My mail tells me that Indians, like most Americans, are conflicted about affirmative action, but have little idea what it means.
The policy appears to have once more dodged a bullet in Fisher v. Texas.
On the technical legal side, I agree that race-based classifications by government must be narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest.
I also agree that affirmative action as a present remedy for past discrimination has a limited shelf life, although the pervasiveness of the discrimination in my home state of Texas is still much more of an issue than the courts have been prepared to recognize.
I also agree that promoting diversity in higher education is a compelling governmental interest. Where I part company with the SCOTUS is the dictum in Grutter v. Bollinger that the diversity rationale also has a limited shelf life.
I teach criminal justice.
A conversation about stop and frisk is a different conversation when there are no black or brown faces in the room or there are so few that the pressure to keep one's head down is overwhelming.
A conversation about domestic violence is a different conversation when the class is all male or there are only a couple of women.
A conversation about anti-terrorism measures is a different conversation with no foreign students in the classroom.
Now, I confess that if you view teaching as a series of lectures rather than an ongoing conversation, then my remarks make no sense. I find it hard to believe the SCOTUS intends to make that value judgment about higher education.
Speaking from my bias about what should be happening in a university classroom, diversity is not a value to benefit minorities but rather a value to enrich the experience of kids who are leaving home for the first time and discovering the rest of the world is not just like their block, their neighborhood, their city, their country.
Minority kids know this at a tender age. Failure to take it into account can be a deadly mistake.
I have taught at a majority-minority school and at a flagship state campus where they beat the brush to bring in a few minority students. I firmly believe that the brush beating conferred as much benefit on my white students as on the non-white students who will have better lives and pass on better lives to their children as a result of their experience.
It should go without saying that everything I've said about race and sex also applies to class.
I cannot understand how, if we value meritocracy, the need to integrate all discrete communities in university classrooms where leaders of the future are educated will ever go away.
The practice of affirmative action has two aspects, net broadening and preferences. Net broadening refers to fishing where the fish are: historically black colleges; Hispanic serving colleges, tribal colleges. Net broadening has been sufficient to enroll plenty of women and Asians, because those groups have the test scores to walk though the front door. Their underrepresentation was a straightforward artifact of discrimination in recruiting and admissions.
While the underrepresentation of Indians, blacks, and Hispanics comes partially from overt discrimination, they also suffer from systemic discrimination by inferior education in K-12 schools, aggravated by generations of low expectations by both schools and parents. These people are like white kids from rural Appalachia, products of similarly inferior schools and low expectations, but the racists use the disparity in test scores to argue that we are naturally suited to take orders and they are naturally suited to give orders.
One big obstacle for first generation college students is the myth that all colleges are alike. I could easily have succumbed to that myth if I had not served in the military with people who were not first generation college students. The most educated person in my family was an aunt who was a registered nurse, but her entire experience was focused on the certification.
Vocational education is important, but it’s not the subject here. Anyone can get into some college, somewhere, now that overt discrimination is illegal. Once in, if you are looking for technical certification in anything from computer systems to respiratory therapy, you can acquire your certification and if you were born to a family of manual laborers, as I was, your life will be entirely different from the lives of your parents. Good for you, but you don’t need affirmative action.
So we come to the other prong of affirmative action, preferences, which the naysayers would claim is all of affirmative action. The antis also overlook the rule that if two candidates are equally qualified, affirmative action gives the nod to a member of an underrepresented class. Only when two candidates are equally qualified.
We who are in favor of affirmative action often overlook that if you give a bureaucrat the choice of a decision they have to justify (pick the white person) or a decision they do not have to justify (pick the minority), the result will be less qualified rather than equally qualified minorities getting preference. The predictable social outcome is the stigma on “affirmative action babies,” like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who without affirmative action would have gotten no closer to Yale Law School than working in the cafeteria. Now, he is likely eventually to be a decisive vote in striking down affirmative action.
To avoid the stigma, the only time I mentioned my tribe in college was to request a press release to the tribal paper when I graduated. I benefitted from the impulse behind affirmative action anyway, because I could not hide rural poverty and no high school diploma. I, too, could never have been accepted at Yale Law without affirmative action, but I got waitlisted and declined to wait.
I learned the hard way that there is no avoiding the stigma. As long as affirmative action exists, people will assume minorities with degrees got an extra hand. To have the policy, the price is worth paying.
I’ve now spent fifteen years doing my best to help first generation college students, many minorities and many not.
George W. Bush graduated from a fine prep school and then skated though Yale with C’s. He was then admitted to Harvard Business School. My kids (biological or professional mentees) could never do that.
If I had told Yale I’m Cherokee, I expect I would have been admitted straight up rather than waitlisted. However, I had graduated from a top shelf state university magna cum laude and I had a decent LSAT score. At Yale, I would have been like Clarence Thomas, occupying a seat for which a white person with higher test scores was turned down. If the elite schools depended exclusively on test scores, they would be virtually all white and Asian.
Elite schools have better sense than to admit people who can’t do the work. They have to cater to American royalty, but it’s in everybody’s best interests that they also serve the value of social mobility.
We who have no family to guide us can look up at the fruit we have been taught not to expect and tell ourselves it’s probably sour anyway. Or we can shake the damn tree.