Opinion

Personal convictions yield support for affirmative action

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Hard as it may be to believe, I was once against affirmative action. I refused to take handouts, especially from the government or its institutions, because if I really wanted something, I would work for it. Amidst my ignorance on the history of this country and its trajectory of civil rights movements, I was blind to see that in actuality I would have to work twice as hard as my white peers to achieve anything I set my eyes on. Not because my gender or ethnicity made me inherently incompetent, but because of the ten steps behind that I will always be in comparison to the average American Joe.

Joe can trace his genealogy back to the Irish immigrants from the 19th century, while I’m a first generation American. Joe’s father and mother attended Big Ten universities. My parents graduated from universities that you can’t pronounce without an accent. My point is that my race has added a facet to my identity and has shaped the path of my life. You cannot argue that affirmative action is unconstitutional without understanding the historical context that makes it relevant today.

The Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision of 1954 was the first time that underrepresented minorities were legally given the right to a quality education. So it has only been 50 years that we’ve been deemed worthy of entering the world of academia. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court’s decision did not automatically welcome people of color into the American school system. It took years to desegregate schools even after President Eisenhower asked for an immediate desegregation.

Even now, 50 years later, we are still culpable of stark segregation in our public and private school systems. Because of this fact, an achievement gap has grown between the quality of education that white students get compared to students of color. Research shows that this gap is not due to intellectual inferiority, but rather a limited amount of resources available.

The cruel truth is that not everyone is born with the same opportunities. Whether you like it or not, the color of your skin is a factor that determines the kind of school you attend, the kinds of teachers you learn from, and the quality of your education. If admission were to be solely based on merit, we would have to assume that people of color have the same educational opportunities as white people. However, research shows that American public high schools with the lowest funding are disproportionately composed of students of color.

If we lived in a perfect utopia, affirmative action would be unnecessary because everyone would have the same opportunities and no one would hold an upper hand. Because of the nature of our society, there will always be a group of people who do not have equal access to higher education, which is why we will always need affirmative action. Moreover, if one argues that affirmative action gives preference to certain groups, we must acknowledge that abolishing this law would not get rid of any special treatment. With affirmative action overruled, universities would continue to give special consideration to athletes, sons and daughters of alumni and people with connections to the administration.

Race has to be taken into consideration as one of the many factors in granting admission because it attempts to undo the effects of the injustices of our past. In the words of our ex president Johnson, “You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe you have been completely fair.”

Monica SanMiguel (masanmiguel@wisc.edu) is a sophomore majoring in economics.