a quiet disaster has accompanied the setbacks affirmative action has suffered in recent months. It is a disaster in misperceptions, widely held and deeply felt, that the end of affirmative action is near and so is the end of black educational opportunity.
This misperception seems particularly to have afflicted the young, many of whom have caught only bits and snatches of the affirmative-action debate in between their MTV videos.
Recently I heard it in the voice of a black University of Louisville senior during my recent visit to the campus. He was a bright, young Army veteran who enrolled in the university after serving in Operation Desert Storm.
Now, on the verge of earning his bachelor’s degree in political science, he applied to graduate school at the University of Michigan, but now he’s having second thoughts.
“With all that’s happening . . . over affirmative action, they don’t sound too friendly to black folks up there,” he said, with a wary look in his eyes.
He was referring to the battle brewing in the courts over whether the University of Michigan’s including of race as a factor, although not the only factor, in selecting students is unconstitutional and unfair to whites and Asians.
I was aghast. “Are you kidding?” I exclaimed. “They got into this predicament precisely because they were so friendly to black folks.” Not to mention Latinos and Native American Indians.
Michigan is widely touted as the next affirmative-action battleground, following the $433,500 payment that a coalition of civil-rights groups collected money to settle the race-based layoff lawsuit of a white, New Jersey schoolteacher just weeks before her case was scheduled to be argued before the Supreme Court.
But, it was not the University of Michigan that filed suit. It was white students who failed to get into the university. The university would not have hired a very expensive high-powered law firm to fight the suit if it did not want to welcome non-whites.
Yet, judging by the many similarly dejected black and Latino youngsters I have heard singing the blues around the country, many bright, black and Latino applicants appear to be turning away from colleges where they suspect minority enrollment is in decline and that only pushes the decline further down. “By now, Michigan is probably ready to welcome you with open arms,” I said, only half joking. “Get in while the getting is good.”
The young man appeared to be encouraged by this news. He told me I sounded like his father. I took that as a compliment. I guess his old man and I have been around long enough to know something about survival.
The good news about affirmative action is that the bad news isn’t hopeless. For example, the media often point out that since California voters passed Proposition 209 last year, minority enrollment at the University of California at Berkeley’s law school fell this year. That’s true.
But, few news reports have gone on to mention that, at the very same time, black enrollment at the university’s other graduate programs increased. Much of the reason is the law school’s heavy reliance on LSAT scores and undergraduate grades. Other departments look more closely at other criteria, including recommendations made by the faculty at the applicants’ undergraduate colleges.
This requires more time and money in the admissions process than Berkeley’s law school now spends, but Berkeley Chancellor Robert H. Berdahl recently told the Los Angeles Times that the university is ready to spend it.
Unfortunately, too many bright and promising black and Latino youths are losing their optimism based on misunderstandings of what’s happening on the affirmative action front.
Extremists on one side try to frighten blacks and Latinos by claiming that an end to affirmative action will “put us back to where we were in the 1950s,” as if the progress of four decades (including a quadrupling of the black middle class) could evaporate overnight.
Extremists on the other side try to inflame whites by claiming affirmative action is doing to whites what the Jim Crow laws did to blacks, as if there was any possible moral equivalence between racial outreach and lynching.
Then there are those of us in the media who give far more attention to the extremists than we give to the voices in the sensible center who are trying to work out real solutions.
It’s time to get real with our kids. The sky is not falling. After 30 years of affirmative action, it is quite proper to reassess it in its various forms. They were never intended to be permanent anyway. It is quite proper to reassess the progress affirmative preferences have brought, and look for better ways to reach those who have been left behind.
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Calmer heads can work out the tensions hotheads have stirred up. In the meantime, we should be sending honest messages to our children. Americans of all colors will survive the end of affirmative action. We cannot survive the end of our optimism.