On the other hand we also have a moral feeling that the sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the sons, that we should not, as Justice Scalia has put it, have a debtor race and a creditor race. So my sense is that the moral claim for reparations is in fact very problematic and ultimately would fail in the American body politic. That's not to say that there aren't important social welfare redistributional claims. But that's a judgment call. On the other hand, the claim that affirmative action is needed as an effective measure to combat discrimination seems quite powerful to me.
Discrimination is still widespread.
The best social science evidence confirms that over and over again. It was very compelling when we went through it with the president. The unexplained residual is attributable to discrimination. The most compelling evidence these days, it seems to me, comes not from the statistical studies of disparity but instead from looking at testers, where matched pairs of individuals, one white, one minority, are sent to apply for a job that's been advertised or to try to rent an apartment that's been advertised, and the testing evidence shows over and over and over again that in areas all over the country discrimination is widespread. The tester evidence lets us measure discrimination directly and the evidence is alarmingly clear.