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I didn't see anything in that article to support that claim. Closest was this:
However, like most points in the article, it's uncited. Although since she as a BIPOC has Other Ways of Knowing, perhaps I should just be quiet while a Black woman is speaking instead of Noticing her general lack of citations. And in what is basically a codified trope now when it comes to blacks writing about racial matters, she does not clarify whether she is talking about per capita or not, nor is it apparent if she understands the concept of per capita in the first place.
Naturally, upon a Googling there are quite a few NBER papers that discuss women, non-Asian minorities, and affirmative action, so it's unclear what research she has in mind. It’s also possible she doesn’t have any actual research in mind and was just regurgitating a passphrase she read elsewhere. One paper from the search results caught my eye, though.
In the context of federal contractors and subcontractors, the paper suggests the "affirmative action program [] is generally ineffective for women, although it has been effective for minorities." And by ineffective, he means "affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women's progress in the workplace." The author explains:
Note that the paper is from 1989. It's darkly hilarious how long affirmative action has been around, when for some reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs. I'm going to tell my children that affirmative action was invented after Saint Floyd was brutally murdered by a MAGA insurgent in 2020.
Especially within education, it doesn't pass the sniff test that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, especially on a per capita basis. Women have similar average IQs as men (or exhibit a modest deficit if you're Hanania-pilled), but blacks have substantially lower average IQs than whites. Thus, there's a lot more ground to make-up in the latter case through affirmative action.
Indeed, Table 2 and Table 6 of this paper show that, in the 80s and 90s, the black-white coefficient (expressed as an odds ratio) was 4x larger than that of the female-male coefficient from logistic regressions modeling undergraduate admission chances at elites schools. The authors remark that "[f]emale candidates have 50 percent better odds of being admitted than their statistically equivalent male counterparts" in contrast to the 450% increase for being black instead of white. I didn’t see the analogous figure quoted for female vs. male, but the authors additionally report that being black instead of white was worth +230 points on the SAT; being black instead of Asian was worth +280 points on the SAT.
I imagine the female-male coefficient has further shrunk since then, given undergraduate females now outnumber males (thus presumably less need for pro-female affirmative action). I do believe in ${CurrentDay} there are larger affirmative action preferences given to women at the graduate level for admissions, and in hiring and promotion decisions in academia and industry (especially in sectors like tech and finance), but this would still pale in comparison to the corresponding racial preferences given to blacks.
Now back to the original article complaining that white Women Have Always Been the Primary beneficiaries of affirmative action. It Just so Happens the proposed next steps involve transferring ever moar money and opportunities from whites towards blacks and latinos, especially black and latina women. She does some ducking and weaving in bouncing between talking about "Black and Latina women," "Black, Latina, and Indigenous women," and "Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian individuals." For the aforementioned third category, she has this to say:
Considering racial benefits given to blacks and latinos often come at the expense of Asians, this sounds amusingly like she's threatening Asians. I came away with a similar feeling after reading her article as I did after reading OU Samantha’s Essay—namely, feeling slightly dumber.
Yes. On of my relatives was a career US military officer, and he described to me the methods through which his branch incentivized recruiters to find diverse applicants (this would have been roughly around 1989, a few years in either direction IIRC).
It seems to me like that the opinion that things just went off the rails recently is very common. I suspect there are a few reasons for this, one of them being the ability of the internet to form a coherent counter-consensus against institutional power, and one of them being that the forces of woke or whatever you want to call them really overextended in the 201Xs, using rhetoric that diverged from the more defensible "make society better for the marginalized" and veered into "make society worse for the unmarginalized." And then finally it seems to me that given the above, there is a very strong incentive for many people who see themselves in the middle to say "woah woah woah, [consequences downstream of X] are clearly too far," while glossing question of whether or not X should be removed since it caused the downstream consequences because fundamentally they support X, or something like X.
There are probably some other reasons I am not thinking of, but I find it interesting that, even though affirmative action has always been controversial, it seems like opposition to it has really been consolidating into something that might actually "stick" beyond grumbling about political correctness. It's interesting to me that this turn took about a generation, perhaps 1.5 generations ("affirmative action" dates to 1961) for the wheel to turn this far. A real reminder of both how slow and how fast society can change.
I do, however, suspect this may have happened before – with progressive overreach in the 1960s and 1970s fueling backlash leading to Nixon and Reagan. So I wonder if part of the "reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs" is simply because a lot of younger people had grown up in an era where progressives/leftists were more chastened (Clinton) and cautious about letting their most radical members steal the microphone and run away with it. But by the time of Obama, they had grown overconfident again (and people who would have pushed for more moderation were aging and sidelined or dead or retired) so the fringes ran away with the microphone and now we're getting Nixon all over again. As one of the younger people, I'm not sure if it's different this time, but it does seem to me that, however you slice it, the question of wokeness definitely goes far back beyond 201X.
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