Subject: [SocialistWorker.org] Ten myths about affirmative action
-----
View original article here:
http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/19/myths-about-affirmative-action
Comment: Elizabeth Wrigley-Field
======== TEN MYTHS ABOUT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ==================================
University of Wisconsin graduate student Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a member of
the Teaching Assistants' Association, unravels the lies of affirmative action
opponents.
September 19, 2011
STUDENTS OF color in the incoming freshman class at the University of
Wisconsin in Madison must have had a disorienting second week of the
semester. On September 13, they were greeted by a small group of old, suited
white men at podiums, telling them they don't belong here--and over 850 angry
students telling those men they're wrong [1].
The press conference held by the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO)
and the debate with their uninspiring spokesperson Roger Clegg later that
same day left me less than impressed with the argument that the university's
affirmative action policies discriminate against white people.
But what did impress me mightily was the students who again and again stood
up to share their stories, their anger that men like Clegg don't think they
matter, and their determination to assert that they do. Inspired by those
students, here is my defense of race-based affirmative action. Put aside that
the richest country in world history treats education like a scarce commodity
to be fought over. Race-based affirmative action is simply a matter of
justice.
Here are 10 myths that people like Clegg spin about affirmative action--and
the facts that dispel those myths.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
*Myth Number 1: Students of color admitted under affirmative action aren't
admitted on merit.*
If there was one phrase Roger Clegg kept using at his debate that made the
entire audience hiss, it was "lowered expectations." That's what Clegg says
affirmative action means for minority students. But what he calls lowered
expectations, I call recognition of a higher achievement.
According to the Black Commentator [2], "Wisconsin, and in particular the
Milwaukee area, justly merit the invidious distinction of the Worst Place in
the Nation to be Black." One reason? The staggering extent to which the
criminal justice system in this state is directed at young Black men and
their communities.
Sociologist Pamela Oliver has shown [3] that Wisconsin's racial disparity in
sentencing people convicted of new drug offenses dramatically dwarfs the
disparity in every other state--including New York under its infamous
Rockefeller Drug Laws [4].
In short, succeeding in high school under these conditions is a real
achievement--one that frankly dwarfs managing to study SAT vocabulary in a
well-funded suburban high school where students are expected to go to
college.
And speaking of the SAT and other standardized tests, it's worth
understanding some of the reasons for the racial discrepancies in test
scores. As Adam Sanchez explained for SocialistWorker.org [5], since
standardized tests are created to sort students, they only serve their
function if some students consistently perform better than others.
This has two implications. First, test designers need questions that lots of
students will get wrong, and the easiest way to do this is to use questions
that draw less on classroom experiences that all children share than on home
experiences that only some did. (The need for variation in scores is also why
the exams are timed, even though this makes them much more artificial.)
Second, test designers need questions to agree on who the high-scoring
students are--otherwise, everyone would score somewhere near the middle. This
means that before new questions are added, they are vetted to make sure that
they pick out the same students who already are scoring well on the tests.
(In testing parlance, such questions are "reliable"--which doesn't mean they
are "valid" at capturing real intellectual merit.)
These reasons help to explain why the best predictors of standardized test
scores are parents' wealth and education.
*Myth Number 2: White students are admitted to college solely on merit.*
Underlying all the attacks on affirmative action is the idea that without it,
college admissions are race-neutral and meritocratic. But as my fellow UW
student Paul Pryse wrote [6] after the last attack on affirmative action at
UW:
>As many as 15 percent of freshmen at America's top schools are white
>students who failed to meet their university's minimum standards for
>admission, according to Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the /Chronicle of
>Higher Education/. These kids are "people with a long-standing relationship
>with the university," or in other words, the children of faculty, wealthy
>alumni and politicians.
>
>According to Schmidt, these unqualified but privileged kids are nearly twice
>as common on top campuses as Black and Latino students who had benefited
>from affirmative action.
>
There's no such thing as a race-neutral college admissions policy in America.
"Colorblind" just means the advantages and disadvantages are rendered
invisible.
*Myth Number 3: Affirmative action hurts students of color by putting them in
environments for which they aren't prepared.*
This might have been Clegg's single nastiest argument of the night--that
because UW-Madison employs affirmative action, it admits students who are, in
Clegg's words, "guaranteed to fail."
Students of color do have a harder road at college than most white students,
but it isn't because they're unqualified--it's because discrimination and
hostility don't stop at campus gates. Campus cultures have been improved by
the victories of antiracist student movements over the past 50 years, but
they are still alienating at best and vicious at worst for some students.
Only this past summer at UW, a fraternity hung a life-size black-clad
Spiderman doll by its neck from the balcony of its house on fraternity row.
If Black students find inhospitable a campus that mere months ago saw the
echoes of lynching, only a racist would think that the answer is to keep them
off that campus--for their own good.
