“The Myth Of Absence”: How America’s Original Affirmative Action Is Still Going Strong
George W. Bush used to joke about it, his mediocre record at Yale, his less-than-diligent efforts throughout his educational career. So many laughed along at every bit of the persona he played into – the incurious certainty, the attempts to pronounce “nuclear” and the confident attitude throughout it all. But few questioned his right to take that place at Yale, another at Harvard and the privileged path that led to the White House.
That is how America has always worked, with the rich and the ones with the last names that matter usually stepping to the front of the line. It’s a system that has overwhelmingly benefited whites and males and, to look at the boards of Fortune 500 companies, still does.
Yet, you don’t see the righteous indignation or a spate of lawsuits to rid higher education of the curse of legacies. Voices are rarely raised to demand that elite colleges and universities take the thumb off the scale for families with a fat checkbook or a name on a campus building. There is not a suggestion that “they” don’t belong.
When Abigail Fisher was refused admittance at the University of Texas, she didn’t think that because she didn’t earn her way into the top 10 percent of her high school class — a bar that in Texas would have gained her automatic admission – that just maybe she should have studied harder. She refused the school’s offer to attend another Texas university, earn good grades and transfer in.
She didn’t consider the university’s logical explanation that it, like every other school, takes a “holistic” approach when putting together a class – using musical talent, community service, athletic ability, SAT scores, disadvantages overcome and yes, family legacy, among a long list of qualifications.
She did not consider the facts, as Pro Publica pointed out in a breakdown of the case, that UT offered provisional admission to 42 white students with lower test scores and grades, and that 168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher’s were also denied entry.
What Abigail Fisher did was assert that she was discriminated against because she is white. She has expressed her disappointment in not being accepted to a school she had dreamed of going to, one her family members had attended. But she has never acknowledged that a dream her family members could dream for generations could only be shared by African Americans starting in 1956, when they were first admitted there. (It wasn’t until 1964 – fewer than 50 years ago – that blacks integrated the residence halls.)
If life is a zero-sum game – what someone else gets takes away from me – then recruiting minorities for a diverse student body at UT, using race and its legacy as a consideration among many when choosing a freshman class, takes away Fisher’s rightful place.
Does she know or care about the history of the University of Texas, where minority students didn’t even get the chance to compete for so long, giving unfair advantages to every white hopeful? Does she know or care about the ways she as a woman has benefited from the tactics and gains of the civil rights movement, from the lessons pioneering feminists learned from the protesters who changed a segregated nation?
Would Fisher ever acknowledge that her family history at the university gave her an advantage and she still could not cut it?
The Supreme Court compromised in its ruling on Fisher’s case against the University of Texas last week, sending it back to lower courts for review but telling the courts to carefully scrutinize any consideration of race in programs to promote diversity.
Not every childhood finger-painted creation on the refrigerator door is a masterpiece, no matter what mom and dad say, and not every student is going to get first choice on the college list. But after this Supreme Court ruling, expect more legal challenges from students who get the skinny college envelopes in the mail.
And you know the lawsuits won’t examine the SAT scores of millionaires, or ask if too many oboe players made the cut. In America, where a man with degrees from Columbia and Harvard is blithely referred to as a “food stamp” president by opponents, any perceived gain by a minority is too often seen as a loss for the way things should be rather than a step toward equality and inclusion that’s valuable for all.
The lack of respect for black achievement is nothing new.
What’s truly missing in American education is a comprehensive history class, one that clearly states what African Americans have contributed, as a counter to a characterization that has taken hold of many minorities as undeserving takers. It was a belief on full display when privileged presidential candidate Mitt Romney – wealthy son of a governor – complained about the 47 percent who expect to be given things such as food and health care. There was outrage but also support for his statements, especially from the high rollers in the room who ignored the minimum wage workers serving them and the guy mixing drinks and making the tape.
