By John McWhorter
There
are administrators beaming at the fact that by admitting my daughter they are
sticking a thumb in the eye at white people who don’t feel guilty enough about
their supremacy. If the idea is that the administrators are beaming because my
daughter is going to make the campus more diverse; if they are beaming because
by admitting my daughter, they are showing that racism is not dead … I will
feel that my daughter is being condescended to. I will feel it as a mark of
disrespect to me and my ability to get past the ills of the past and to pass on
those abilities to my daughter.
The debate was civil in a way that debates, sadly,
frequently no longer are, and it was part of a long line of such debates over
affirmative action that has since continued, and soon promises to return the
issue to the fore.
Affirmative action — broadly speaking, policies that
seek, affirmatively, to achieve racial and gender balance in areas
such as hiring, contracting and university admissions — has been controversial
since it was instituted in the 1960s. It’s frequently thought to have
originated, in a formal sense, with President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order
10925 and has proliferated throughout American institutions over time. It was
controversial at the time of that 2009 debate and it still is, such that in
its upcoming term, the Supreme Court will be considering challenges to
affirmative action programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
I now have that daughter. (I don’t remember what made me
so sure I would have a girl, since she wasn’t born until a few years later, but
here we are, and she’ll be applying to college in eight years, I assume, with
my younger daughter doing so three years later.) And not only do I stand by
what I said more than a decade ago, I feel it more deeply now.
It’s not that I’m opposed utterly to
affirmative action in the university context, admitting
some students under different grade and test score standards than other
students. I just think affirmative action should address economic disadvantage,
not race or gender.
When affirmative action was put into practice around a
half-century ago, with legalized segregation so recent, it was reasonable to
think of being Black as a shorthand for being disadvantaged, whatever a Black
person’s socioeconomic status was. In 1960, around half of Black people were poor. It was
unheard-of for big corporations to have Black C.E.O.s; major universities, by
and large, didn’t think of Black Americans as professor material; and even
though we were only seven years from Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the
Supreme Court, the idea of a Black president seemed like folly.
But things changed: The Black middle class grew
considerably, and affirmative action is among the reasons. I think a mature
America is now in a position to extend the moral sophistication of affirmative
action to disadvantaged people of all races or ethnicities, especially since,
as a whole, Black America would still benefit substantially.
And that informs my perspective on racial preferences as
they might apply to my own children now, in the 2020s. My daughters are lively
young people taking their places in this thing called life, learning how to
deal with problems (including growing up during a pandemic), embracing what
they love, discerning what they don’t, figuring out who they are on their way
to becoming thriving individuals.
I shudder at the thought of someone on a college
admissions committee, in the not-too-distant future, reading their dossiers and
finding their being biracial (in their case, half Black and half white, or
“mixed,” as we might have said in my day) — and thus, officially “diverse” and
even, according to our strange retention of the retrogressive “one-drop
rule,” officially “African American” — the most interesting thing about
them. Or even, frankly, interesting at all.
I don’t want an admissions officer to consider the
obstacles my children have faced, because in 2022, as opposed to in 1972, they
really face no more or less than their white peers do.
I don’t want that admissions officer to consider that,
perhaps here and there, someone, somewhere, underestimated them because both of
their parents aren’t white. In the 2020s, that will have happened so seldom to
them, as upper-middle-class persons living amid America’s most racially
enlightened Blue American white people, that I’m quite sure it will not imprint
them existentially any more than it did me, coming of age in the 1970s and
1980s.
I don’t want the admissions officer to consider my
children’s “diversity.” For one thing, their diversity from the other kids in
their neighborhoods, classrooms and lives is something of an abstraction. They
wear clothes from Old Navy, watch (and rewatch) “Frozen” and “Encanto,” and
play a lot of Roblox, just like their peers. And I will never
forget a line from a guidebook that
Black students at Harvard wrote two decades ago: “We are not here to provide
diversity training for Kate and Timmy.” Yep — and if we salute the enterprising
undergrads who wrote that, we must question the general thrust of the sundry
amicus briefs that will be offered in the Harvard and U.N.C. cases, about how
kids of color are vital to a campus because of their diversity, echoing the statement of Harvard’s president, just this week,
that “Considering race as one factor among many in admissions decisions
produces a more diverse student body which strengthens the learning environment
for all.”
“Diversity” has become one of those terms (and ideas)
that makes us feel cozy inside, like freshly baked blueberry muffins and “A
Charlie Brown Christmas.” But how would you feel about looking a Black
undergraduate in the eye and saying, “A lot of the reason we wanted you here,
on our campus, is your differences from most of the other students and the life
lessons they can learn from them”? Someone says, “I want my kids to interact
with Black students before they go out into the world.” I ask, “Just what was
it about Black people that you were hoping your kids would learn?”
There are ripostes to this, of course. Some
would say that we need to maintain racial preferences in admissions until we’ve
eliminated inequalities between Black, Latino, Native American and white
America — no differences in wealth, educational opportunities, health outcomes
or access to the ballot. (Note that Asian Americans are a somewhat different
case, broadly speaking, that we might take up another time.) I understand that
argument but consider it flawed, for two very straightforward reasons.
First, where is the evidence that maintaining racial
preferences in admissions, at the nation’s most selective universities, is the
only, the best or even a reasonably effective way to rectify those
inequalities? In individual cases, certainly, some students of color will
receive, and capitalize on, opportunities that they otherwise may not have had.
But the persistence of the wealth gap, after generations of affirmative action,
suggests that somewhere along the way, we’ve missed the mark, policy-wise.
Second, if you’ve raised your kids amid economic
adversity, you most likely will understand and even support having those
circumstances taken into account in their evaluation by a university, even if you’re
not part of a racial minority. But suppose that those aren’t your
circumstances, that you’re middle class or above and aren’t Black, Latino or
Native American. How would you feel about your kids being admitted to a
university because of their “diverseness” from other kids rather than, well,
their selves?
Read the full piece at the New York Times.
https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/its-time-to-end-race-based-affirmative-action/
