When we imagine getting into college in the US, it often looks like a race to fill a
limited number of seats.
A good SAT score?
+10.
Class president? +8.
You play the bassoon?
+15.
We mostly agree that these factors are a good way to decide who should get a seat.
But there's one factor where Americans disagree...
Race.
“Should race continue to play a role in how colleges pick their students?”
“Why should I be discriminated against because I’m white?”
“As a tool to increase diversity, affirmative action has been successful.”
“Why are you supporting - explicitly supporting - a system that penalizes people for the color
of their skin?”
“High achieving kids, having under-resourced neighborhoods and under-resourced schools
need and deserve a leg up in admissions.”
There's a reason this debate makes you want to cry, and it's not just because it's about
race.
It's because we suck at talking about race-based affirmative action.
And there are two simple reasons why.
One reason we suck at talking about affirmative action is because many of us don't actually
know what it is.
It was originally a way for colleges and universities to give special consideration to racial minorities
to help undo the effects of past discrimination.
And for many schools, it meant setting aside a certain percentage of their seats for minority
applicants, including the University of California Davis Medical School.
But that changed in 1978 because of this man, Allan Bakke.
Bakke was rejected twice by the UC-Davis medical school.
So he filed a lawsuit.
Back then, the school reserved 16 of the 100 seats for minority students, in an effort
to remedy past discrimination.
It was a quota.
Bakke argued he had higher academic scores than several minority students who were accepted.
And in 1978, the Supreme Court sided with Bakke.
The court said the school couldn't use quotas to racially balance the student body.
And that they couldn't consider race to remedy past racial discrimination.
The reasoning?
Justice Lewis Powell wrote that societal discrimination is not a valid reason for considering race.
So, Bakke was admitted to UC-Davis and became a doctor.
“Ninety-seven medical students graduated there today, among them, Allan Bakke.”
But his case didn’t end affirmative action.
It just redefined it.
Here's the rest of Justice Powell’s decision: "the only state interest that fairly may be
viewed as compelling on this record is the interest of a university in a diverse student body."
So university administrators could no longer use affirmative action to address past discrimination,
but they could use it to create a diverse student body.
And, to be fair, diversity is beneficial to everyone.
For example, research shows that it exposes students to different ways of thinking, which
helps them better solve problems.
But here's what's so confusing.
The Court said colleges couldn't use quotas to create diversity.
But later, the court said colleges needed concrete diversity goals.
So how do you have a goal without naming an actual number?
Well, one way would be to give bonuses to all students of a certain race.
But in 2003, the Court said that was not allowed.
Instead, schools could consider an individual student’s race — if it was a factor
of another factor.
All of this means that our debates tend to paint a picture of affirmative action that
just isn't correct.
It's not a racial bonus or quota.
And it's not about historical discrimination.
It's a very narrow, and frankly confusing, tool for colleges to create more racial
diversity.
And it's that tiny sliver of affirmative action that many conservatives want to kill.
And the latest effort comes in the form of a highly charged allegation:
Harvard is discriminating against Asian Americans.
“A group of about 60 Asian organizations is suing Harvard University.”
“At issue is whether the university imposes a cap on the number of qualified Asian-American
students that it admits.”
“But Harvard’s argument is essentially that the Supreme Court says that we can use
race in admissions to diversify our campus.”
Harvard assigns each applicant something called a "personal" score to measure subjective things
like kindness, courage, and leadership.
And Asian applicants are scored lower on that metric than white applicants.
Meanwhile, on the academic metric, Asian applicants tend to score higher than white applicants.
So the plaintiffs argue that, since Asians have better academic profiles, Harvard is
using this "personal" scores to balance out the number of Asians they get.
Which is, ultimately, a fancy racial quota.
But in this chart, you can see that the share of Asian students varies a lot from year to year.
If Harvard had a quota, you’d expect that share to stay the same.
But even if Harvard wins its case, affirmative action opponents hope that this case will eventually
go to the Supreme Court, a body that’s recently become more conservative.
And their ultimate hope is that this Court will rule broadly — and just kill affirmative
action entirely.
But there's another part of story that we glossed over — and it makes this debate
very confusing.
Harvard really is giving Asians lower personal scores.
And many Asians are pretty angry.
“Asian-American students are marked down, subjectively.”
“I mean, courage, bravery, saying that Asian-American students lack that?
It’s insulting.”
It brings up the inevitable question: Where do Asians fit into the affirmative action
debate?
It's a confusing question because Asians certainly face discrimination, but we've also had a
lot of success in higher education.
At very selective private colleges, Asians make up the second biggest group, even though
we're a much smaller portion of the US population.
But this isn't because Asians work harder or care more about education.
Here's a chart of immigration to the US since 1820.
That tiny red sliver is Asians.
You can see that, for much of American history, the US severely limited Asian immigration
and enacted racist policies like the Chinese Exclusion Act.
This means most of our families weren't subject to policies like Jim Crow and redlining that
engineered separate schools and neighborhoods for white people.
The US eventually allowed Asians into the country, and we arrived in large numbers.
But US immigration policy selected for certain types of people.
Here, we can see the percentage of newly arrived US immigrants with college degrees.
And Asians are among the most educated.
This doesn't mean that all Asian Americans share the same history.
Asia is a big continent, and our histories vary pretty widely.
Here, we can see poverty rates are very different across these groups.
But by looking at our histories — which were largely determined by our skin color
and ethnicity — we can understand how Asians might face racist admissions practices.
But how that doesn't mean Asians suffer systemic disadvantages in education.
And that's the other reason we suck at talking about affirmative action: we often ignore
the history.
Opponents of affirmative action say that any policy that considers a person's race violates the
14th Amendment, which says everyone is guaranteed "equal protection of the laws."
But looking at our history helps us understand why that's misleading.
The equal protection clause was created to protect the rights of black people after the
Civil War.
And the Supreme Court has cited it in decisions like Brown v. Board and Loving v. Virginia, cases
that made American society more inclusive.
And the Supreme Court has ruled, time and again, that being inclusive doesn't mean we
have to be colorblind.
For example, today's schools are still highly segregated and children of color still face
major disadvantages.
So creating a more inclusive system requires us to recognize the role of race in America.
And this is arguably the best defense of affirmative action.
But the Supreme Court says that schools can't use the history racial discrimination as a defense
for considering race.
The only thing schools can say is: diversity is good for everyone.
And soon, if this Harvard case makes it in front of the Court, colleges might not even
be able to make that argument.
Which means a place like Harvard — the training ground for America's elite, where about one
in four students are currently black or Hispanic — would go back to looking the way it did
two generations ago.
And conservatives will finally get the colorblind process they've long dreamed of.