Are Percentage Plans Really Race Neutral In the First Place?
All this raises a fourth, and deepest, question: why are percentage plans preferable to old-fashioned affirmative action anyway? The SG says they are better because they are “race-neutral.” But are they really? Suppose a state chooses a percentage plan (or some other variant which downplays the role of standardized tests that have disparate racial impacts) precisely in order to accomplish racial diversity, as indeed may well have been the case in California, Florida and Texas. Isn’t that race-consciousness? It is one thing for a state to say, “we no longer think the SAT measures the qualities we are looking for in a college student, and for that reason, we are shifting over to other criteria.” But if states are saying, either implicitly or explicitly, “the SAT does measure scholastic aptitude, but it also leads to a segregated university, and so we are downplaying it for that reason,” isn’t that simply a race-conscious government decision that is different from affirmative action in fo
