Banning Affirmative Action – Who Cares? Who Should Care?

  California 1923

US Army in WWII

“If you are not a part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.” 

― African American activist Eldridge Cleaver

Without a feeling that you are a stakeholder in country, you are an outsider looking in… especially if the system has evolved to keep you outside. Long-term patterns of exclusion often leave long-term consequences. Historically, for example, Jews have often been forced to live in designated places (often with gates that locked after curfew) all over Europe, banned from many sorts of jobs. The practice made it very easy for Hitler’s operatives to round them up for extermination.

Even after slavery was abolished and voting rights accorded to former slaves, the poverty and lack of education blended with the stereotyping bigotry to effectuate what seems like a permanent lower class which, through redlining (which continues de facto into the present day, even provoking a fine against Wells Fargo Bank), assuring that ghettoized Blacks denied access to the neighborhoods that appreciated the most generating massive wealth… for White people. That legacy created embedded, multigenerational poverty from which escape was/is exceptionally difficult.

Native Americans were driven from their land, and those few that survived were relegated to reservations and pueblos. Chinese workers who labored to build our railroads were summarily pushed out when their work was done. “Chinese Exclusion Act, formally Immigration Act of 1882, U.S. federal law that was the first and only major federal legislation to explicitly suspend immigration for a specific nationality. The basic exclusion law prohibited Chinese labourers—defined as ‘both skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining’—from entering the country.” Encyclopedia Britannica.

Those anti-Chinese efforts continue into the present day, as Asians in general were beaten up under Donald Trump’s Kung Fu Flu description of COVID as caused by Chinese. And more: “New efforts to bar Chinese citizens and others from owning property in Texas and other states [recently Florida] echo the treatment of Asian people in the US more than 100 years ago, when Congress barred them from obtaining citizenship and multiple state laws restricted land ownership… The Texas proposal in particular specifically recalls a despicable chapter in US history, when so-called Alien Land Laws were passed in numerous states between the 1880s and 1920s to specifically bar Asian people from owning land. The California Alien Land Law was eventually overturned by the Supreme Court in 1952 for violating the 14th Amendment.” CNN.com, February 23rd.

Beginning in the 1960s, many American colleges and universities began giving preference to applicants from such underrepresented minorities in order to proactively to overcome a legacy of segregation and inequality in higher education, to create diversity and open opportunity doors to groups often denied access to education and better jobs. Such colleges maintain that a diverse learning environment benefits all students and leads to a more informed society and workforce. But two cases pending before a very conservative Supreme Court – involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina – just might be the death knell for affirmative action admissions.

So what does education and diversity look like in states that have already experienced years of banning affirmative action? Like Michigan, one of nine states that eliminated the practice in its state colleges. Its ban took effect in 2006. “According to a Harvard working paper in 2013, affirmative action reversal in Michigan and other states led directly to a reduction in diversity (nine states currently have passed laws banning the use of race-based affirmative action). Michigan’s reversal, says the study, was a ‘natural experiment’ in what happens when equity boosters like affirmative action in college admission are reversed.

“The study found that, in government jobs at least, ‘a significant loss of workplace diversity’ occurred relative to a control group of states with affirmative action laws still on the books. For Hispanic men, government jobs declined by 7%; Black women held 4% fewer jobs in government after the ban, and Asian women’s employment declined by 37% (this seemingly large figure is likely due to the relatively low overall employment of Asian women in state and local government jobs)…

“The Harvard study looked at government sector jobs in states with affirmative action bans in place. One conclusion it reached: As the pipeline of diverse college students dries up, so too, later on, does the number of minority workers in higher-level government jobs.

“In August 2022, the University of Michigan filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court asking the court not to repeal the practice nationwide. The brief claims that despite 15 years of overwhelming efforts to use race-neutral means like socioeconomic status, family college history, and other influencing factors in admissions, the college has been unable to maintain its previous levels of racial diversity. Black enrollment is down 44% since 2006, and Native American enrollment has decreased by 90%, even though overall enrollment at University of Michigan has increased by 10% in that same time.

“‘The University’s persistent efforts,’ reads the brief in part, ‘have not been sufficient to create the racial diversity necessary to provide significant opportunities for personal interaction to dispel stereotypes and to ensure that minority students do not feel isolated or that they must act as spokespersons for their race.’” Mickey Lyons writing for the May 31st FastCompany.com. We are less of a “people” when we do not try to right injustices, and are even less when we deprive ourselves and our children of the opportunity to expand our cultural horizons. A nation of diversity, of immigrants, can create a magnificent and explosive land… of success and growth.

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes we forget that our diversity, taking ideas and culture from different sources to blend is exactly what MADE AMERICA GREAT in the first place.