Simionas Blog Post 2

 In her discussion of Affirmative Action, Cheryl Harris provides a very clear and effective response to the idea that Affirmative Action policies take away from aspects of individualism or opportunity from white people. On page 1784, in her description of distributive justice Harris explains how “distributive justice also holds that individuals or groups may not claim positions, advantages, or benefits that they would not have been awarded under fair conditions.” She goes on to explain how “If, in a fair world, white males would have achieved N percent of a given set of benefits, then white males who claim benefits beyond that percentage are claiming benefits they are not entitled to” (1784). If we were to apply this to the court case with Alan Bakke and his medical school rejection, and his argument that he was competing for only 84 spots rather than 100 because of the 16 set apart for racial minority applicants, the argument doesn’t stand. The key part being that in a fair world, white people would not have a claim to 100% of the seats in the medical school. Let’s say that his argument of minority students being “less qualified” than him -for which I wholeheartedly agree with Harris’s explanation for why it doesn’t- stands: in a fair and equal setting the percentage of minority students achieving those levels of “qualifications” would be increased, and the percentage of white students admitted would be lower because of it. Therefore the white students would not be competing for 100% of the seats when they submitted their applications in the same way that they would be when systemic disadvantages are ignored. Perhaps Bakke would be competing for about the same number of seats as he is when 16 are set apart, but it would not be given second thought because white students would not be “outperforming” minority students and therefore it would be the norm for not as many seats to go to white students. In this case, Bakke is claiming benefits beyond the percentage he would be entitled to. Therefore his rights to opportunity or claims to individualism are not being diminished, they were instead unjustly augmented before. 

In response to arguments that say creating a goal of what society would have looked like without racial discrimination is too lofty or unrealistic or impossible to imagine because it has never been seen before, I’d say that it underestimates and underutilizes the resources available to us. While accomplishing racial equity in society may require trial and error in policy, because of the information available to us regarding U.S demographics I do not think it is impossible to imagine/construct what racial equality would look like. Harris used the language of percentages in her argument above, percentages that we very well have the data to observe. We have heard the statistics of how much of the prison population is made up of Black people compared to how much of the U.S. population is made up of Black people. We can compare the job, education, welfare data of minority groups to their population, to the comparative rates for white people and to national averages. In many fields we have already done it and we have already seen discrepancies. With the ability to access this data and track this data, and the rich resources in the areas of policy-making, philosophy, economics, etc in the U.S. I would argue that we are more than capable of exploring policy solutions and effectively tracking their results to start to see comparable measurements of economic and social well-being across racial groups. While there is always the risk and probability that these policies do not work, to not at least strive for a new equality on the basis that we cannot conceive what it would look like does not sound like an argument coming from the bottom like Harris mentions. It does not sound like an argument coming from a country (world) full of ingenuity. I don't think the question is if we are capable of doing this in the sense of if it is possible, but more if we are willing, and if we are willing to listen to racially diverse leaders in these attempts.