Meritocracy v. Hypocrisy
I work for Boeing on NASA’s Artemis Program and we recently had Victor Glover come and speak at our site where we build the core stage of the SLS rocket in New Orleans. Victor will be the pilot on NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first in over 50 years to have humans orbit the moon. He was a great public speaker and I learned a lot. At the end of his fireside chat he took a few questions from the audience. One question he got was “How do you feel about being the first man of color to go to space, and do you welcome this chance to inspire young black kids to do great things?”
Victor could have chosen to correct this lady and state that NASA has sent up precisely 18 black men and women into space on the Space Shuttle and Falcon rockets, including himself. But he did not. He will be the first black astronaut to orbit the moon, this is what the questioner meant.
Instead he said he believes in meritocracy and that people should be celebrated for what they are capable of. He said he wants to inspire people of all races to do great things not only those that are similar to him.
He mentioned Carter Woodson who was the second black man to get a PHD from Harvard and who started black history week in 1926. He quoted a passage by Carter from memory which I don’t perfectly recall and have been unable to find. But the thrust of it was that he believed black history week was about black people’s contributions to history whereas black history month is now only about the history of black people. The former being how black people discovered, invented, and wrote things that affected people of all races and the latter being a more insular affair. It was a moving answer and shocked some people in the audience. This is a man who believes in equality of opportunity and a strict meritocracy.
in 2014 two groups of students sued Harvard and UNC for their admission practices regarding race. Arguing that if they admitted applicants only on quantitative metrics like test scores and grades the percent of the student admissions that are Asian would be far higher. Harvard in particular would have a student body consisting of over 50% Asians whereas in reality it is 22%.
Students for fair Admissions, INC v. President and Fellows of Harvard College made its way through the courts and was selected to be heard by the supreme court. In June 2023 the court issued its decision: Harvard and the University of North Carolina’s affirmative action programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Effectively, colleges can no longer consider race when considering applications for admission.
Take a look at the below chart
Only in America do you have a fair enough society that hard working and talented immigrants can move in and economically outperform the natives to such a large degree. This is despite cultural differences and disadvantages such as English being a second language.
Many people still think white men are the most privileged group in the United States, but these people have not looked at the data in many decades. More women are admitted to college, law school, and medical school than men: 60%, 56%, and 55% respectively. For the last 8 years in a row more women have been admitted to law school than men. The white male privilege argument was perhaps true 50 years ago but I would encourage people to update their dataset before making sweeping arguments.
This is all well known and in the public domain but I want my contribution on the topic to be this: affirmative action and similar policies have stoked racism in a counterintuitive way that the well-meaning people who implemented these policies did not expect.
Let’s take the example of medical school admissions. Standardized tests are the most objective way to compare students from hundreds of different colleges. GPA is much more idiosyncratic. This is why medicals school place more weight on an applicants MCAT score than anything else on the resume, it is by definition the most objective. Many of my friends are in medical school and they have told me about the differences in MCAT scores for students of different races. I looked up some of the data regarding admissions. You can find this data on the AAMC’s website.
The average MCAT score of a white student admitted to medical school is 513, the 86th percentile.
For Asians it is 515, the 90th percentile.
For African Americans it is 506, the 66th percentile.
For Hispanics it is 507, the the 69th percentile.
I don’t believe most people are born racist but become racist due to societal influences. When I choose my doctor I care about one thing: how qualified they are to treat me. But now I have the above statistics in my mind when choosing a doctor and I hate it. Medical school admissions boards are turning people into racists. This is Hippocratic oath hypocrisy.
Many well-meaning people think it is noble to select underrepresented groups for certain organizations or industries. But I would simply like to ask them: how would you feel if it was you? How would you feel to be selected for something you had no control over like your skin color as opposed to your grades or test scores. It would feel disempowering.
You would want to feel as if you were selected on merit, due to your ability and hard work. You would fear that your coworkers or fellow students will disdain you as a diversity hire. These policies are toxic to our schools and workplaces. No selection process will ever be perfectly fair but we should make it our goal to try to be as fair as possible.
The long arc of history has shown that society improves faster the more meritocratic it becomes. When people are chosen as the leader of a country because their father is the king this is impossible. Anti-meritocratic policies endanger the march of progress and turn all of us into hypocrites.
