An honest discussion about whether race should be a factor in college admission decisions can only take place with the initial acknowledgement of one incontrovertible fact: blacks continue to face significant discrimination regardless of class, income, experience or skill.
A now famous study done in 2002 by former UW sociology Ph.D. student Devah Pager found that whites in Milwaukee were more than twice as likely as blacks to get a call back for a job interview, even when they had the same r?sum?. In fact, the study found whites with a criminal record had a greater likelihood of getting a call back than blacks with no prior record.
Similar studies done using the Implicit Association Test, a test used in social psychology to measure the strength of automatic associations between internal concepts, have found most whites unconsciously associate a person with white skin much more easily with desirable character traits than a person with black skin. Even worse, a study published in 2008 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that many whites implicitly or subconsciously associate blacks with apes, not even regarding them as “fully human.”
These facts present us with an inescapable conclusion: most of us — in fact, a vast majority — maintain implicit or unconscious racial biases which ultimately affect our perceptions and behavior. In short, though it would be ideal, society is not actually colorblind.
The problem is society probably never completely will be. In 2003, retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in issuing an opinion for the majority of the court that affirmed the legality of race-based discrimination in college admissions, noted such policies “must be limited in time.” I think we are forced to agree.
While discriminating in college admissions in the interest of equal opportunity or racial justice may be justified now in the face of widespread and significant racial biases, it will not be indefinitely. It seems uncontroversial to think that perceptual and behavioral racial biases within the American population will shrink below the level of relevant significance in the relatively near future. While I doubt O’Connor was correct in arguing this will happen in the next 25 years, the next 50 seems to be a reasonable bet. At such a point, in which racial biases are neither widespread nor significant, race should no longer be a relevant factor in affirmative action considerations.
Some activists would likely argue here that even at such a point, in the interest of maintaining a variety of perspectives on campus, race should still be a relevant factor for college affirmative action programs. This justification simply fails.
It is entirely unfair to bring a student into a classroom as a representative of an entire race’s view, and entirely simple-minded to think that such a student would necessarily carry a different perspective because of their race in a world in which racial biases are at a minimum. An application, personal statement and biography will lend you an individual’s perspective, not the pigment of his or her skin.
The fact is affirmative action programs were not initiated to bring different perspectives to college classrooms, but as an attempt to preserve a type of American ideal, where a person’s starting point in life does not dictate where they can finish. Up to and including the present, racial prejudices in the population have worked to violate this ideal, and thus race has rightly been included as a factor in affirmative action decisions. However, as racial prejudices fall below significant levels, racial affirmative action should be completely replaced with its more effective but continually ignored counterpart: class-based affirmative action.
As Jerome Karabel, professor of sociology at the University of California-Berkeley, wrote in an editorial in The New York Times, “Despite their image as meritocratic beacons of opportunity, the selective colleges serve less as vehicles of upward mobility than as transmitters of privilege from generation to generation.” Addressing the same point, a study of 19 selective colleges conducted by a former president of Princeton found that applicants from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds got “essentially no break in the admissions process.”
This is a situation both tragic and absolutely unacceptable. But there is a silver lining. This is also a tragedy where people on both sides of the current affirmative action debate can agree on. Lost in the constant and incredibly divisive focus on race in the affirmative action debate has been a factor much more relevant to the preservation of the American ideal of infinite upward mobility and it is one we can all agree on. Whether you think race should be a factor in affirmative action programs — now and in the future — it is undeniable that socioeconomic background needs about 10 more seats at the affirmative action table.
So yes, a person’s race does still need to be a factor in college admission decisions, but we have to remember that reverse discrimination is merely one means by which to accomplish an end which need not, and eventually will not, be associated with race in any meaningful way. We would be smart not to lose sight of that.
Alec Slocum ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in philosophy and legal studies.