*Myth Number 4: Maybe affirmative action was important once, but those days
are long past.*
It's hard to imagine anyone making this argument seriously, but then again,
Clegg--who, under student questioning, said he wasn't sure whether Black
students on average attend less well-funded schools than white kids--didn't
seem to be joking. Here are just a few relevant facts:
The median Black family has just 5 percent of the wealth of the median white
family [7] (with Hispanics much closer to Blacks than whites)--this is one of
the most important ways that advantages and disadvantages are passed down
over generations.
Another is segregated schools. A majority of Black students in Illinois,
Michigan, New Jersey and New York attend schools that are over 90 percent
Black and Latino [8], and most white students attend schools that are
overwhelmingly white. Here in Wisconsin, the Milwaukee school district, with
77 percent Black and Hispanic students, spends $3,081 less per student [9]
than the nearby Maple Dale-Indian Hill district, where 80 percent of students
are white. The average Black or Latino K-12 student in the country attends a
school in which most students are poor [10].
Meanwhile, one of the most-ballyhooed areas of progress--the narrowing gap in
high school graduation rates between Black and white students--has been shown
by sociologists Stephanie Ewert and Becky Pettitt to be a statistical lie:
once you include prisoners, the progress disappears. The biggest change is
that now the Black students who don't graduate high school are locked up.
*Myth Number 5: Affirmative action policies in colleges distract attention
from disparities earlier in the pipeline.*
This one--which Clegg also threw out at the debate in Madison--is just
bizarre. Have you ever heard any proponent of affirmative action say, "Well,
I would support equal access to quality K-12 schools, but I'm too busy
defending affirmative action at colleges?"
Affirmative action at every level helps future generations at every level.
Many students of all races are being taught by teachers who may have
benefited from affirmative action programs--and who had their sense of
education's power and importance shaped by the struggle for affirmative
action and civil rights at their colleges.
On the other hand, we might ask those making this argument about their
commitment to reforming "the pipeline." I was next in line to question Clegg
when the debate unceremoniously ended, with a long line of students still
waiting to speak. My question was simple: Since he and his organization
apparently want schooling to be colorblind, what have they done to combat
residential segregation, by far the biggest contributor to different
schooling for different races?
*Myth Number 6: Eliminating affirmative action would be fairer to Asian
students.*
This might be the CEO's most important left cover for their position--the
idea that UW-Madison is discriminating not only against white students, but
Asian students as well.
As Chinese-American student government leader and Student Labor Action
Coalition member Beth Huang pointed out at a pro-affirmative action rally on
campus here in Madison, this argument lumps together very diverse populations
into the category "Asian." In particular, Wisconsin has a large Hmong
population--settled in the Midwest as refugees after the CIA had recruited
them into its "Secret War" in Laos--who are largely segregated and
impoverished, and should be beneficiaries of affirmative action.
However, it's also true that some "holistic admissions policies" used at
universities--such as privileging certain kinds of extracurricular
experiences--can function to limit the number of Chinese and Chinese-American
students on campus. The main beneficiaries are not other students of color,
who remain underrepresented on campuses, but wealthy white students.
Proponents of affirmative action should fight efforts to divide populations
that historically have faced discrimination in the United States.
*Myth Number 7: White students are only harmed by affirmative action
policies.*
As it happens, the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in
general--by far--have been white women. But this article is about race-based
affirmative action, and my case is that these race-based programs are
essential for white students--for the sake of their own education.
As we waited in line to question Clegg last week, the student in front of me
told me that she had multiple white students in her classes tell her they'd
never met a Black person before. Can it really be in these students' interest
to have African American students kept out of college, so the country's Black
population remains an abstraction to them?
As left-wing education expert Jonathan Kozol points out [11], research shows
that "the strongest opposition to integrated schooling among white people is
among those who have never experienced it." Kozol cites studies showing that
"60 percent of young people of all races feel not only that they will receive
a better education in an integrated setting, but that the federal government
should make sure that it happens."
*Myth Number 8: Anything that smacks of "quotas" is rigid and suspect.*
Quotas became a dirty word in the 1990s, when Democratic President Bill
Clinton led the effort to get rid of them--in the name of "mending, not
ending" affirmative action. A series of Supreme Court decisions then sharply
limited the ways that colleges are allowed to use race in admissions.
But what a quota really means is that there is accountability to stated
diversity goals. Here at UW-Madison, the university's 10-year diversity
initiative, Plan 2008, fell far short of its goals--which the college's
Academic Planning Analysis division attributed [12] to a lack of increased
financial aid. Today, the university is [13] less than 4 percent Hispanic,
less than 3 percent Black, less than 2 percent Southeast Asian and less than
1 percent Native American. And a third of these students never graduate.
