Photo by hollow sidewalks | CC BY 2.0
One of the hidden sources of division in the United States is the conceptual silo: the habits of thought, jurisprudence and reporting that segregates issues that feed on each other into separate debates, news reports and court cases. The segregation of debates and decisions about affirmative action, on the one hand, and mass incarceration, on the other, is exemplary in this regard and worth digging into, as I do below.
Both phenomena are rooted in America’s tortured racial history. But affirmative action has been firmly placed by the Supreme Court in the diversity silo: Enhancing education and research by diversifying college campuses (the focus of the most celebrated of the affirmative action cases that have reached the Supreme Court) has been the only consistent justification for affirmative action that have survived continuous court battles against the policy. Those battles have been regularly in the headlines since the 1978 decision in the case of the Regents of California v. Bakke. Justice Lewis Powell, writing the plurality opinion, declared quotas unconstitutional over the objection of civil rights lion Thurgood Marshall. But Powell created a silo for affirmative action by identifying diverse student bodies as a boon to education and a “compelling state interest.”
Meanwhile, the war on drugs that would flood American prisons with brown and black young men was ramping up in a separate silo, with a nakedly racial…