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E.W.R's avatar

One more case to add to the anecdata, re: how far affirmative action has strayed from its core purpose, need, and usefulness:

When I was in elementary school, my mom, sister, and I were coming out of - in a real sense fleeing (we had to stay at friends’ or in motels) - a terribly sad, acrimonious failed marriage due to my dad’s alcoholism and severe mental health problems. He was the youngest child of parents who has grown up as sharecroppers with 3rd and 4th grade educations and was the only one in his family to go to college, to really move away. Years later, I was told he was likely gay or bisexual and terribly closeted and conflicted. We were a tenuously lower-middle class family who qualified for federally-subsidized school lunches and who sacrificed all else to afford a small house in the “Golden Ghetto” of a good suburban school district. My mom took a humbling job working around often snooty people in the local public library, so she could remain close to us during and after school. One of her coworkers was married and also had two kids. Her husband was a banker who had entirely European, continental Spanish heritage. They were affluent, lived in a very nice house, had luxury cars, and traveled frequently for vacation, etc. The wife made no secret of the fact that their kids used and benefited from the husband’s Continental Spanish last name. In admissions and scholarships, they were Latino and were, I guess, making the schools and programs they applied to “more diverse”. We had bigger things to worry about as a family and I remember us just talking things like this in stride. We had books on the shelf by Baldwin and Ellison, and Morrison and grew up with a deep sense of revulsion at the shocking brutality of slavery and the cruelty, humiliation, and exclusion of Jim Crow America. We were raised to feel a real solidarity with our black fellow citizens and deep commitment to ensuring our country live up to its promises.

When I was in college, I helped organize a campus debate and argued in favor of affirmative action. My sense was that there was still necessary work to do to ensure equal opportunity for black descendants of people who’d been enslaved in our country. An open-ended program of overt, unapologetic racial discrimination, with no particular focus on present familial, socio-economic disadvantage, as the means to address this did give me some misgivings. But, overall, I felt we were still (at that time) too close to Jim Crow and still needed to “take race into account in order to get past it”.

That didn’t mean forever. We were actually supposed to get past it, weren’t we?

Every semester, I saw more and more evidence of kids from much more comfortable, stable backgrounds than mine - from two-parent, dual-professional families - benefiting from: special mentorship programs (when we had no “ins” or contacts and I still barely had any idea how to interact with an adult man); much easier admissions standards at top colleges; special low LSAT and low GPA slots available at very good law good schools, in case they’d really messed up along the way; and generous, often full-ride scholarships, based simply on skin color.

And now here we are: many years past when Justice O’Connor predicted affirmative action would surely have no justification twenty-five years in the future. We are decades past Bill Clinton urging us to “mend it, not end it” - acknowledging major flaws but counseling us not to throw out the proverbial “baby with the bath water”. And the rationales for affirmative action keep morphing and creeping into a permanent and major entitlement based on skin color, with no regard for actual hardship. Until affirmative action began hitting high-achieving Americans of Asian heritage so hard (often kids from lower-income families), the programs new focus on “diversity” had begun to mean: not white. (Not unless you’re a legacy or the child of the major donor.) The Democratic Party, for which I’ve been a lifelong supporter and frequent volunteer, is completely invested in it as an constituent group identity pander and major benefit to populations which provide votes in the highest proportions (especially, these days, those who need it the least). It has, essentially, been both a major reparations program for far, far longer than I’ve been alive and has expanded to benefit even the most privileged and newest arrivals from abroad, so long as they are superficially diverse.

To me, honestly, the poster child for affirmative action in 2021 is that horribly- narcissistic, aggressively-entitled young woman recently at Smith, who grew up wealthy, has been handed everything imaginable while being pandered to due to her skin color and ethnicity, whose response to all of this was to recreationally unleash and continue to promote utterly baseless accusations of racism at aging, barely working class white school employees, marring their good names, causing them terrible stress, and risking their very livelihoods. Rallying the whole school administration around her. Leaving destruction in her wake while she skipped along to her next sinecure.

Yes, lots of really nice and compassionate kids from solidly middle class or affluent backgrounds surely benefit from affirmative action, too. But they don’t need it. It can’t be based on race or ethnicity anymore. All truly socioeconomically-disadvantaged kids deserve a hand up. In recent years, I’ve begun telling close friends that I oppose affirmative action and why. And I’ve lost at least one very close, long-time friend due to conversations like these. Among truer, more loyal friends who feel free to partly agree, partly disagree, one consensus is that the Democratic Party (we are all still Democrats) will never let it go. And most current beneficiaries will never let it go. It’s become a permanent entitlement program for black Americans dressed up in evasive and misleading happy talk about diversity.

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Nemo's avatar

When my daughter graduated from Grinnell College in 2001, the commencement speaker was Robert Moses - the civil-rights leader, not the builder. In his address, he praised the coming of standardized testing, because it gave people like himself a fair shot at higher education. Prior to that, admissions were made using a sort of gestalt approach, which tended to favor "people like us". It looks like we're busily dismantling what Moses praised, and returning to the gestalt, "people like us" approach.

That being said, it seems to me that we should be concentrating instead on primary and secondary education for young black men and women - and men, in particular. My daughter attended an International Baccalaureate program in a Chicago public high school that served the Cabrini-Greene public-housing project and Old Town. The program was rigorous and the students received a fine education, which is why she got into Grinnell College; but of the blacks who were in the program, all were female, without exception. What can we do to improve the education of black boys? I don't know; I have no answers. But I think that *that* is the question we should be asking.

Just my $0.02 worth ...

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