On Tuesday, the United States Supreme Court announced that it would hear a case on affirmative action in university admissions. This case, like the landmark 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision, involves a white student who applied to a public university and was denied– and, according to the plaintiff, Abigail Fisher, minority students with lower scores than hers were admitted. In Grutter, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of quota systems for racial minorities in public university admissions was unconstitutional, but it also held that admissions committees may use race as one of a myriad factors that go into the admissions process– not unlike the way admissions committees favor students who are legacies or those who hail from Barrow, Alaska (so that they can claim in brochures that they attract students from all fifty states–and Guam!). In other words, race might be a factor that gives your application a little nudge toward the top of the pile, but it can’t be the sole determining factor in an admission decision.
A cursory glance at the comments on even the story in the New York Times is enough to know that even this little nudge pisses a lot of people off. Fair enough– the Supreme Court is fighting the good fight against the egregious favoritism the federal government has shown to people of color for hundreds of years and the privileged place they have traditionally held in society. Oh, wait. That was white people. Hm.
In any case, I think everyone can agree that we hope that someday there will be no need for affirmative action policies at all– that we will no longer see the pernicious effects of structural racism made evident through disparate rates between racial groups of poverty, unemployment, imprisonment, and college education (to name a few). But we’re not there yet.
I support affirmative action policies because they are correctives for centuries of a state-supported racial caste system, but the Supreme Court has ruled that out as a constitutional argument. I find the majority opinion in Grutter to be imperfect and frustrating, but it’s not necessarily wrong. The courts have always treated schools differently than other public institutions– and for good reason. They are where we send people to learn how to use calculators (so they can still ring up our Twinkies and Mountain Dew if the power goes out) and spell BOOBS and stuff with numbers (calculator skills are essential to leading a successful, happy life). In other words, it’s where we learn valuable life skills. It’s also where we teach kids that it’s not okay to pick your nose in public and that peeing your pants after a certain age is not really cool. The socialization part of schooling is key because it has its own educational value– one that’s difficult to quantify and yet essential nonetheless.
So what does this have to do with race-based admission policies? Everything, in my opinion. In Grutter, the Court acknowledged that an education isn’t merely made up of what information students glean from lecture or textbooks– it’s also ideally a social experience where learning takes place in a communal environment. We learn not just from our professors but from the different experiences of those who surround us. And race is not the only variable here– class matters, as do gender, sexuality, and whether you grew up on a farm or in a doorman building on New York’s Upper East Side.
I’ve taught both at an elite university and at a public middle school in a low-income, mostly-black neighborhood. In a way, these two places are more alike than they seem at first glance. Despite serving entirely different populations, they’re both mostly homogeneous and provincial in their own ways. My public school students saw me as something of a foreign person– a white girl from the Midwest who grew up in a small town– especially since some of them had never even left the city of Baltimore. A few of them loved to jokingly ask me if my growing up in Minnesota was like the movie White Chicks (in all fairness to them, I do know all the lyrics to that song). At the university where I attend graduate school and teach now, my students have a different kind of provincial attitude– one that is colored by a privileged upbringing, for the most part, finds the experiences of people from other backgrounds somewhat incomprehensible. Never is this more apparent than in our discussions that center on race or working-class life in America. My students often struggle to understand the nuances of racial discrimination or the anxieties families face who live paycheck-to-paycheck. How are we supposed to train young people to live in a diverse society if our schools and universities surround them with people who are just like them? How do we make good citizens out of kids who never see any side but their own?
As critics of affirmative action policies love to point out, it often benefits students of color who grew up in upper- or middle-class homes– people who went to good schools and were on the cusp of being admitted to places like the University of Texas Law School. This might be true, but that doesn’t mean that affirmative action isn’t useful. As I mentioned, there are many forms of diversity, and they include both race and class. Someone doesn’t have to hit the trifecta of being a gay black person who grew up in Cabrini-Green in order to have a life experience that is different and adds to a rich, diverse learning environment. And that’s the kind of learning environment that’s good for everyone.
As five of the nine sitting justices are on record as opposing the policy, it seems likely that the Court will ban even its previous tepid endorsement of racial diversity as a legitimate goal. The standards imposed in the Grutter decision are limiting enough (although, oddly, no one who opposes it seems to have read the damned thing), and it seems likely that soon, universities won’t be able to claim racial diversity as a positive goal– something that’s good for the institution and good for the students who attend it.
I’m happy to live in a “colorblind” nation– as long as we can prove that race no longer matters. But it does. And until then, I’ll support affirmative action policies in whatever capacity they have to break down segregation in schools and workplaces.
