Of A Split Mind: Thoughts on Affirmative Action
by Special Correspondent Latoya Peterson
I’ve been reading and reading and reading about Barack Obama and his views on affirmative action.
First came this Washington Post Op-Ed analyzing Obama’s comments on ABC’s “This Week.”
Eugene Robinson, the author of the piece, compares Obama’s statements:
Obama has repeatedly gone on record as a supporter of affirmative action. But “if we have done what needs to be done to ensure that kids who are qualified to go to college can afford it,” he said in the ABC interview, “affirmative action becomes a diminishing tool for us to achieve racial equality in this society.”
He seemed to side with those who think class predominates when he said, “I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”
Robinson ends by discussing other issues in college education - like legacy admissions - and notes his own views on race and class.
After reading the Op-Ed, I came across another interesting post. Written by dnA of the Too Sense blog, he address the original issue in this post, and then revisits the topic in yesterday’s post.
dnA summarizes his views by stating:
Obama seems to be suggesting that AA is needed only for those people for whom “race and class still intersect.” That black middle class folks who are the first generation in college need AA, “as opposed to fifth or sixth generation college attendees.”
Empirical research bears out that race still matters in hiring practices, regardless of class, which means that black folks of all classes need Affirmative Action, not just those who are poor and are first generation college attendees.
Saying otherwise is suggesting a significant change in Affirmative Action as we understand it.
Obama is obviously between a rock and a hard place on that one. There is no right answer - at least, not one that will please a large group of people.
I wish I could supply an answer, but I cannot. On one hand, I understand Obama’s sentiments - most of the obstacles I have had in life have resulted from being poor, not being black. The boost I received from programs rooted in affirmative action were predominantly to overcome financial barriers. I remember sitting in my AP classes, listening to my friends discuss SAT prep programs like Kaplan, expecting their parents to cough up the $700 (it was much more expensive in 1999) it would take to increase their SAT scores by 200 points.
I remember being silent during those discussions, knowing that in my household a free $20 was hard to come by. I earned all my own money in those days, and $700 might as well have been seven million. Paying the reduced fees on my AP tests broke my pockets enough, along with all of the extra expenses involved in being an extra-curricular superstar and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life. Thank goodness for my pre-college programs. They gave us PSATs and SAT prep every year, paid for up to five college applications, and allowed us access to internships, interviewing skills, and summer school and job opportunities that my friends took for granted.
Still, I understand Obama’s position. Broke is broke. Poor white kids are at just as much of a disadvantage as poor black kids, right?
dnA thinks not. In his argument, he points to institutionalized racism trends that have been verified through research: a bias against blacks in hiring and promotions, based on variables as simple as a name. I am reminded of a statement made by former editor of the Source, Carlito, expressed in a late 1990s Editor’s Letter. In the letter, he basically ranted about things that made him angry or disgusted about our society, throwing in the item “knowing that Billy and Heather will always have a chance.” By dint of birth, the white majority always seems to win the set, no matter how they started the game.
Affirmative action is necessary to correct a cultural disadvantage - yet it is so tainted with skewed perceptions and double meanings that it almost hurts to claim the benefits.
I hear the voices of one of my Asian friends from high school, whispering that she heard Asian students were being rejected from the University of Maryland because they had already met their affirmative action quotas. I hear that former white friend of mine, whispering that another friend’s admission to Princeton was based on Affirmative Action, and knowing that her liberal mind truly believed that was the case. I hear a former boss of mine - whom I thank for unabashedly sharing an older white male view of the world - telling me that I shouldn’t go to a black college because “employers will think you couldn’t cut it at a real school.”
Affirmative action was intended to right a wrong…yet sometimes, I can’t help but feel like accepting the benefits it provides perpetuates a stereotypical view that African-Americans (and other minorities) cannot advance under their own devices. It is almost as if affirmative action is a new colonization tactic, where we are expected to be grateful, and in awe of this wonderful gift of equality we are receiving. We are supposed to be grateful for this gift, and never ever question anything else - after all, aren’t we receiving affirmative action now? Everything is supposedly equal. Why are black people (and I use black people in lieu of minorities for a reason) still complaining? Affirmative action has been in place twenty years now - shouldn’t you have caught up by now?
The alternative-establishment, unschool supporting, hip-rocker in me wants to rebel. It is obvious to me that this gift is tainted, and tainted gifts are ones I do not want to accept. Strings of obedience were used to tie the bow, and I will be damned if I have to spend the rest of my life kow-towing to someone else’s warped sense of superiority. It irks me to no end to see people take in my brown face, and automatically assume that it was not my merit that got me to where I am, but a social program.