In the same 10 years, the university recruited faculty of color, but failed
to increase its rates of granting tenure to them. Faculty of color often face
a dilemma in which they are expected to mentor many students of color and
serve on every diversity committee, but are not really rewarded for this work
in the tenure system.
A system that enforced more accountability to its stated diversity aims would
force departments and the university administration to address this kind of
discrepancy. Without this accountability, it is far too easy to never
question the basic operating and funding structures of the university, while
bemoaning the lack of progress on diversity.
*Myth Number 9: If we had class-based affirmative action, we wouldn't need
race-based affirmative action.*
Racial and economic disadvantages in education are deeply intertwined, but
that doesn't mean the racial disadvantages can be reduced to class.
Because of residential segregation, even when a Black and a white family have
the same household income, it's very likely that the Black family's children
go to far worse schools. The "war on drugs" has led to an all-out assault on
Black communities in particular. And in the current era--to quote sociologist
Matt Desmond [14], commenting on his study of evictions in
Milwaukee--"eviction is for Black women what incarceration is for Black men."
It should be obvious that these processes have a tremendous effect on
children.
Moreover, the most important dimensions of class--wealth, not income--are the
hardest to account for in college admissions, especially when it comes to
ensuring racial justice.
One reason wealth is harder to measure is that many government programs are
designed to make sure the poor--as opposed to the rich--don't get benefits
they don't qualify for. One result is that it is generally easy to verify
whether someone is officially living in poverty, but not always whether
another family has been living paycheck to paycheck, while still another with
the same income has valuable assets.
*Myth Number 10: We have to choose between class-based and race-based
affirmative action.*
Have you ever noticed that the only time Republicans seem to care about how
poor kids will get to college is when they can use this concern as their
battering ram against racial justice?
There is every reason to support affirmative action based on both race and
class. And although I began by setting aside the way education is being made
a scarce commodity, there's every reason to fight that, too.
Beneath the attack on affirmative action is the idea that not everyone is
entitled to a good education. But the money is there for quality, integrated
schools--in the military budget; in the bailouts going to the banks; in the
taxes never paid by corporations and the extremely wealthy. Any social
organization that requires children to spend their childhoods competing to
see whether they'll be among the lucky few to attend the right schools isn't
rational.
So at the same time that we fight for justice in college admissions--and
justice means affirmative action--we should fight for more educational
opportunity for all students. The rallying chant of this defense of education
should be: "Black, Latino, Arab, Asian and white, rich or poor--education is
a right!"
Or maybe it will be the cry that we came back to last week, over and over
again: "Power to the people!"
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
What you can do
The struggle to defend affirmative action at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison is ongoing. Join activists for a discussion of what's next
at a forum titled "Power to the People: Fighting Racism at the UW Campus,"
[15] on Tuesday, September 20, at 6:30 p.m. in 1101 Humanities.
To read more about the affirmative action issue at UW, read the Education
Optimists [16] blog, coauthored by UW education professor Sara Goldrick-Rab.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Published by the International Socialist Organization. Material on this Web
site is licensed by SocialistWorker.org, under a Creative Commons (by-nc-nd
3.0) license, except for articles that are republished with permission.
Readers are welcome to share and use material belonging to this site for
non-commercial purposes, as long as they are attributed to the author and
SocialistWorker.org.
[1] http://socialistworker.org/2011/09/15/a-stand-for-diversity-at-UW
[2] http://www.blackcommentator.com/146/146_cover_dixon_ten_worst.html
[3] http://ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/RACIAL/RacialDisparities.htm
[4] http://www.droptherock.org
[5] http://socialistworker.org/2010/09/28/why-testing-fails-our-schools
[6] http://socialistworker.org/2008/10/23/in-defense-of-affirmative-action
[7] http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2069/housing-bubble-subprime-mortgages-hispanics-blacks-household-wealth-disparity
[8] http://www.nsba.org/Board-Leadership/Governance/Policies/Newsletters/GuidancetoSchoolBoardsonRaceandStudentAssignment.txt
[9] http://socialistworker.org/2008/10/23/in-defense-of-affirmative-action
[10] http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2011/05/17/resegregation-american-schools
[11] http://www.isreview.org/issues/45/Kozol.shtml
[12] http://www.dailycardinal.com/officials-look-back-on-results-of-plan-2008-1.892504
[13] http://apa.wisc.edu/Diversity/2010DiversityForumFINAL_Feb.pptx
[14] http://trueslant.com/megancottrell/2010/01/27/eviction-is-for-black-women-what-incarceration-is-to-black-men/
[15] http://iso-madison.blogspot.com/2011/09/get-word-out-far-and-wide-and-come-to.html
[16] http://eduoptimists.blogspot.com/
