How Can Affirmative Action be a Catalyst for Social Justice?

What is affirmative action? According to the Encyclopedia Britannica it’s an active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for members of minority groups and for women. In the case of higher education, it refers to admission policies that provide equal access to education for those groups that have historically been excluded or underrepresented. Some feel that affirmative action does just that, while others feel it is a form of discrimination against white people.

The drive for legal support for equal access to equal education began in 1946 when Heman Sweatt, who was Black, attempted to apply to the University of Texas, Austin. Sweatt was a brilliant high achieving college graduate. After college, he first taught in Texas and then intending to become a physician, enrolled in the University of Michigan. At the end of his first semester of classes for medical school, Sweatt had a B+ average. However, he wanted to return to Texas where, because of his passion for civil rights, he applied to the University of Texas Law School. The Court of Civil Appeals in its decision wrote that Sweatt, “possessed every essential qualification, except that of race, upon which ground alone his application was denied.” The Attorney General of Texas upheld Texas’s segregation laws, and Sweatt was denied admission. Rather than accept his rejection Sweatt hired an attorney, Thurgood Marshall, and sued.

Thurgood Marshall later was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals by President John F. Kennedy and in 1967 was nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson, becoming the first Black Supreme Court Justice of the United States.

In 1946, Marshall argued that Sweatt deserved fair treatment in college admissions. A lower court’s answer was for Texas to create a segregated, all Black law school. The planned legal education for black people was under-resourced and unequal. Sweatt, represented by Marshall and with the backing of the NAACP, went back to court. Eventually, the United States Supreme Court, acknowledging that segregated is not equal and that Texas did not offer an equal education, ruled in 1950 in Sweatt v Painter that the University of Texas must allow Mr. Sweatt to attend their university. The decision was an important precedent in opening the doors to students of color to all universities and graduate schools. This decision allowed Sweatt to become the first black man to become a law student at UT. Sweatt entered the Law School in 1950, graduated, and became a brilliant force in the U.S. legal community and in the Civil Rights Movement. So began an empowered drive for the right to equal access. In 1954, four years after Sweatt entered the University of Texas, the pivotal decision that public school’s must integrate, Brown v the Board of Education, was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Court case after court case has pushed for Civil Rights, and for equal access of the historically excluded. Case after case has sued to push back and defend the rights of the historically privileged.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order stating that federally funded projects must be used to ensure that hiring and employment practices were free of racial bias.

The argument against affirmative action frequently claims that it is “reverse racism,” or discrimination against whites to favor people of color.

In Fisher v. University of Texas, Abigail Fisher argues that she was denied admission to the prestigious University of Texas, Austin, on the basis of her race. One of her main arguments in the case was that people with lower grades and test scores than hers were admitted while Fisher was denied. It was later discovered that while that was true, only five of those applicants whose admission seemed to supersede Fisher’s were Black, while forty-two of them were, like Fisher, white. Her case rose all the way to the Supreme Court, and in 2016 in a highly controversial decision the court ruled against Fisher, and upheld the university’s affirmative action program. In fact, many students whose scores were lower than hers were admitted – oddly the vast majority of these were white, like her, not Black, Hispanic, or Asian. While some deemed this an end to the affirmative action debate, that is far from the truth.

Glenn E. Singleton, author of Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, began his career as an Ivy League admissions director. Singleton defends affirmative action as an important remedy to past injustices. “Persistent legal attacks on affirmative action, adopting the belief that such policies award preferential treatment to people of color, fail to acknowledge and calculate the benefit white employees and students receive from places of business and university systems steeped in residual racism. By this I mean institutions and employers in which the faculty and leadership composition, hiring and teaching methods, and organizational culture are already decidedly and overwhelmingly white… with the effects on-going today, it is unconscionable to come to any conclusion that a system of remedy in place for 50 years, like affirmative action, is unfair to the people who are granted the status of being white.”

Singleton digs at the college admissions system’s preferential admissions – but not because of its preferential treatment of those of color.

Singleton points out that affirmative action — by ensuring a more diverse community — in fact, supports the education of whites — as well as people of color. Singleton points to the misconception that affirmative action only benefits underserved Black and Hispanic students when really preferential based admissions is rampant throughout college admissions. Singleton explains the different types of preferential admissions, a high percentage of which supports the traditionally privileged. Preferential treatment for individuals in the college admissions process includes “preferences given for students 1) whose parents are alumni, also known as “legacy” admissions; 2) whose parents make extraordinary financial contributions to the institution, also known as “development” admissions; 3) who attend private schools, suburban public schools, and select urban magnet schools; and 4) athletes.”

One of the most uncomfortable facts of affirmative action is that its purpose is to mainly benefit white students rather than aide students of color. Singleton explains: “In a doctrine known as Critical Race Theory, [affirmative action] is a perfect example of what is referred to as Interest Convergence. Interest Convergence holds that any legal remedy to racial injustice, discrimination or subordination for people of color must first be of benefit to white constituents, AND will constantly be under threat of being repealed or revoked. is is the uncomfortable and inconvenient truth of a society and social system founded on the ideology of white supremacy.”

The current climate of the affirmative action debate is extraordinarily grim with the new Attorney General of the United States Jeff Sessions in league with the Trump administration in their fight against affirmative action. In his article in the New York Times, “Justice Dept. to Take On Affirmative Action,” Charlie Savage reveals Trump’s plans, “The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by the New York Times.” Trump and Session’s attack on inclusive access is a drastic shift from that of the Obama administration, a strong proponent of affirmative action.

When asked what she felt was the basis for the vociferous objection of some white people to affirmative action, a college counselor at Lick-Wilmerding High School, Gabriela Ruiz de Mejia said, “ This is really difficult because I want to be real but I’m also nervous about being quoted and misinterpreted…I think that some non-allies in the white community believe that whenever people of color are given an opportunity to try and find equality, they feel as though something’s being taken away from them.”

The backlash to the election of Barack Obama as President has called affirmative action to the forefront of people’s minds. In the fleeting calm of the belief in a “post racial” America, some asserted that affirmative action was no longer needed and that Blacks and other people of color could reach the highest levels of academia and obtain lifelong success. It was said that Barack Obama was the literal embodiment of the fact that Black people could make it in America.

Eight years after Obama’s election, however, the admissions and demographics on college campuses are still skewed. At the University of Texas in 2015, the number of freshman consisted of 44% white students, 24% Asian students, 23% Hispanic students, and 5% Black or African-American students. In 2015 the University of Michigan’s freshman class consisted of 68% white students, 15% Asian students, 6% Hispanic students, and 5% Black or African-American students.

While in 2010, the U.S. census found that 63.7 % of the population was white, the Bureau’s projection says that by 2020 over 50% of the children in the United States will be nonwhite. Data from the Census Bureau projects that by 2044, the majority of the population will be nonwhite.