That being said, a small part of me still worries. As much as I want to cast off this oppressive yoke of obligation, I wonder about the kids who are growing up in my circumstances. If Affirmative Action were eliminated, would they be able to receive those same benefits? Would a young black girl be able to dream about a life of entrepreneurship if her entire world was limited to people who are unable to conceive of such a thing? Would I have learned to accept my unmistakably black name, if it were not for minority-based programs that instilled in me that working and living into mainstream America did not mean hiding one’s ethnic identifiers? After all, you could just as easily be reading a post from L. Denise Peterson. Or the genderless identity L.D. Peterson. Would I have been able to hone my skills discussing race and society if I was not in a predominantly black pre-college program?
I still have no answers, and it appears I have run out of items to read.
I don’t know what to answer, or what to think.
What I do know is that affirmative action would be a lot easier to swallow if it wasn’t for the lasting bitter aftertaste.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
atlasien wrote:
I don’t think affirmative action should be abolished by any means, but I think it should be reformed through including measures of income and theories of social capital. For example, an affirmative action application test could consider the number of college graduates in the applicants’ extended family.
Even leaving aside the issue of the lowest income white people, there are serious inequalities among minorities under the current system.
For example, the following four black students - the child of an elite family from an African country, the child of a refugee family from an African country, an upper-class black student, a lower-class black student - are all considered the same. All of them will face systemic anti-black racism, but some of them need a lot more support and resources than others.
Some Southeast Asian populations in the Western states are mired in severe poverty and gang violence, with high dropout rates, yet children from those populations are considered “model minorities” that don’t need any affirmative action… this is quite an injustice.
Posted 18 May 2007 at 8:17 am ¶
Celeste wrote:
I am certain that I personally benefitted from affirmative action. My medical school (with varying results) endevours to try to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in medicine. So, even though the school was supposed to give preference to in-state students, I was accepted from out-of-state because I was qualified (My stats were in the average of the other accepted students) they felt it was important for 2 of 120 incoming students to be AA. That was all I needed. I met or exceeded every standard for matriculation. I would like to note that many students admitted without AfA (men who are not members of groups underrepresented in medicine) cannot say the same thing. I think there are two main reasons why we have AfA: 1. To give certain groups a chance to catch up after being excluded from opportunities so long 2. To counteract the natural tendency that far too many of us (I mean as Americans) have to prefer certain racial groups over others based on ingrained and often racial stereotypes 3. To give those with the potential to perform well despite not having stellar stats because of a disadvantaged background a chance. I’ve still had to deal with so much racism during my education and training that it’s not funny. However, at least I’m here. The more diversity we get, the less it will happen. When the topic of affirmative action comes up, I tell people my experience because I want them to think of their collegue and friend when they think of affirmative action, not the abstract idea of some underqualified minority (when in reality they should be picturing a white woman but I digress) bumbling about like an idiot, while a ” more qualified” person suffers. In addition, as long as there is so much racism everywhere, we need programs to offset its impact. However, I think it should be expanded to help those with low socioeconomic status. We need not be binary. We can address poverty and racism with much the same approach. A poor kid of any race is going to have a tougher time at it than my kids and they should get more help than my kids would. I don’t see why we have to pit poor white or asian kids against other minorities. We can address both these problems.
Posted 18 May 2007 at 8:57 am ¶
wendi wrote:
Great post, Latoya
I respect your ability to put your neck out there with your honesty about your experiences and personal feeling on Affirmative Action.
I sit on the fence when it comes to A.A., but mainly because of how it affected me in a social sense. I attended a predominately white (I was one of 6 girls of color in my entire grade of 47, and by “of color,” I am speaking of APA, Latina, and black; and was the only black person in my grade) all-girls school in the South, so I always felt a bit on edge when it came to race issues. I had to constantly deal with people asking to touch my hair, if I could tan, etc, but the worst racism I experienced was when it came time for us to prepare for college.
I will never forget when a white classmate of mine, while looking at a board near our senior den on which we posted the colleges to which we had been admitted, said to me (yes, aloud), “You are lucky. You will have such an easy time getting into college because you are black.” Screech…record stopped. WHAT?
She had ignored the fact that I was making excellent grades, was involved in like every extra-curricular known to man, and had a full course load (I took 2 AP sciences and 2 languages plus my other classes– something unheard of at our school at the time and for which I had to receive special permission to do). She didn’t know that I was paying for SAT tests and admission fees out of my own pocket, or that I was attending high school on a scholarship because my single mother couldn’t afford to pay the tuition. She certainly did not know that just to be a smart-ass, I had checked every box and written “human” in the race section on all of my standardized tests. But of course, none of that mattered. She had used social discourse surrounding A.A. to create a divide between us.
