Diversity's Discontents: The "Contact Hypothesis" Exploded

Academic Questions

Volumn 21, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 409-430

  Nieli, Russell K ^a  

^a PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84858050497     PISSN: 08954852     EISSN: 19364709     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s12129-008-9082-6     Document Type: Article

References (52)

1. Quoted in Shelby Steele, "The Recoloring of Campus Life," in Second Thoughts about Race in America, ed. Peter Collier and David Horowitz (New York: Madison Books, 1991), 87.
2. Grutter v. Bollinger 539 U.S. 306 (2003).
3. See Peter Wood, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), especially chapter 5.
4. See John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5. Facts on File, 1976, 324.
6. See Brian T. Fitzpatrick, "The Diversity Lie," Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 27, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 395-96.
7. Ibid. 4
8. A similar stance is taken by Peter Schmidt, Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War over Affirmative Action (Palgrave Macmillian, 2007).
9. who speaks of a "diversity dodge" designed to obscure the real, compensatory, and social justice goals of racial preference policies-goals he believes are critically important and not sufficiently furthered by current affirmative action practices.
10. Theodore Burghard Hurt Brameld, Minority Problems in the Public Schools: A Study of Administrative Policies and Practices in Seven School Systems (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946), 245.
11. Henry A. Singer, "The Veteran and Race Relations," Journal of Educational Sociology, 21, no. 7 (March 1948): 397-408.
12. Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Vol. 1.
13. Adjustment During Army Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949).
14. See, for instance, Gordon W. Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954).
15. D. Landis, R.O. Hope, and H.R. Day, "Training for Desegregation in the Military," in Groups in Conflict: The Psychology of Desegregation, ed. N. Miller and M. B. Brewer (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), 257-78.
16. M.B. Brewer and N. Miller, "Beyond the Contact Hypothesis: Theoretical Perspectives on Desegregation," in Groups in Conflict, 281-302.
17. Donald Chu and David C. Griffey, "The Contact Theory of Integration: The Case of Sport," Sociology of Sport Journal 2, no. 4 (December 1985): 323-33.
18. John F. Dovido, Sameul L. Gaertner, and Kerry Kawakami, "Intergroup Contact: The Past, Present, and Future," Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 6, no. 1 (2003): 5-21.
19. See, for instance, Robert Alan LeVine and Donald Thomas Campbell, Ethnocentrism: Theories of Conflict, Ethnic Attitudes, and Group Behavior (New York: Wiley and Son, 1972).
20. Marilynn B. Brewer, "The Psychology of Prejudice: Ingroup Love or Outgroup Hate?" Journal of Social Issues 55 (Fall 1999): 429-44.
21. Daniel P. Moynihan, Pandemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
22. Lincoln Quillian, "Prejudice as a Response to Perceived Group Threat: Population Composition and Anti-Immigrant and Racial Prejudice in Europe," American Sociological Review 60, no. 4 (August 1995): 586-611.
23. Carol M. Swain, The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
24. Jan Delhey and Kenneth Newton, "Predicting Cross-National Levels of Social Trust: Global Pattern or Nordic Exceptionalism?" European Sociological Review 21, no. 4 (2005): 311-27.
25. Cited in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural America (Knoxville, TN: Whittle Direct Books, 1991), 78.
26. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
27. See Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
28. "Tuning In, Turning Out: The Strange Disappearance of Social Capital in America," PS: Political Science and Politics 28, no. 4 (December 1995): 664-83.
29. Robert D. Putnam, "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-Fifth Century," Scandinavian Political Studies 30, no. 2 (June 2007): 147.
30. Ibid., 148.
31. Ibid., 149-50.
32. Ibid., 149.
33. Scott E. Page, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
34. Consider the following account by a Princeton University student of his high school experience with affirmative action preferences. (The account is taken from the conclusion of a term paper critical of affirmative action policies in America): I'll close with a personal anecdote. In my high school graduating class, five were admitted into the class of 2005 at Princeton. Of those, one was of a minority.
35. While I was lucky enough to be one of those five, many others in my high school with much higher grades and SAT scores than the admitted minority were passed over. In many ways, the situation disgusted me. I knew that countless students had worked much harder than the minority student, but they had not been admitted only because they were not black.
36. While I had never fostered any ill will towards that student, I found that I resented the fact that she could matriculate because she was black; really, though, my anger could only be directed at the cause of the problem-race-preference-and not the minority student. We seek a society where race does not matter, but affirmative action, as my high school experience testifies, only intensifies the importance of race.
37. I look forward to the day when affirmative action ends and race truly does not matter. In the meantime, society seems vigorously keen on becoming more race-conscious in a misguided attempt to become less race-conscious.
38. Douglas S. Massey et al., The Source of the River: The Social Origins of Freshmen at America's Selective Colleges and Universities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 198.
39. Ibid., 143.
40. John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (New York: Free Press, 2000), 89, 229-30, 236.
41. Vanderbilt Law School professor Carol Swain offers the following observations about the beliefs of many black students she encountered as an undergraduate in the 1980s: As an older undergraduate student in the 1980s, I often encountered other black college students struggling with grade point averages at or below a 2.00 on a 4.00 scale who voiced aspirations of wanting to become lawyers and doctors.
42. If I challenged them directly by responding, "But I thought you needed a 3.0 to get into law or medical school"-almost invariably the student would respond, "Oh, they have to let us in. They have to let us in, because of affirmative action."
43. Now, I don't believe that many of those students were actually admitted to professional schools, but the misinformation led some genuinely to believe that traditionally white professional schools were obligated to take them, regardless of their less-than-stellar performance. This perception, I believe, affected how hard these students trained Could such beliefs be a factor in the well-documented fact that black students in college underperform their SAT scores-that is, black students with the same SAT scores as whites exhibit a considerably lower performance in college than white students?.
44. "An Inside Look at Education and Poverty," Academic Questions (Spring 2006): 48-49.
45. Stanley Rothman, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Neil Nevitte, "Does Enrollment Diversity Improve University Education," International Journal of Public Opinion Research 15, no. 1 (2003): 8-26.
46. A less technical version of this paper appears as "Racial Diversity Reconsidered," in the Spring 2003 Public Interest, available at www.thepublicinterest.com. The quotations in the text are taken from the online version of The Public Interest article.
47. Ibid. 10
48. It is true that the less selective a college category, the more colleges there are in it (e.g., there are more Tier-II schools than Tier-I's). Thus downward raiders can probably increase the proportion of black and Hispanic students in their own institutions without reducing by the same proportion the blacks and Hispanics in the lower-tiered institutions that they raid.
49. But the fact still remains that every black and Hispanic student upwardly ratcheted into a more selective college deprives a less selective college of the (more healthy) diversity-enhancement value that that student might have provided to the students at the less selective institution. Good diversity is always replaced by a less healthy, stereotype-reinforcing diversity that diminishes the quality of interracial relations on campus.
50. I have dealt with this issue in The Changing Shape of the River: Affirmative Action and Recent Social Science Research, Academic Questions 17, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 7-59. See especially 52-56.
51. See Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
52. Herman Belz, Equality Transformed: A Quarter-Century of Affirmative Action (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991).