Why Affirmative Action is Still Relevant
By James Solomon
Staff Writer

As the date when the Supreme Court will listen to arguments challenging the University of Michigan's affirmative action programs draws near, you will hear a slew of different arguments against affirmative action. The critics will say that affirmative action goes against the basic American principle of being rewarded for and judged on individual merit; they will suggest that "race neutral" approaches to college admissions should be used, or affirmative action should be based on income. Yet these arguments fail to recognize both the unique disadvantage that African-Americans and Latinos face in today's society and the irreplaceable benefits that both colleges and society as a whole receive by including minorities in the highest echelons of American life.

The college admissions process inevitably favors the wealthy, negating the notion that each applicant is evaluated on merit alone. Personally, SAT tutoring was able to increase my score by 170 points. And because I lived in an affluent district, my public school, drawing on property tax revenue, could afford to attract better teachers than inner city schools by offering higher salaries. The resultant disparities between wealthy suburban and poor urban educations produce tangible results. According to a national survey carried out in 1996, only 46 percent of urban students read at a "basic" level, compared to 63 percent of students in non-urban areas. Among high-poverty schools, the differences are even greater. Only 23 percent of students at urban high-poverty schools read at the basic level.

Given these statistics, it is clear that the educational advantages of the wealthy will be reflected in the supposedly objective test scores that colleges use to judge applicants. Colleges must therefore take the special efforts, accomplishments and situations of low-income applicants from low-income schools into consideration.

As of now colleges do not compensate enough for the disadvantages of underprivileged applicants: only 3 percent of students at top universities came from the poorest 25 percent of the American population. Colleges must ask themselves if their "need blind" admissions program is creating the unintended consequence of excluding the poor. Many have used this data to suggest that affirmative action based on race should be replaced with affirmative action based on income or class. Unfortunately, this argument does not take into account the realities race in American society.

There is a significant difference between the areas in which underprivileged Whites, poor Blacks, and Latinos live. Blacks and Latinos disproportionately live in areas of extreme poverty, where more than 40 percent of the population is low-income, while low-income Whites tend to live in areas where most of the population resides above the poverty line. Given that local schools get most of their money from property taxes, the educational funding given to underprivileged African Americans and Latinos is far worse than it is for poor whites.

Though these statistics show that one cannot separate race from income, they do not strike at the heart of why an affirmative action program is still necessary: racism. World-renowned African American mathematician Scott Williams says, "The reason to gamble with aggressive affirmative action in this country is to counter-balance the overt and conscious racism of the past which underlies the covert and unconscious racism of the present." There is a pervasive practice in inner city schools to offer students vocational courses instead of philosophy: people expect less of minorities and educate them according to these lowered expectations.

Though 75 percent of students in New York City public schools are Black and Hispanic, only 9 percent of the students at one the city's top high schools are Black and Latino. The vast majority of NYC's minorities are not being asked to engage at their highest intellectual levels. Forty years ago the belief structure that upheld segregation thought that minorities were not capable of being America's leaders, let alone white America's peers. I do not subscribe to the theory that there is a conscious conspiracy to deprive minorities of opportunities, but to think that all vestiges of that the belief structure are gone is ridiculous.

America has not come to the point where it is comfortable with Blacks and Latinos in positions of "respect and responsibility." In today's society, it is much more common to see African-Americans entertaining than leading. I believe the societal benefits of having Colin Powell and Condleezza Rice speak to Americans about the most important of decisions, war, are incalculable. It is important to note that both of these qualified leaders have stated that affirmative action helped them achieve their positions of prominence. Affirmative action is furthering the integration of American society.

Finally, we should all note how diversity, obtained in part through affirmative action, has improved our lives at Pomona. Interest from minority students has opened up educational opportunities in Asian, Black and Latino studies, most of which would be eliminated if there were only a few Black and Latino students or if the importance of minorities in our societies. Discussions of race in American society as well as American history itself can only be complete when the entirety of American society is represented.

As Pomona's brief to the Supreme Court says, affirmative action is necessary, "because our classrooms and residence halls are places of dialogue, not monologue; because teaching and learning at their best are conversations with persons other than ourselves about idea other than our own."