It was as if all the hard work I had done in order to prove myself at the very least equal in the first place (ahem, “black tax”) had been flushed down the toilet.
So with that said, despite the fact that I did not explicitly use it to my advantage (considering my politicized mangling of the race category on my tests and applications as well as my uber-”white sounding” name) and that I am disturbed by the way it has been perceived by those who do not think it necessary and/or feel resentment toward those whom it is meant to serve, I think Affirmative Action needs to stick around. It needs a ton of re-working, no doubt, but I think that in order to accomplish that, we as a nation need to have an open discussion about it and a better understanding of how it functions (a lot of AA policies at universities and the workplace are not disclosed, which aids anti-AA movements, no doubt).
Posted 18 May 2007 at 9:45 am ¶
dnA wrote:
My question is, after four hundred years of preferential treatment, why don’t white people have self-esteem problems or question whether or not they just get what they have because they’re white?
The answer is that the college admissions process is so freaking arbitrary, that its basically the luck of the draw. I don’t ever assume I got into a school because I’m better than all the other applicants, because the entire process of evaluating a whole person is absurd. The reason I support AA is because in the end, no matter what, they’re more likely to evaluate someone as worthy based on race or class.
Posted 18 May 2007 at 11:10 am ¶
Winn wrote:
When I began attending a prestigious, predominantly white Texas college in the early 90’s, the campus debates about affirmative action were just heating up. I felt like I needed to carry a CV with me to prove I deserved to be there: National Merit Finalist, Who’s Who Among American High School Students, graduated in the top 10% of a class of almost 1100 students, 4s and 5s on the six AP exams I took, etc. Eventually, I began to question affirmative action, feeling that it diminished my own achievements and caused people to question whether my accomplishments derived from merit or some kind of favoritism based on race. My parents were both college graduates and educators and I lived in a fairly affluent city, so wasn’t I already advantaged? I have since come to a more nuanced view. If affirmative action protects me from being disregarded by interviewers regardless of my qualifications or if it gives me a leg up for a position for which I am otherwise qualified but minorities are underrepresented, I’m not going to apologize for that. Unlike Ward Connerly or Clarence Thomas, I am not so naïve or self-deluded as to believe that we have attained a level playing field or that white privilege has suddenly gone out of fashion. Until both happen, even white people constrained by poverty will still have doors open to them that remain barely cracked or closed for people of color. The idea that class trumps race has just enough substance to seem credible, but labor and economic statistics continually show that the idea is not totally supported. I agree with other posters that economic need should be considered along with race, but the unique situation of being Barack Obama’s child should not be mistaken as representative of the needs of the average child of color, and certainly can’t be extrapolated onto the larger issue of affirmative action.
Posted 18 May 2007 at 2:42 pm ¶
mireille wrote:
I’ve lived in Northern Virginia most of my life. Most of my friends go to relatively prestigious in-state public schools (UVA, Tech, W&M) and, though a very diverse lot, I’ve only had one thing about AA, an off handed comment made by my white friend about her adopted little brother who happens ethnically ambiguous (dark skin, curly hair). She said something like
“yea, he’s lucky, he can claim whatever the hell he wants and it isn’t like anyone could prove otherwise”. Also, another friend of mine got a scholarship (which I believed she declined because she got a full ride) from a Hispanic student organization. She is, in fact, half Mexican but is not exactly in touch with that part of her ethnic make-up (nor does she have any obligation to be). In my theatre class, there were whispers from a few bitter white girls that another girl got to play Puck because of “diversity casting”. She happen to be a Muslim in hijab. It seems that being of the same class has to an extent not afforded some minorities the ability to be judged on their own merit. I, however, have never experienced this kind of treatment personally, so I am still very naive to it. I would be shock (shock!) to know that someone discriminated against me for being Filipino or female. When my mother, one of the most respected people in her field, was passed up in favor of a white man for a promotion, she said it was because he was more qualified and I believe that too.
However, having said all of that, I still support AA. Most people have no idea what they’re talking about when they rant against it. Race, as it is conceived in America, was on of the bad side affects of the Enlightenment flurry to classify everything. It has no real scientific basis. However, social forces and discrimination are real. Education and employment are concrete ways to uplift groups of people previously kept down. AA is one way to amend past mistakes. Why there isn’t room for EVERY qualified person in high education is beyond me. The popularization of education in american can be nothing but good, artificial selectivity in higher education is done to protect a certain class of people.
Posted 18 May 2007 at 5:44 pm ¶
Mina wrote:
“Robinson ends by discussing other issues in college education - like legacy admissions”
He forgot one more admissions quota program: the DoD thing. Several years ago I heard that if not for quotas, MIT undergrads would be 60-80% international students.
