Affirmative Action Bred Hypocrisy and Victimhood

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, liberals have vowed to find workarounds. Conservatives must continue to make the case for merit as the logical organizing principle for America.

The elevation of victimhood over achievement has led many to misrepresent their racial and gender identities in pursuit of advantages in professional and academic positions. Students at selective colleges are identifying as non-heterosexual at rates several times higher than historic or national averages, though University of London political scientist Eric Kaufmann noted that there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in sexual behavior tied to those identities. I’ve heard of parents at elite private high schools using genetic testing services hoping to identify any ethnic heritage that would boost their children’s college applications and of young professionals falsely identifying as bisexual for a career boost.

Racial and gender quotas result in liberals’ willful hypocrisy and convoluted rationalizations when they are confronted with the reality that aptitudes, interests and effort aren’t always evenly distributed among their superficial and shifting politicized racial categories. Liberals have translated their calls for increased diversity into demands that colleges admit and employers hire black and Hispanic applicants in proportion to their group’s share of the U.S. population.

Some logical conclusions of their race-based approach that liberals are loath to admit: Immigration and medical school policies should be altered to reduce the number of Indian-American physicians, and selective colleges, which generally already require higher test scores for Asian-American applicants, should raise standards even higher so that Asian-American and Jewish students aren’t overrepresented on campus. When asked about apparent dampened ideological diversity among its student population, a Harvard administrator admitted to me in 2004 that evangelical parents were less likely to send their kids there and claimed that was good for both the kids and the school.

Privileging minority status in admissions and hiring decisions inevitably brings about a hierarchy of competing victimhoods. Liberals have moved beyond debating which minority groups deserve preferential treatment. They now create distinctions within groups. Activists complain that recent black immigrants, their children, and children of biracial couples are less deserving of preferential treatment than descendants of American slaves.

This unseemly debate raises unanswerable questions: How should we quantify and compare the ancestral loss of Holocaust survivors to victims of American slavery to those who suffered from European colonization? The more important question liberals should be considering: How long should we disadvantage those who didn’t commit these evils and reward those who didn’t suffer them?

Organizing American society around merit, rather than historic grievances, has produced tremendous wealth and progress, made America the destination for strivers from around the world, and served as the best antidote to inherited advantage. Immigrants relentlessly chasing the American Dream know that their children can achieve unparalleled success without regard to ethnicity or family history. Many immigrant parents and other Horatio Alger-type successes gratefully remind their children that their success could happen only in America.

America must not discard this advantage in the face of intensified international competition. Ironically, China embraced merit in place of ideological correctness to unleash and transform its economy at the end of the 20th century. Deng Xiaoping realized what America’s liberals don’t: “When everything has to be done by the book, when thinking turns rigid and blind faith is the fashion, it is impossible for a party or a nation to make progress.” While American elites rewrite school curricula to emphasize systemic racism, victimhood and sexual minorities, our competition is focusing on math, science and innovation.

Liberals insist on equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunity, and find patterns of racism everywhere. While liberals try to increase the number of minority students enrolled in selective colleges by undermining merit-based measures, conservatives should fight to increase the number of qualified minority applicants by giving parents the power to choose the best K-12 educational options for their children. The quality of an American child’s education is too often correlated with his neighborhood and family wealth. Giving all children access to high-quality math, science and humanities instruction is hard work and will involve taking on teachers unions, but this will do more to boost America’s economy, improve minority outcomes, and narrow inequality than tinkering with admissions policies at a few colleges.

America’s history of treating people differently based on race is a grievous sin. Conservatives must be relentless in stamping it out and preventing its resurrection. The American ideal of a colorblind, upwardly mobile society, where success is available without favor to all who harness their talents and work tirelessly, is best achieved by rewarding merit.

Mr. Jindal was governor of Louisiana, 2008-16, and a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.