In Charlotte, N.C., where I live, an exhibit that should be required viewing for every American fills in some of that history. The Kinsey Collection: Where Art and History Intersect has opened at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, named for a former Charlotte mayor and honored architect who had to sue his home state of South Carolina for the right to attend Clemson University. Bernard and Shirley Kinsey’s amazing collection of art and historical artifacts and documents, one amassed during more than 40 years of marriage and shared goals, is American history, no hyphen required.
It includes a Currier and Ives lithograph of “The First Colored Senator and Representatives in the 41st and 42nd US Congress,” from 1872, a portrait of seven distinguished men elected after the Civil War — when black soldiers suffered a mortality rate 35 percent greater than other troops. After post-Reconstruction disenfranchisement of black voters in the South for much of the 20th century, such officials vanished until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, weakened last week by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The contributions of African Americans to this country have not been noted, but “we’ve got the documentation,” Bernard Kinsey told me as we walked slowly among the proud portraits, the books written and overwhelming evidence of the sacrifices made during a preview of the exhibit last week. He called it “the myth of absence.”
Despite the privilege that would assert otherwise, the descendants of these history makers aren’t stealing anyone’s seat. They are merely taking their rightful place.
By: Mary C. Curtis, She The People, The Washington Post, July 1, 2013
“Blindspots, Symbols And Symptoms”: What Paula Deen Could Teach The Supreme Court
Why, in a week of multiple important Supreme Court decisions, are we so focused on the racial sins and multiple apologies of country cooking’s Paula Deen?
In part, of course, it’s because we brake for train wrecks, preferring them even to this week’s twin local animal stories about Rusty the runaway red panda and the black bear cub running through backyards in Northwest Washington.
But we’re also clicking on the Deen-athon because the “Oprah of food,” as one of the cook’s 2.7 million Facebook fans calls her, is a symbol and a symptom — a walking, talking, crying and deep-frying reminder of how much we still need both affirmative action and a fully functional Voting Rights Act.
Deen, who told NBC’s Matt Lauer, “I is what I is and I’m not changing,” was wrong about that: She’s already lost her cooking show, her deals with Smithfield Foods, Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Target. All that and more slipped away since the news that she’d admitted in a legal deposition that “of course” she’s used a racial slur in the distant past, and dreamed of throwing her brother Bubba a “plantation-themed” wedding dinner served by an all-black wait staff.
Now even Novo Nordisk has, by supposedly mutual agreement, “suspended” the woman who brought the world skillet-fried apple pie as spokeswoman for its diabetes drug. But she is the perfect spokeswoman for a week in which a number of the biggest stories circle back to the issue of inequality. To our flawed efforts to live up to that shimmery line in our Declaration of Independence about the apparently not-so-self-evident truth that we are all created equal.
In Florida, where George Zimmerman is on trial in the shooting death of black teenager Trayvon Martin, the friend Martin was on the phone with right before he died testified that he told her, “That ‘N-word’ is still following me now,’ ” she told the court. “I asked him how the man looked like. He just told me the man looked ‘creepy.’ ‘Creepy, white’ — excuse my language — ‘cracker. Creepy [expletive] cracker.” So we’ve been told that Zimmerman saw Martin through a racial lens. And now know that Martin saw Zimmerman that way.
In California, same-sex couples will soon be free to marry, but they still can’t walk down the aisle in 38 other states. And despite the high court’s thumbs down on the Defense against Marriage Act, we’re still nowhere near equality for an awful lot of Americans.
Which is why the saddest headline of the week had to be the one announcing that, as the civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis put it, “the Supreme Court has stuck a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act” and “gutted the most powerful tool this nation has ever had to stop discriminatory voting practices from becoming law.” Now Mississippi and Texas can implement voter ID laws that, whatever their intent, will disenfranchise minority voters.