Apparently the Department of Defense won’t cut research deals with a university unless the school agrees to have at least a certain % of Americans in the student body or something (I don’t know how the rule counts green card holders, American citizens in high schools abroad, etc.).
Posted 18 May 2007 at 8:29 pm ¶
Mike wrote:
Affirmative Action is suitable for schools and jobs where the workforce does not match the demographics of the state. However, at times it is simply ridiculous.
As a white male who grew up in a relatively poor household, I was rejected by 3 high schools in a row because I appeared too white–and having a white guy a school is fighting against diversity.
These schools were Hispanic-majority by a country mile, followed by a large number of Asians (primarily Koreans), Blacks, and then Whites.
I was a stellar student–4.0 GPA, but my being there would’ve somehow upset their quota.
Affirmative Action based on race has no place in areas where whites are the minorities anyway.
Posted 18 May 2007 at 10:18 pm ¶
AAD wrote:
As the father of a four year old black boy I MUST be in support of AA. His options are limited by his being a male black person, and society’s expectations of him are low for the same reason. My son has already unknowingly experienced institutional racism when his preschool tried to label him as “special needs” when his only special need was more sleep. They were shocked by what a little rest could do for a black boy after my wife and I rejected their evaluation! (All of the administrators and teachers at his school are white.) With these kind of forces against you before you even reach public school age tells me that racism often has nothing to do with class, and that AA is still a necessity. The reality is that even if AA gets you into school, or a good job, it’s still up to the individual to figure out how to be successful in those (hostile) environments.
Posted 20 May 2007 at 6:37 pm ¶
Eun-jung wrote:
Great post, LaToya!
I’m sure you read my comments to TooSense’s article the first time around.
I have to tell you - Affirmative Action is how I got a lot of the ecclectic array of jobs that I have had. I worked for Cover Girl as a model for a few years - when I walked into the first casting, there were four of us: an Asian(me), an African-American girl, a Hispanic girl, and a white girl. Bing - can we say…United Nations for make-up?
I overheard my boss the first week that I started at my job whispering to the HR woman on the phone that her department was, “starting to look like the United Nations”.
A.A. is needed. Yes, okay, it might be for cultural, and it might be for financial - it might very well be for both at some certain times. But in the end, I know that I probably got into Berkeley because A. I am out of state and B. I am Korean-American. Why? Because my SATs were lousy and my GPA was just above average.
Posted 21 May 2007 at 6:49 am ¶
Chris wrote:
Does anyone have the complete text of the Affirmative Action law that was passed by Congress? From what I remember Affirmative Action was created in general terms as part of compromise , not spelling out a particular race, but stating that an affirmative action needs to take place to right wrongs in a situation where discrimination has taken place. Honestly I think politicians have gotten lazy and not tried to tackled the inequalities that are still present in our society, but they have instead chose to pass the problem on to future generations to solve or to pass on.
Posted 21 May 2007 at 7:53 am ¶
Jeremy Pierce wrote:
The general difficulty I see with affirmative action (in college admissions, anyway) is that it takes kids who aren’t meeting the standards required for a certain college and then throws them into that higher-standards environment without being prepared for it, which leads them to have a harder time doing as well as they would have if they were at a school with slightly lower standards for admission. I’m thus not convinced at all that it helps the people it’s intended to help, and perhaps it even hurts them.
AAD, what makes you think the teachers wouldn’t have done the same thing with a white kid displaying the same behavior? Nothing in your explanation seems to me to have anything to do with his being black. It seems instead to have to do with not interpreting his behavior correctly. Since special needs are independent of race, I have no reason to think they wouldn’t have done the same thing with a white kid.
Posted 29 May 2007 at 9:19 am ¶
Lyonside wrote:
>The general difficulty I see with affirmative action (in college admissions, anyway) is that it takes kids who aren’t meeting the standards required for a certain college and then throws them into that higher-standards environment without being prepared for it,
That’s a fallacy. Affirmative Action still requires that the minority in question be QUALIFIED. It’s meant to ensure diversity, but not at the expense of success.
Posted 29 May 2007 at 3:40 pm ¶
Sewere wrote:
Thanks for taking him to task Lyonside.
For those who are interested in a more detailed understanding of the implementation of Affirmative Action please see a brief history of the law through this link.
Carmen interviewed Daniel Golden on Addicted to Race Episode 48 and they discussed the” Original Affirmative Action Program” (aka the combination of Legacy, Wealth and Whiteness without the necessary “merit-based” academic qualifications) that Jeremy seems to have “mistakenly” mis-labeled with the one that came as a result of the changes to Civil Rights.
Posted 29 May 2007 at 6:00 pm ¶