单项选择题

Many Americans breathed a sigh of relief about this week’s ruling by the Supreme Court on "affirmative action". In a 5-4 ruling, the court decided that universities (and by extension companies and the armed forces) can use race as a criterion when they choose which people they let in. Citing the importance of racial diversity, the court argued that giving preference to "disadvantaged minorities" was in the national interest. On the other hand, in a 6-3 decision, the justices struck down a specific points-scoring system used by the University of Michigan because it made race "a decisive factor". The compromise has been welcomed by George Bush, various Democratic presidential candidates, the Pentagon and several large companies,
Alas, a popular decision is not necessarily a correct one. In this case the decision seems doubly incorrect—wrong in principle and wrong in execution This is not the pragmatic solution that takes race out of the equation.
The principle part of the argument is simple enough. Affirmative action, no less than any other form of discrimination, is a bad idea which for a brief time made some sense. In the 1960s, it was right to set up programmes to help black Americans readdress years of discrimination. Now, 40 years after the Civil Rights Act, the idea of reparation no longer makes sense. The Supreme Court admits this. Hence the new rationale of diversity. Again, this is certainly in America’s national Interest. But it is a colossal jump from extending help to people who happen to be members of minorities to allowing laws that discriminate in favor of people on the basis of their skin.
For that in the end is what affirmative action is: judging people by their color, The great tragedy of the struggle to get rid of this anachronism in America as opposed to, say, in South Africa under apartheid is that it has been portrayed as a conservative cause. In fact, treating each applicant for a job or a university place as an individual goes to the heart of liberalism. The white and Asian students who were denied places at the University of Michigan on the basis of their color were treated illiberally.
Ah, reply the defenders of affirmative action, you are being simplistic. This in one way is true: principles on this basis do tend to be simple. But the charge of neglecting important complications anyway needs to be hurled back at advocates of affirmative action. If racial preferences have any logic at all, it is two-tone countries with a clear and racially defined over class and underclass. One could make a good case that America 40 years ago fitted that description; today it is a far more complicated place.
Blacks, the first target of affirmative action, are not even the biggest minority any longer; Latinos are. The fastest-growing group of Americans is of people who say they belong to more than one race. Is a Latino-Asian more in need of affirmative action than a black Pacific Islander who is half native American And should whites count as a minority, which they are already in Los Angeles It is hardly surprising that the University of Californian dropped this nonsense.
Now for the second big problem: execution. Remember that the Supreme Court also struck down the most explicit version of affirmative action, Michigan’s point-scoring system. This may have been ghastly, but, like the "scientific" systems that South Africa once invented for grading whiteness, it had the virtue of being clear. People could see when they were not getting jobs, university places or promotion in the army because of their skin color. Now affirmative action will go underground. It will be like one of those 01d clubs that had no rules banning Jews; they just didn’t seem to have any. Opacity will please nobody but lawyers and rabble-rousers.
Above all, race-based affirmative action will continue to give America an excuse to run away from dealing with a far more pressing issue that really is about fairness: the condition of the nation’s public schools. In America, the gap between rich suburban high schools and poor inner-city ones is remarkable and disgraceful. Addressing the problem means recognizing that it has more to do with class than with face. The children of the (fast-gr0wing) black and Latino middle classes go to much better schools than poor white Afghan and Albanian refugee kinds who have just arrived in Bronx.
The justice had a chance this week to draw a line under a once-successful experiment, and to begin the long process of removing race from American law. In most civilized Countries, judging somebody on the basis of their race is illegal; but not in the world’s most diverse country, where race is getting ever harder to define. Looking at this week’s judgment, George Orwell would not have known whether to laugh or cry; but he would certainly have started writing.
Which of the following about affirmative action and Michigan’s point-scoring system is true