Across the land, meantime, disappointed white college applicants have effectively been invited to challenge race-conscious admissions plans like the one in Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, which the Supreme Court sent back to a lower court for further review. “The worst forms of racial discrimination in this nation have always been accompanied by straight-faced representations that discrimination helped minorities,” Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion. He’s long seen affirmative action as a vote of non-confidence, suggesting that maybe minorities aren’t as good as anybody else.
I’m not puzzled about why he might feel that way; when someone recently observed — pleasantly, with a hug and no ill intent — that my contribution to a certain group was to keep it from being all-male, I smiled on the outside yet inside, narrowed my eyes and gave him the invisible Death Stare.
But the problems caused by affirmative action are nothing compared to what the lack of diversity gets us: Just for example, a 66-year-old millionaire who still doesn’t know not to brag that she has a friend who is “black as a board.” Who somehow reached retirement age and became a big darn deal without ever learning that yes, the racial slur in question is offensive. Or that “plantation-style” is not a festive party theme.
Matt Lauer finally did make me feel for her with his blunt questions while she was in tears, acting like some latter-day Jean Le Maistre demanding on behalf of the Inquisition that Joan of Arc forsake men’s clothing in prison. (Though if Joan responded that he who is without sin should “pick up that stone and throw it so hard at my head that it kills me,” I don’t want to know.) We all pay the price for that kind of not-at-all-benign cluelessness. And for her blind spots and all of ours, what better antidote do we have than the civil rights remedies undermined this week by our highest court?
By: Melinda Henneberger, The Washington Post, She The People, June 27, 2013
“Diversity Is A Faddish Theory”: According To Clarence Thomas, Affirmative Action Is Just Like Segregation
Today, the Supreme Court sent the University of Texas’ affirmative action program back for a lower court for review by a vote of 7-1.
Justice Clarence Thomas concurred in that decision but also wrote a scathing concurring opinion saying he would have rejected Texas’ affirmative action program outright as unconstitutional.
In the opinion, which no other justice joined, Thomas called the idea that racial diversity at colleges improves education a “faddish theory.”
“As should be obvious,” wrote Thomas, “there is nothing ‘pressing’ or ‘necessary’ about obtaining whatever educational benefits may flow from racial diversity.”
Thomas repeatedly compared arguments for affirmative action in college admissions today to arguments for segregation in the 1950s and before. Here’s Thomas:
It is also noteworthy that, in our desegregation cases, we rejected arguments that are virtually identical to those advanced by the University today. The University asserts, for instance, that the diversity obtained through its discriminatory admissions program prepares its students to become leaders in a diverse society… The segregationists likewise defended segregation on the ground that it provided more leadership opportunities for blacks…
There is no principled distinction between the University’s assertion that diversity yields educational benefits and the segregationists’ assertion that segregation yielded those same benefits.
He went on to associate his view with the arguments made by the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education, the 1955 decission that prohibited racial segregation in public schools:
My view of the Constitution is the one advanced by the plaintiffs in Brown: “[N]o State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”… The Constitution does not pander to faddish theories about whether race mixing is in the public interest. The Equal Protection Clause strips States of all authority to use race as a factor in providing education. All applicants must be treated equally under the law, and no benefit in the eye of the beholder can justify racial discrimination.
Thomas also wrote that universities’ arguments about promoting diversity are canards and their real goal with affirmative action is to help black and Hispanic students—but that they’re not actually helping.
He wrote that “discrimination is never benign” and “the University’s professed good intentions cannot excuse its outright racial discrimination any more than such intentions justified the now denounced arguments of slaveholders and segregationists.”
Thomas made two arguments that affirmative action hurts black and Hispanic students: It leads to them being admitted to schools where they have, on average, significantly lower SAT scores than white and Asian students; and it creates an impression (both internal and external) that their admissions are not based on merit.
Given the high bar that Thomas places for allowing any public policy that discriminates based on race, this policy analysis wouldn’t matter for the constitutionality of the Texas program.
By: Josh Barro, Business Insider, June 24, 2013
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