Anonymous asked: As a feminist and a queer supporter, you are (probably) a believer in minority rights. What do you think of affirmative action in college admissions? Many Asian-Americans, as "overrepresented minorities", seem to resent the practice.
Even though it’s an imperfect solution to a structural problem, I support affirmative action in college admissions. I didn’t always. In high school, I very much bought into the idea that those who have the best stats should get into the best schools. I’ve long since realized that this was a belief borne in self interest and ignorance. Brief history lesson for those not familiar with how affirmative action works: the policy was first instituted in 1965 by executive order of President Kennedy, whose aim was to stop racial bias from keeping minorities out of the workforce. Explicit quotas in college admissions have been illegal for decades and a points-based systems (which award underrepresented groups extra “points” on the basis of race) used at the University of Michigan was declared unconstitutional in a 2003 Supreme Court ruling. What affirmative action consists of nowadays is the inclusion of race as one of a litany of factors when making admissions decisions. (This is what Harvard does.) In other words, having brown skin alone is not enough to get you into college.
A lot of my beliefs about affirmative action changed when I went to college and realized that my peers grew up with all kinds of unexamined privilege. I’d hear remarks about how “no one actually needs to be on full financial aid” while partying at final club. Someone once drunkenly related to me their resentments about having to go to a high school where poor students were bused in from the other side of town. I learned that despite the University’s official stance on diversity, there were still a lot of rather ignorant members of the student body. And I thought, dude, this is happening AT a place that is extremely diverse; imagine what sort of ideas are commonplace elsewhere! Meanwhile, I’d gone from having exclusively Asian friends in high school to being a part of a peer group that resembled a Kodak commercial. My closest friends from college include: a Midwestern farm gal, an upper-middle class New England gay, a Black Southern-Baptist-turned-atheist, and a Texan Latina. There are others, but you get the idea. When I graduated in May, I can guarantee you that I had learned a ton more from the people I met at Harvard than I had from the classes themselves. And I credit them for expanding my worldview, for making me and this blog what it is today.
There are a lot of other reasons why affirmative action continues to make sense to me:
Race and class remain very much connected in America and minorities continue to suffer the disadvantages of being born into poorer families, living in poorer neighborhoods, and attending less well-equipped schools. All of these are factors which contribute to generational poverty and de facto segregation in higher education. If my readers have learned anything from my blog, it’s that social mobility in America is a myth for most of our country’s citizens. Given how unequal the playing field is, it’s unreasonable to expect minority students to succeed in a “meritocratic” system. They simply don’t have the means to compete in the first place. People talk about “reverse discrimination” and how they’re punished for being White or Asian (“I didn’t create slavery! Why should I pay for it?”) but there are all kinds of disadvantages that Black people didn’t ask for. (Helloooo racial profiling!) Those who believe most fervently in of the American Dream assume that all you have to do to get ahead is to work hard. Guess what? Someone who grew up in the urban slums can work as hard as they like; they’re still not going to get into Harvard, and even if they do, they’re the exception, not the rule. Most of their peers will likely never even breathe Cambridge air.
Say what you will about racism against Asians (certainly, it exists), but as a whole, Asians fare much better than other groups. They have the highest medium income and lowest incarceration rate of any racial group, including Whites. (Of course, this is just an overall statistic that doesn’t hold true for every Asian minority — which is why the “Model Minority” myth is not only untrue but harmful, since it glosses over the struggles of Southeast Asian immigrant groups.) I am going to be much less likely to be arrested than, say, someone who’s Black. Is that because I’m such a law-abiding citizen or is it because of how I look? I don’t think we have to conduct an shop-lifting experiment involving me, a Black guy, and your local Target in order to figure out the answer to that question. And look at UC Berkeley or Cal Tech, schools that operate with zero affirmative action. Asians comprise the majority of the populations at those schools, with Whites following closely behind. But is it actually good for the Asian students there? They might be satisfied knowing that they’re attending classes only with those who have been properly vetted for GPA, SAT score, and “demonstrated leadership”, but isn’t college also supposed to be an opportunity to learn about the world through interactions with different people? How are you supposed to do the latter if you spend your early twenties not seeing any brown-skinned people for days at a time?
Last, and most important, colleges do not owe you anything. Admission is a privilege, not a right. And quite frankly, I think it reeks of entitlement when someone rages that they’ve been robbed of their rightful spot at a school, because some “less deserving” minority took it. Look, if the school is a private institution, they can do whatever the hell they want to do, and sometimes that includes diversity initiatives that you don’t agree with. The world is an unfair place, and it’s a far more unfair place for those who grew up without the means to even pay the application fee for college. Let’s not even get into the fact that White people are also admitted for all kinds of reasons that aren’t “meritocratic”. (I’ve met athletes whose SAT scores are several hundred points lower than mine, legacy admits who share a last name with a Harvard building, the list goes on.) Personally, I’m glad that some schools have determined that a diverse student body is crucial to create a future leadership that is representative of the country’s population. It’s their prerogative to create an admissions policy that reflects these goals.
For the students who do get in, it’s absolutely to their benefit that they are exposed to a diverse peer group. As I wrote nearly three years ago on Sex and the Ivy:
I don’t value my relationship with JB because he’s gay any more than I love CK because she’s black, race — like everything else — still matters. I am positive that my relationships with people of different colors, sexual orientations, religions, etc. shape and influence my world view for the better and that I will be better off when I graduate for having known and loved people who are not mostly white, Asian, or Californian. Perhaps I would’ve met some of them (or their equivalents) anyway, but I know that at Berkeley, it would’ve been much harder to forge a bond with a tongue-ringed five-foot wonder with a Southern drawl and skin several shades darker than my own. And wouldn’t that have been a shame?
More burning questions? Ask Lena.
