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If blacks are 25% of the student body, how do you make sure the student government "looks like" the student body?
Why, the same way that companies do. The same way that countries that require a certain number of female representatives or pre-defined numbers of specific ethnicities to elected office do. We applaud "women" or "black" or "Latino" "seats" on the SCOTUS. You hear the reasoning when people say that a majority-black Congressional district shouldn't have a white representative, and the reasoning for the gerrymandering to produce majority minority districts (which reversed the gerrymandering that all but made diluted minority districts de rigueur). It was the administration's position when a physics department hired another white male and the provost pointed out that they had too many white males, requiring that the dept. justify not hiring a woman or "representative of another American culture" (i.e., black or Latino or Native American). Many people like affirmative action, where specific percentages of job hirees or college acceptees or grant recipients have to come from a specific race, sex, or ethnicity. You have to guarantee equality of outcome. The workforce, political class, set of judges, faculty, student body all have to "look like" some extraneous group such as the state, county, city, or national population.
On the other hand, it's blatantly unfair. Everybody should have the same opportunity to be elected, hired, receive public grants or be accepted to college, given their state and condition at the beginning of the process. People shouldn't be primarily members of a group, representatives of their category. They're individuals. If what you are and what you're like when you apply--a better campaigner, have higher academic attainment or more experience--you should be judged on what you've done. This is a strict equality of process viewpoint.
There's also another viewpoint: That those who make the decisions should be free to make whatever decision they want. This argument was largely lost in the US decades back. You're allowed to violate equality of outcome only if you can show that equality of opportunity is more important: If the requirement that says "what the person can do" is essential to the job. We don't like legacy enrollments because it says that the university can admit somebody for a non-ability/non-category-based reason. We allow freedom of choice only when the outcome and process meet certain requirements, when choosing between people that fit into essentially the same box.
We wind up putting moral values on each of these outcomes. How we rank the values differs from person to person. And crucially, the restrictions we want always have to fall on other people. Restrictions, taxes, zoning regulations, etc., should never hobble *us*.
We see constant tension between these POVs because we think that equality of outcome, equality of process, and freedom of choice should always yield the same result, but they can only yield the same result if the different cohorts are equal in attributes and the people making decisions are truly color/sex/ethnicity-blind. So what do you do when life sucks and the three processes yield disparate results? You have to choose which value dominates the others. This school chose equality of outcome: But you can't just specify "25% of winners must be black." Implementing that kind of policy would be a nightmare. And capricious.
The contrast is most stark when it's written down and when the limitation is not on those perceived to be somehow morally deficient or who are somehow "wrong" but on voters and us (meaning both "us" and those we empathize with).
For example, I see very few criticisms of stipulating that the VPs have to be black, which limits, of course, opportunities for whites. I see a lot of criticisms of the stipulation that the prezes be white, which limits opportunities for blacks. I suspect on FR the foci of criticism would be reversed.
I don't like this kind of a priori stipulating of outcomes and restrictions on voter choice, viewing people as primarily exponents of some single characteristic. Then again, I think that over the course of several years without it you'd see blacks disproportionately underrepresented, so it's more likely that this system imposes a greater limitation on whites.
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