, experienced a steep social deterioration whose exact causes are difficult to specify. What began as ethnic tension between the Sinhalese majority in the south and the Tamil minority in the north became bloody slaughter. The substantial preferences given to the Sinhalese (awarded, as in Malaysia, to protect a less competent majority) certainly played a role in exacerbating these tensions.
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Deliberately exacerbating racial tensions for the sake of political gain — we learn from the case of Sri Lanka — promotes hatred of a kind and of a degree almost impossible to reverse. What begins with race preference ends with race riots.
What about Nigeria?
Preferences and quotas are justified in Nigeria by the demand, expressly formulated in the constitution of 1979, that national activities should “reflect the federal character of the country.” This “federal character” principle has been extended to school admissions, to promotions in school, and even to membership on the national soccer team. Every activity must “look like Nigeria.” Intergroup tensions have become very sharp; almost every policy issue becomes a matter of racial dispute accompanied by charges of ethnic corruption. These disputes often turn bitter, and become fights.
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Sowell points out that in the 1990?s, when the Katafs, formerly lagging behind the Hausa, closed the gap between the two groups, relations became more polarized, not less.
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To reduce discord, separate ethnic enclaves have been carved out and given formal status. Thus, having given rise to a deadly spoils system, ethnic heterogeneity is mitigated by a gerrymandered homogeneity. The lesson from Nigeria? When racial balance is advanced by granting preferences that are deeply resented, diversity produces not greater racial harmony but greater racial conflict.
And America?
The fifth of the five great nations dealt with in this book is the United States of America. The appropriate lesson(s) here? All of the above.