Affirmative Action: Why Race Matters

When it comes to the higher education admissions process, the discourse of racial preference has held a considerable amount of weight in terms of the diversity range among applicants and admitted students. Institutions of higher education have, over the years, implemented affirmative action programs that seek to further integrate the student body. Many advocates of affirmative action argue that, without such programs, there is little to no movement in ensuring that minority groups have an “institutional” voice within the higher education system. “Institutional" voice, as Cezar Busatto captures it, develops space for the discourse of inclusion:

" Inclusion is community. No one becomes included by receiving handouts,

even if these handouts are given by public bodies and with public resources.

No one becomes included by being treated by a program in which they are

no more than a number or a statistic. Inclusion is connection to the network

of community development, it is to become more than a speck of dust, to

have a forename and surname, with one’s own distinctive features, skills

and abilities, able to receive and give stimulus, to imitate and be imitated, to

participate in a process of changing one’s own life and collective life."

However, they do not presume affirmative action to be an all-encompassing solution to the absent effort of elite institutions’ inclusion of minorities. Such assumption is based on the notion that affirmative action in practice does not fully include them but does not liberate them once they have been admitted. The difference between the full inclusion and liberation of minorities is that the first allows some of them to integrate into the system but does not guarantee their success, while the latter term encompasses both inclusion and success. The opposition towards affirmative action stems from the notion that the program within itself perpetuates a discriminatory checking system that does not fully consider merit as a factor for admissions. In a recent study of the California 1996 affirmative action ban, authored by campus assistant professor of economics Danny Yagan, it was discovered that: “although the ban didn’t affect UC Berkeley law school’s students of color admission rate, it did decrease the number of students of color applying.” The study also included minority students with lower qualifications, to reflect that the ban discouraged them from applying causing the admissions rate to fall from 61% to 31%.

Studies like these force us to realize that, although minorities have accomplished great strides in regards to attaining a higher education, the educational gap is still a prominent issue amongst elite institutions. However, it is important that policy makers, who are developing such policies of affirmative action, take into consideration their effectiveness in getting minorities not just through the admissions gate but onto the graduating stage. Ensuring that these affirmative action policies increase minority graduation rates results in the assurance that we are proactively diversifying the future workforce, particularly within sectors that have historically shown very low minority representation: corporate and law. The reform that is required in affirmative action programs today does not involve its eradication but rather involves a transformation in terms of how they allocate resources for minority students to not only “survive” on campus or the corporate/legal sector but also succeed within them. Affirmative action programs should also be geared to establishing fundamental professional, academic, and identity programs that ensure equal representation of minorities on campus.

Professional programs should be tailored to providing mentorship and workshops as well as navigating opportunities for minority students who have not had the privilege of being exposed to fields that misrepresent them. This will, in turn, allow them to integrate their identity and professional sphere, in ways that will allow them to prosper and envision more competitive/ambitious career objectives. Academia has long misrepresented minority groups by disregarding their voice in the history of the United States and furthermore has evoked the emergence of ethnic and cultural studies within the university framework. However, it is from affirmative action programs that this emergence has been made possible as minority student admissions rates go up and provide the basis for the demand of a more integrated and diverse university curriculum.

In the recent Supreme Court decision of Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the court decided to uphold the ban based on the notion that “ judicial interference in the democratic process whereby the majority of Michiganders voted down race-sensitive admissions would violate voters’ rights to make policy decision for their state.” However, Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent clearly highlights the significance in maintaining such programs as a judicial responsibility to prevent minority interests and history within the university from being silenced. She writes, “Race matters. Race matters to a young woman’s sense of self when she states her hometown, and then is pressed, ‘No where are you really from?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent applies to the current state of race as “common-sense” where society presumes to be living in a post-racialism era, which assumes that race no longer is significant in the dictation of an individual’s academic, social or political stance. She implies that affirmative action is a finite solution to minority exclusion within the university, but it is also the foundational pillar that allows discourse of racial identity to emerge within academic settings that have long been governed by the narrative and ideals of the “conqueror."

Thus, it is quite evident that affirmative action programs should be revised in terms of its agenda, practice, and resources. However, its complete eradication will erase the progress of minority groups and will ensure that their voices be silenced. Affirmative action has yet to bring about minority inclusiveness, but it is a very important step in securing future opportunities and molding the discourse of identity within elite graduate programs.

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