Retrieved from the University of Texas in Austin.
Pro
by Gabriella Kiernan
Affirmative action is a heavily debated topic, especially amongst those applying to colleges. Affirmative action is used primarily for universities, but also applies to employers and other organizations. Some say that it gives certain groups an unfair advantage and stops people from getting accepted based on ability. Others argue that it allows minorities to have equal opportunities to those with more privilege and allows for more diversity in executive roles in the workplace. But, affirmative action gives equal opportunities to marginalized groups and promotes diversity in schools.
One of the main pros of affirmative action is that it gives opportunities to people of color, who have faced systemic disadvantages for many decades. It is not about equality. Instead, it is equity. Pushing marginalized people up so that they have the same chances of getting into a college as others is part of the goal of affirmative action. This allows for more diverse leadership in the workplace, as when these people graduate with professional degrees, they will go on to have high-paying jobs. According to Leah Schafer from Harvard’s Usable Knowledge, “They find that black students who probably benefited from affirmative action—because their achievement data is lower than the average student at their colleges—do better in the long-run than their peers who went to lower-status universities and probably did not benefit from affirmative action. The ones who benefited are more likely to graduate college and to earn professional degrees, and they have higher incomes.” Diversity is important in the real world, and it would not be fair if we continued to leave perfectly capable people behind.
A second pro of affirmative action is having more diversity in schools. Keeping everything equal is the central goal of affirmative action, and it assures that a school will not be disproportionately white. Of course, many may think that this is unfair. Some believe that acceptance should be based solely on someone’s application and race should have nothing to do with it, but both white students and people of color can benefit from attending more diverse schools. Schafer states, “Decades of research in higher education show that classmates of the direct beneficiaries also benefit. These students have more positive racial attitudes toward racial minorities, they report greater cognitive capacities, they even seem to participate more civically when they leave college.” Schafer also discusses how in California, a state that banned affirmative action in the 1990s, the percentage of black undergraduate students at UC Berkeley has fallen from 6 to 3 percent between 1980 and 2017. This ties into the previous point. The more minorities that graduate with professional degrees, the more representation we will see in the professional world. Keeping schools equal and diverse will allow for equal opportunities after college.
Lastly, affirmative action stops the cycle of poverty that plagues many minorities. Hundreds of years of systemic racism have left white people with a higher average income than people of color. According to the Center of American Progress, “...middle-income white households typically have twice as much wealth as their Latinx counterparts and three times more wealth than their black counterparts. As a result, students of color (especially black students) are more likely than similarly situated white students to attend underfunded and high-poverty K-12 schools.” Even wealthier people of color face obstacles in the school system. They are less likely to get admitted into gifted programs and more likely to get suspended or expelled than their white counterparts who perform equally as well or worse in school. Not to mention, bullying and racism itself are bound to affect a student’s performance in school. This causes a generational cycle of poverty that is nearly impossible to get out of. Affirmative action gives these students an opportunity to break the cycle.
Overall, there are many pros of affirmative action. Its primary purpose is to give marginalized students an equal chance to succeed in school and in their adult life. This branches off into many other pros, such as more employee diversity and fewer people of color in poverty. Affirmative action was only instilled in the 1970s, so it is still fairly new. Hopefully, as time goes on, we will continue to see the benefits and gain more diversity in the workplace.
Sources
Statement Regarding YCT Affirmative Action Bake Sale from Dr. Gregory J. Vincent - Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. (2016, October 26). Division of Diversity and Community Engagement. https://diversity.utexas.edu/2016/10/26/statement-regarding-yct-affirmative-action-bake-sale/
Corporate Finance Institute. (2020, April 15). Affirmative Action - Overview, Advantages, and Disadvantages. Corporate Finance Institute. https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/other/affirmative-action/.
Leah Shafer. (2018, July 11). The Case for Affirmative Action. Usable Knowledge. https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/18/07/case-affirmative-action.
Maxwell, C., & Garcia, S. (2020, June 18). 5 Reasons to Support Affirmative Action in College Admissions. Center for American Progress. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2019/10/01/471085/5-reasons-support-affirmative-action-college-admissions/.
Con
by Angelica Vellore
Racism is becoming more prevalent with movements such as Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate. This includes college admissions.
To specify, affirmative action in the United States is supposedly an active effort to improve employment or educational opportunities for individuals in minority groups. However, for the current system of affirmative action, this is not the case. Asians are its greatest victims.
To expand on anti-Asian racism, prominent California Democrat legislators Cristina Garcia and Allison Collins used degrading and violent language against Asians to justify affirmative action. Cristina Garcia—prominent #MeToo activist—was also under investigation for abuse of former staffers. She was also reprimanded by former Assembly Speaker John Perez in 2014 for making racially insensitive comments directed toward Asians. For specifics, Garcia called for violence against Asians because of their opposition to affirmative action, tweeting that, “I want to punch the next Asian person I see in the face.”
Perez confirmed that he had to “strongly admonish” Garcia after she made comments against Asians in a closed-door Assembly Democratic Caucus meeting in 2014. However, she is still in her position. Allison Collins, on the other hand, was also stripped of her role as vice president of the San Francisco Board of Education after several anti-Asian tweets from 2016 were unearthed. One of her tweets was,“Do they think they won't be deported? profiled? beaten? Being a house [n-word] is still being a [n-word]. You're still considered 'the help’”. The outrage from the tweets resulted in a joint statement from almost two dozen San Francisco officials. As for her policy, Collins advocated for a removal of merit-based admissions. Instead, she desired a lottery that would suppress Asian attendance and devalue Asian achievements.
