The topic we all think we understand: Affirmative Action

-- By MaryamAsenuga - 11 Apr 2021

Introduction

Olympic runners Usain Bolt, Leo Manzano, and Galen Rupp walk to the starting line of their race. The gunman signals; they take their mark. 10 seconds pass; the gun goes off. It is time for all to run to the finish line, right? Wrong. Bolt is Black and Manzano is Latino; both are underrepresented minorities. They must wait for Rupp, their Caucasian peer, to go first, make his laps around, and usurp all the benefits. Time passes, which feels like a century, and it’s finally Bolt and Manzano’s turn to run in this race of inequity. While running, their feet are shackled by chains that accompany their status as underrepresented minorities in America. They are weighed down by redlining, the school-to-prison pipeline, and police brutality. But, they are expected to perform just as well as Rupp who not only started before them, but ran in the absence of impenetrable obstacles. Welcome to California’s Public Higher Education system: the race with the inherently unequal playing field.

As a native East Coaster, it may seem odd that I am writing about CA’s education system. However, I have known since high school that I ultimately plan to move to and build my roots in California following law school graduation. Due to my plans to build a family in the Golden State, I first desired to research about the state’s relationship to race and education.

I was disappointed.

Current Status of Affirmative Action in California

With CA’s ban on affirmative action (AA), we’re on a crusade to make America homogenous again. In 2017, Donald Trump had announced the administration'sinvestigation and potential lawsuit against universities who utilize affirmative action policies. He deemed it as a system of intentional race-based discrimination.

But it’s not.

AA simply provides equitable access to underrepresented and historically oppressed groups.

Instead of remedying historical race-based maltreatment, CA’s public universities overlook its applicants’ hardships. UCs ignore how the G.I. bill’s exclusion of black veterans still negatively impacts African-Americans’ ability to accumulate wealth and intergenerational mobility. While applying to a UC, I, an African-American, would be evaluated against overrepresented applicants who attended elite boarding schools, had private tutors, and have run in this race that I am just starting in.

How is this fair?

Thanks to the Trail of Tears, a Native-American student is unable to remedy the burdening plights of her reservation, no matter how grand the efforts. She does not have the resources to take the SATs multiple times, establish non-profits, or participate in numerous extracurriculars, like other applicants. However, UC schools do not care. California’s public universities are saying to underrepresented applicants, “Despite shocking inequalities of opportunity, we’re still going to evaluate everyone the same. Good luck!”

It doesn’t have to be this way.

AA, if implemented by Senator Hernandez's SCA-5 bill, would have permitted consideration of race and its accompanying disadvantages in UC admissions. It would have given a chance to the students whose ancestors only knew a life of subjugation. But, opposition killed SCA-5 as CA’s conservatives and Asian-Americans broadcasted AA’s “reverse discrimination” shuts the door on them, but opens it for “unqualified” minorities.

But it doesn’t. Affirmative action would help all, including its greatest opponents: Asian-Americans.

Affirmative action would help all, including its greatest opponents: Asian-Americans.

AA would increase enrollment of CA’s underrepresented Asian subgroups (Pacific Islanders, Cambodians, Filipinos, etc.). This is huge as CA’s Asians has a high percentage of these subgroups. Currently, 43% of all Filipino-Americans reside in California. The state has a larger population of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders than Hawai’i itself!

AA doesn’t close any door. It simply permits opportunities to equally-qualified minorities.

But, AA doesn’t just affect some people, it affects everyone.

All CA’s residents would reap AA’s benefits. Diversity, a major goal of AA, is obsessively sought after by employers, huge corporations, universities, etc. Why? Diversity creates enriching perspectives, creativity, and progress. Studies found diversity’s lasting effects on higher education, students, and the economy. Racially diverse universities allow students to navigate in the multicultural real world without distrust and tension. This not only benefits social society, but it facilitates efficient business, something we all have a stake in.

Plus, AA creates a strong workforce and strong economy. A study found AA leads to higher graduate/professional schools enrollments, incomes, and civic participation.

This goes beyond a moral inclination to do good. AA directly impacts your pockets.

It seems that CA universities acknowledge AA’s benefits themselves. UC Berkeley's mission statement calls for “open and equitable access to opportunities for learning and development”. Berkeley, albeit subconsciously, champions the importance of equal access to education for all, not just a segment of society. Maybe Berkeley and other UC schools have my back and the backs of other underrepresented minorities.

But they don’t.

Conclusion

Without AA’s implementation, California excludes underrepresented minorities just like the G.I. bill did.

The state cannot claim to be “the capital of Liberal America”, then turn around and whip us with instruments of injustice. We must take it beyond unfilled mission statements. The window to push for AA is wide open and the time is now. We need AA for justice, profit, and progress.

If you think your future and the implementation of AA are unrelated, just think about how without AA, this war on underrepresented minorities will lead to a stagnant and unprogressive America. Do we really want that?

I think there are two possible routes to substantive improvement here.

First, most of the statements made about California in this draft would be more or less directly transferable to any discussion about any other state's situation in its higher education system. Two elements are present in California's context that are relevantly special: the Prop 13 limits on the use of property taxes in financing public education, and the Prop 209 prohibition on race-conscious decision-making in, among other roles, public education. Prop 13 took California from among the highest ranked states in public education outcomes to among the lowest. After a quarter century under the effects of Prop 209, comparative effects should also be visible in relation to states, like NY, with large public higher education systems and no barrier to affirmative efforts to include all the public in the state's system of higher education. We are now half a century into the open enrollment system in the City University of New York, and that too might provide relevant points of comparison.

Second, I think the draft can be improved by more carefully separating the goal, which—as you point out in an opening illustration that can be compressed—is the attainment of real social and economic equality from the remedial means, referred to as "affirmative action," largely developed in the 1960s. Although critics in the libertarian and socially conservative strands of American political conversation often decry "equality of results" instead of "equality of opportunity," the actual purpose of public education is precisely to achieve equality of outcome. Every child in society should have an equal education at the public's expense, and that education should be sufficient to offer all children the knowledge and skills they want to acquire to suit them for the lives they want to have. Continuing education should be equally available to all citizens throughout their lives, priced according to their individual ability to pay, so as to offer all an equal opportunity to learn, to think and publish, and to retrain and reskill themselves as they see fit. We can be sure that this level of acceptance of the public sphere's duty and value to the people will not be realized in my lifetime, though it could be in yours. In the meantime, we not only competitively allocate places in the higher educational system, but we do so on the basis of plainly unjust failures to provide equal primary and secondary education. Those unjust inequalities subsist in relation to historical inequalities of many sorts, as well as presently-existing social discrimination systems in a society becoming rapidly more unequal in distributions of income and wealth.

Naturally, remedial arrangements shaped sixty years ago in the then-existing social and technological context will have some continuing value now, and likewise they will be largely outmoded and in need of replacement. Fighting with the "colorblind society" advocates over "quotas" and "preferences" might not be worth it in an information society context. UC as a whole and its component campuses can use far more advanced data-modeling systems to admit their students, in which a large number of components none of which are prohibited under Prop 209 are combined to create admissions profiles. Such a system could produce precisely the admissions distributions that make each class representative of California, without running afoul of Prop 209 or judicial rulings to similar effect. Or, like social democracies in Europe such as the Netherlands, we could conduct lotteries among all applicants for the fixed number of available places. (This is more equal, but in other respects more socially costly than the much more flexible US public higher education systems.) Focusing on the desired social outcome enables remedial creativity, which is both tactically and strategically important.

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