Some legal observers believe the Supreme Court may overturn affirmative action policies currently in place at America’s universities. The justices are hearing challenges to admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette has a personal connection to affirmative action and was once supportive of it. He no longer feels that way, and says it’s time to dispel the myth that affirmative action actually helps minorities.
Let’s back up a beat and define affirmative action…then I should describe my personal history with the concept. Affirmative action is more than 60 years old. It was on March 6, 1961, that President John F. Kennedy signed Executive Order 10925. It required that U.S. government contractors take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Americans have argued about the concept ever since. Three times over the last six decades, the Supreme Court has given colleges and universities permission to take the race ethnicity of applicants into account, as long as it’s just one factor among many in the admissions process. In 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the justices struck down a quota at UC-Davis Medical School, but said race could be considered. In 2003, in Grutter v. Bollinger, the court upheld the admissions policy at the University of Michigan Law School. In 2016 in Fisher v. University of Texas, the justices decided it was okay for UT-Austin to consider race and mission.
My own personal relationship with affirmative action goes back to the fall of 1984, when I was a 17-year-old high school senior. As a Mexican American with perfect grades and advanced placement courses, I was accepted by five elite universities, including Harvard, which I would eventually attend. This inspired white friends whose grades weren’t as good as mine, to tell me that I would not have been admitted had I not been Mexican.
For a long time I stood by affirmative action, maybe out of loyalty, but over the last 20 years, not so much. Gradually, I’ve become convinced that when applied too aggressively, a program that was intended to benefit Latinos and African Americans can actually hurt them. It labels beneficiaries as unqualified, lowers academic standards and masks the failures of the K-12 public schools to properly educate Black and brown students.
Get it straight. Affirmative action is not an attack on whites and Asians. It’s a Band-aid on a bullet wound. It’s time to pull off the bandage and heal the patient, once and for all.
