I'm doing a joint presentation on affirmative action next week at my university, and the recent appeals court decision in Texas upholding race-conscious admissions was timely.
The decision provides continued support for the general notion that race matters.
Since Grutter v. Bollinger, the academic field has been intentional about documenting benefits of diversity. How we get there is a contentious question. Recent lawsuits and proposed changes in the public school realm, have threatened mechanisms that uphold integration.
Consistently, when I teach my first year seminar on understanding race, students tell their anecdotes about the student of color who got into Harvard (or insert institution) because of race and White student who was denied yet had higher scores.
Having not been a part of many selection committees, I have some sympathy for the students. They have just been through probably the most scrutinizing experience in their lives. It almost seems natural that they would turn some of that critical energy towards one another.
What's so compelling is how blind we can be to our own biases. For example, it seems difficult for us to acknowledge how quickly we assume the Black person did not deserve admission on the basis of an external characteristic (race) yet the White person did deserve admission on the basis of skill (internal). Can we say self-serving bias?
The anecdotes and lawsuits seem to stem from the tendency to describe the failure of oneself, or people from one's own group, as due to situational factors out of their personal control. That paired with the assumption that race is the factor that clinched the Black candidate's success-discounting the similar amount of work and investment-makes for a tough sell.
I'll attempt to give a historical, sociological and psychological timeline for affirmative action efforts. We will discuss the unconstitutionality of quotas; they will swear they know of a place that uses them. We'll do this dance and hopefully they will walk away with at least an understanding of why the general policy exists and why the recent ruling was upheld. I'm not suggesting current affirmative action related policies are without their flaws; however, I am suggesting that an understanding of the need for such policies is an essential step towards dismantling institutional racism.
