Americans for Merit-Based Admissions
Progressives are preoccupied with imposing racial preferences in education and hiring, but the American public wants these decisions to be based on merit. Witness the results of a new Pew Research Center poll.
The survey, conducted in March, asked more than 10,000 respondents what factors should matter for college admissions. In a landslide, respondents favored academic achievement over race and gender.
Ninety-three percent of respondents said high school grades should count toward college admission, with 61% saying they should be a major factor. Nearly four in 10 said standardized test scores should be a major factor, and 85% at least a minor factor.
Nearly three of four said race or ethnicity should not be a factor in admissions. That includes 59% of blacks, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 62% of Democrats.
When Ibram X. Kendi, a bestselling prophet of the woke left, writes about racial preferences, he offers an ad hominem attack in lieu of an argument. “The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is ‘reverse discrimination,’” he claims in “How to be an Antiracist.”
He continues: “That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities ‘race conscious’ and standardized tests that produce racial inequities ‘race neutral.’ That is how they can blame the behavior of entire racial groups for the inequities between different racial groups and still say their ideas are ‘not racist.’ But there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” Does he know he’s insulting the majority of Americans?
The poll reinforces the results in state referenda on racial preferences. In 2019 voters in Washington rejected the state Legislature’s attempt to impose a policy of racial preferences. In 2020 voters in progressive and Democratic California rejected a ballot measure that would have repealed a constitutional provision that bans “discrimination against” or “preferential treatment to” anyone on the basis of “race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.”
The Pew poll underscores that the gentry left’s preoccupation with dividing America by race is unpopular. Americans want equality of opportunity, not government-imposed “equity” of results.
Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal here.