They are not the only ones slandering Asians for “lack of effort in Affirmative action”(in regards to BLM). Yale student, Eileen Huang, released a statement insulting the Asian community. She wrote, “We Asian-Americans like to think of ourselves as exempt from racism. After all, many of us live in affluent neighborhoods, send our children to selective universities, and work comfortable professional jobs”. Then, she discusses anti-Asian hate and the racial hierarchy. In particular, she accepts Asian hate, explicitly. In one tweet about anti-Blackness in the Asian community, she says, “@ asian boba liberals on subtle asian traits posting anti-Black Canva infographics on how BLM ‘doesn’t pay enough attention to Asians’, like...maybe it’s ok to normalize racism against Asians.” On the whole, race-based affirmative action advocates use anti-Asian slurs and stereotypes. For instance, the idea of white-adjacency.
Asian-Americans are even more negatively affected than whites by affirmative action designed for ‘people of color’, which is a term that one Washington school used to exclude Asians from minorities.. In essence, affirmative action advocates view Asians as even whiter than white people. There is the logic that Asian-Americans are ‘privileged’, as claimed by the University of British Columbia, which sent a school-approved message about ‘yellow privilege’. Meanwhile, there is the risk that Asian-Americans will be squeezed out to provide proportionate representation to white. Already, white women are the greatest beneficiaries of race-based affirmative action. Advocates of affirmative action also believe that Asians apparently do not add to a school’s diversity.
This conflict has led to multiple lawsuits against both regular and elite universities. Harvard is notorious for attempting to attain “balance” when accepting students. The Supreme Court has upheld the use of race in college admissions. Many white people continue to oppose giving preference to minorities to to diversify campuses, and the Trump administration says it may sue universities for practicing “intentional” discrimination.
Even with Democrats, using race as a factor in admissions is unpopular, including with African-Americans and Latinos. With Asians, progressive groups like Center for American Progress and Asian-American Voter Survey use cruelly deceptive wording to claim that “70% of Asian-Americans support affirmative action”. Specifically, they ask participants if they “favor or oppose programs designed to help Blacks/Black people, women, and other minorities get better access to education”. Other wording polls significantly lower.
As for genuine legislation, Proposition 16 was a constitutional amendment that would have repealed Proposition 209 from the California Constitution. Effectively, it would have allowed racial discrimination for the purpose of instituting affirmative action programs. Proposition 16 was defeated in a state that is notoriously blue and liberal. In areas with high Latino populations, most voted no. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board wrote,” This rejection of identity politics in one of America’s bluest and most diverse states should echo around America, not least at the U.S. Supreme Court.” Moreover, using affirmative action in California required the repeal of Civil Rights Era legislation that aimed to stem discrimination. Proposition 209 stated that discrimination and preferential treatment were prohibited in public employment, public education, and public contracting on account of a person's or group's race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. In simpler terms, it deemed affirmative action as illegal discrimination. Without Proposition 209, governments would—within the limits of federal law—be allowed to develop and use affirmative action programs that grant preferences on race, sex, color, ethnicity, and national origin in public employment, education, and contracting. Likewise, in another heavily Democratic state, Referendum 88 also aimed to bring back affirmative action. It failed.
Ward Connerly, a member of the University of California Board of Regents, led the campaign behind Proposition 209. "Affirmative action was meant to be temporary," wrote Connerly, "It was meant to be a stronger dose of equal opportunity for individuals, and the prescription was intended to expire when the body politic had developed sufficient immunity to the virus of prejudice and discrimination." He added, "Three decades later, affirmative action is permanent and firmly entrenched as a matter of public policy, not because of any moral imperative but because it has become the battleground for a political and economic war that has racial self-interest as its centerpiece.”
Such issues have occurred in the past. Abigail Fisher’s dream school was The University of Texas in Austin. Fisher, from Sugar Land, Texas earned a 3.59 GPA in high school and scored 1180 on the SAT. This was not enough for the highly selective UT Austin in fall 2008; Fisher's dreams were dashed when she was denied admission. Fisher sued with the argument that applicants of color, whose racial backgrounds were included as a component of the university's holistic review process, were less-qualified students and had displaced her.
This case brought an interesting paradox, white women benefited the most from affirmative action. A 1995 report by the California Senate Government Organization Committee found that white women had the most managerial jobs (57,250) as opposed to African-Americans (10,500), Latinos (19,000), and Asian-Americans (24,600) after the first two decades of affirmative action in the private sector. In the modern era, diversity has emerged with an overwhelming increase in the presence of white women, not necessarily people of color. For African-Americans, affirmative action increased their admissions rate but decreased their graduation rate. On the net, a similar percentage before and after affirmative action managed to receive a degree.
Affirmative action is not black and white. While in theory, it would eliminate racial barriers and decrease discrimination, it is actually the greatest perpetrator of these sins, pitting others against Asians while failing to benefit African-Americans. As it can be seen with the college admission process. Changes in how society reacts to affirmative action may change, though for better or worse will only be seen with time.
Sources
California Proposition 16, Repeal Proposition 209 Affirmative Action Amendment (2020)(n.d). Ballotpedia
Marinucci,C. (2021,March 26).#MeToo movement lawmaker made anti-Asian comments.POLITICO.
#MeToo movement lawmaker made anti-Asian comments - POLITICOBack ButtonSearch IconFilter Icon
Massie,V. (2016,June 23).White women benefit most from affirmative action—and are among its fiercest opponents.Vox. https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11682950/fisher-supreme-court-white-women-affirmative-action
Palmer,E. (2021,March 26)What Alison Collins' Tweets Said as San Francisco School Board VP Removed.Newsweek.
What Alison Collins' Tweets Said as San Francisco School Board VP Removed (newsweek.com)
Wu, F. (1995).Neither Black Nor White: Asian-Americans and Affirmative Action. Boston College Third World Law Journal.
https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1845&context=faculty_scholarship