We hear about such cases because they occur in the lives of journalists, professors and other elites that play a disproportionate role in shaping public opinion. Yet such cases are often misleading. The typical affirmative action recipient is a mail carrier or a cashier. Affirmative action on the assembly line at Southern New England Telephone makes less dramatic newspaper copy than whether Allen Bakke could go to medical school, but the ultimate consequences of such policies are probably more profound. A second problem with drawing inferences from extreme cases is that the best policy will still produce occasional disasters.
Bureaucratic justice is dispensed by fallible, busy people who face significant uncertainty.
Under any reasonable policy, there will be some welfare mother in Brooklyn who kills her child. Afterwards, there will always be some expose about how the authorities should have intervened. Right now, conservative foundations are combing the land in search of appealing, disadvantaged whites who were denied important opportunities because of affirmative action. Many resulting cases reflect the consequences of bureaucratic snafu or unusual circumstance rather than inherent problems of affirmative action itself. Cheryl Hopwood is the current poster child of the anti-affirmative action cause.