Last Monday night I felt like the white kid from a black school in a white state sitting in a room full of black students at a white university. Issues of race, usually lurking in the unspeakable shadows, were then front and center in a panel discussion that dealt with whether the historically ivory tower of academics would be able to keep embracing students of color through affirmative action in the future, a possibility that I, apparently alone in my stand, look at with dismay. I see a legitimate alternative: class-based affirmative action, unfairly discounted by backward-looking ideology at American universities.
The panel debate was framed by cursory discussion of two Supreme Court cases entering oral argument earlier that day, lending a sense of immediacy to the discussion, and featured eminent Georgetown personalities including the Assistant Director of Admissions for Multicultural Recruitment and Director of the Center for Minority Educational Affairs. My views, however, were not well represented: the opinions given were uniformly pleasing to the vast majority of those attending. The event drew about 50 people, fewer than 10 of whom could count themselves among the racial majority at Georgetown. This was, for me, not an unfamiliar situation.
My school district in Indiana is third only to downtown Indianapolis and downtown Gary in terms of its percentage of minority students. My high school is 27 percent white; my middle school just 16 percent. My soccer team, even for a suburban sport rarely noted for its integration, started six students of color out of 11. We competed in an athletic conference that counted among its members one school with fewer than 15 students of color out of 1500 where, on multiple occasions, the town’s “undeserved” reputation for intolerance was borne out on the heels of racial slurs. I know racism is out there. This background, while giving me a unique perspective on the lives of people different from myself, didn’t oblige me to nod approvingly in unison with the rest of the crowd as I heard about the glories of affirmative action.
Rather, I scowled at hearing the phrase “myth of meritocracy” and winced at hearing that our society functions at the mercy of “white supremacist ideology.” I was similarly incensed to see the debate hidden behind misleading, loaded terms that preclude dissent. “Who would want to deny access and opportunity?” asked Dr. Angela Mitchell of the African Studies Department.
Even after competing, studying and speaking at graduation alongside people of color, after living with a Senegalese immigrant and having long conversations with a Nigerian girl determined to make me understand what life is like for her and people with skin like hers, I maintain my opposition to affirmative action. It is not because I discount the value of those experiences, but because the artificial admixture of races created by affirmative action in no way mirrors such natural journeys of understanding.
The catchphrases of affirmative action advocates—equality and diversity—and their claims that a diverse student body benefits everyone once they get here (what a shame, then, that not everyone gets that chance) rang hollow with me. The underlying motivation of affirmative action never gets mentioned in glossy admissions literature.
There was one required school-wide assembly in my high school: the Black History Convocation. My sophomore year, after a singing of the Black National Anthem and a skit about how the word “picnic” is actually derived from how white people would “pick a n—-er” to lynch, then go spread a blanket and have lunch, a deus ex machina “God” proclaimed the superiority of the race He “created in his image.” The lone white actress in the production was, in a poignantly surreal moment, ridiculed in a later skit for bringing her family’s favorite dish, macaroni and cheese with guacamole, to a family picnic. I mean, cookout. A historically motivated attitude toward race relations was revealed in the assembly, like last week’s panel discussion, that deemphasizes equality and maximizes visceral guilt.
I asked Professor Reed of the Government department why he was so quick to discount socio-economically-based initiatives that help, for example, poor high school students whose parents never attended high school (both proven predictors of decreased educational attainment) of all races. He responded that while he doesn’t discount them, they don’t take into account the “historical context” of the practice.
Affirmative action doesn’t exist to foster equality; it exists to create inequality today to reimburse inequality from yesteryear. It’s just as divisive and just as much of a guilt trip as my high school assembly. Students must realize that affirmative action’s purported benefits—diversity of opinion and stimulating intellectual debate in a university setting—are mere facades. Already, proponents resort to projecting guilt on dissenting whites to paralyze opposition to affirmative action and the inequality inherent therein. This antiquated attitude should be soon abandoned and programs that help those in legitimate need, both blacks and non-blacks, replace the purely race-based programs that ignore the hardships of many deserving students under the unconvincing veil of “equality.”
