Geographical Diversity May Be The Next Affirmative Action Trojan Horse

Walter Block

A map of Arkansas's congressional districts with racial concentrations of black residents, from a 2011 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette article, with a caduceus symbol, representing the medical industry, imposed on top.

Those affirmative action operatives are so clever. They have been balked, seriously, in imposing their malevolent program of academic selection on the basis of race by the recent Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Are they likely to quietly incorporate this ruling into their admissions policy and cease and desist from implementing this racist scheme?

Don’t bet the farm on it! The left regards affirmative action as a moral imperative. Their motto is: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Very likely, they will attempt to impose racial quotas by other means. I suspect that geographical selection may be their next direction of attack, by adopting a program that has been bruited about in Arkansas even before this recent Supreme Court finding.

According to Arkansas state law, the medical school at the University of Arkansas must engage in affirmative action on a geographical basis for 70 percent of their first 150 entry positions out of a total of 188 freshmen. Placements are divided equally amongst that state’s four congressional districts. That is, instead of race, each of these districts will be awarded 25 percent of the entering class slots.

Why has state law mandated that this policy be implemented? There were many reasons given during debate in the Arkansas legislature, but at least one Democratic politician admitted it was an attempt to get more racial diversity in the state’s medical schools.

“There’s always somebody better than you or me,” Rep. John Walker said during a debate on the law in 2017. Walker, a black Democrat who passed away in 2019, represented a district with a 27 percent black population, which is about twice the state’s average. “But that’s not the sole consideration. Other factors should be considered,” Walker said. “You don’t just go ahead and judge somebody just because he or she has the best test score,” he continued, adding that it’s important to look at “multiple selection criteria, including geographic.”

Contrary to Walker’s opinion, affirmative action is not a good program, especially for medical school selection, whether it is done explicitly through race, or by adopting any of these other subterfuges, such as zip codes. This is because physicians are faced with life-and-death situations, perhaps even daily if not hourly, and it behooves us as a society to have to most talented people making those decisions. Also, patients will tend to avoid doctors they think obtained their licenses on the basis of skin color rather than expertise.

A similar scheme would be to accept the top 10 percent of every college graduating class for medical school, even though the best students at some such institutions are clearly far superior in academic ability than at others. Presumably, the Supreme Court will see through such attempts to escape its decision. In the next case to reach the courts in this vein, hopefully some teeth in law will be implemented to ward off such end runs around it.

Do not the advocates of this policy realize that they too, and as well as their loved ones, their parents, spouses, children, grandkids, and friends, will one day be faced with inferior medical services, due to this policy? What will be their reaction if such people, even complete strangers, are killed or maimed as a result? Will they then regret injecting racial politics into healthcare? If they have any decency whatsoever, that would be their reaction. Evidently, their ability to anticipate the future result of their present actions is severely wanting, otherwise, presumably, they would not pursue it.

Shall we also apply this policy to pilots and air traffic controllers? Are we really ready to contemplate needless deaths as a result of inferior skills? But doctors and airline personnel are hardly the only ones whose errors are crucially important. They are only the tip of the iceberg in this context. There are also engineers and architects, whose inferior buildings, roads, and bridges, can endanger masses of innocent people. There are chemists and drug makers whose errors can create biological havoc.

It is entirely possible that those responsible for affirmative action have indeed anticipated these problems. They still favor this program nonetheless. They place a higher value on the pigmentation of their staff (and their plumbing, too, in the case of applying affirmative action programs to women) than on safety and protection for the public. There are appropriate categories for the crimes of such people: aiding and abetting assault and battery, and, in the extreme, murder.

Moreover, affirmative action programs impose an onus on black physicians, some of whom may be perfectly competent but who won’t be trusted. It is one thing to hire a black gender studies teacher who might have been accepted as a student by a university as an affirmative action beneficiary. It is quite another matter to accept medical care from someone who went to medical school as an affirmative action student.

This affirmative action policy is thus so unfair to black doctors who are not the product of affirmative action, and are thus as competent as are any other physicians. It is also unfair to all patients of whatever hue who could have benefitted from additional medical professionals in the absence of this evil anti-life policy.

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