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Many years ago, a Black teenager in the small town of Safety Harbor, Florida, had an unlikely dream. The boy shared his dream with his guidance counselor, a middle-aged white man unaccustomed to any lofty ambitions from his students, Black or white, at the local high school. The guidance counselor listened courteously and then revealed a look of concern.
The counselor assumed he knew enough about the boy’s history to make an informed recommendation. He knew the boy had been a transfer student from two other high schools. He knew the boy’s race, his slightly above-average grades, his below-average test scores, and how involved he was in sports and campus activities. It was not a negative student file, but it did not appear to the counselor to be an impressive record of achievement.
The counselor did not know that the boy was the product of what was once called a “broken home” or that his mother had been an orphan raised in a foster home and his father had abandoned him before birth, but had he known, it would not have changed his advice. Nor did he know that the boy had been born in what was once called “the ghetto,” but he may have assumed as much from his experience dealing with the other Black students at the school, many of whom were bused in from the local projects.
Based on what he knew from his years of experience, the guidance counselor informed the boy that his dream to attend an elite college out of state was likely beyond his reach and suggested the teenager pursue a more modest goal somewhere in Florida after high school.
One of the schools that did accept him was an Ivy League college in New England.
The teenager left the meeting with a sense of disappointment, and the guidance counselor may have assumed that would be the end of the student’s pipe dream. But the boy was not completely dissuaded. He applied to several universities and was admitted to some, rejected by others, and waitlisted by one. Sadly, he was not admitted into the dream school he most wanted to attend, but against what seemed to be all odds, one of the schools that did accept him was an Ivy League college in New England.
The teenager “matriculated”—a word he had never heard before college—at the Ivy League school and met with mixed success at first. Like many students, he struggled to identify a major and performed better in some classes than others. But he found a passion in campus activities, joined a sports team as a walk- on athlete, and started working for the student newspaper. Those activities kept him disciplined and engaged in his schoolwork, and things eventually started to click for him.
Then something unexpected happened. At the end of his first year at the elite Ivy League college, the Black student received a letter from the first-year dean informing him that he had won an award as the outstanding freshman man in his class. He thought it was a mistake when he opened the letter and wasn’t sure if the school would rescind the award when they realized what they had done. But they never did.
By the time he graduated, he received another surprising award from the school.
In his next few years on campus, things got better. He competed in the NCAA championships in the very sport in which he had not been recruited, and he served as the editor in chief of the influential daily college newspaper. By the time he graduated, he received another surprising award from the school. It was an all-around achievement award given to “the member of the Senior Class who shows the greatest promise of becoming a factor in the outside world through strength of character and qualities of leadership, record of scholarship and broad achievement, and influence among their fellow students.”
After college, he attended Harvard Law School, served in the White House, started a civil rights organization, taught at Columbia University, worked as a political commentator on CNN, and published seven books, including this one. As you’ve no doubt figured out by now, I was that teenage boy, and the reason I was able to access those opportunities is that the admissions office at Dartmouth College saw potential in me even though my test scores fell well below the college’s median. Yes, I was one of those Black students admitted to my college, in part, because of affirmative action.
I did not fully grasp the background and history of affirmative action and how it worked.
At first, I was intimidated by my classmates and suffered from impostor syndrome because I did not know that I deserved to be there. Although I had taken Advanced Placement courses at my public high school in Florida, many of my elite college classmates were wealthy prep school grads who were much better prepared for the first year than I was. As I got to know them, however, I realized they were no smarter than I was. But unlike me, they had parents who graduated from college, spoke the Queen’s English, enrolled them in the best schools, put them in test prep courses, and gave them a sense of confidence.
I also wrongly assumed my admission meant the college had lowered its standards to allow me to attend. Although I reflexively defended the school’s policies from the student critics on my conservative campus, I did not fully grasp the background and history of affirmative action and how it worked.
The term “affirmative action” dates back at least to the New Deal, when President Roosevelt signed the Wagner Act of 1935, requiring employers to take “affirmative action” to correct unfair labor practices. In 1961, Democratic president John F. Kennedy issued the first executive order requiring government contractors to “take affirmative action” in employment practices, to include workers previously excluded based on “race, creed, color, or national origin.” Four years later, Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson issued an executive order prohibiting federal contractors from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, and national origin. In 1967, he amended his order to include sex as a protected category. And in 1969, Republican president Richard Nixon extended affirmative action with his own executive order.
Since the 1970s, however, affirmative action has been vigorously challenged and criticized by conservative Republicans. In 1978, the US Supreme Court prohibited explicit racial quotas but allowed for “a properly devised admissions program involving the competitive consideration of race and ethnic origin.” It was through “the competitive consideration of race” that I was admitted to Dartmouth College in the spring of 1983. Race was not the only component that contributed to my admission, but it was a factor that the school, a predominantly white institution, was allowed to consider.
We rarely hear complaints about affirmative action for white women.
Under pressure from Republicans to abolish affirmative action, Democratic president Bill Clinton spoke in 1995 and urged the nation to “mend it, but don’t end it.” As the Supreme Court became dominated by Republican appointees, the pro-affirmative action majority narrowed. The court upheld affirmative action in 2003 in a 5– 4 decision in Grutter v. Bollinger and again in 2016 in a 4– 3 decision in Fisher v. University of Texas. But when the high court overturned Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022 and heard new affirmative action cases that fall, it was clear affirmative action was doomed.
While much of the debate about the policy has focused on Black people, “the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action have been Euro-American women,” Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw explained in an article for the Michigan Law Review in 2006. A 1995 report by the US Department of Labor found that affirmative action policies had benefited six million women. Another study the same year in California found that “white women held a majority of managerial jobs (57,250) compared with African Americans (10,500), Latinos (19,000), and Asian Americans (24,600) after the first two decades of affirmative action,” according to Vox. But we rarely hear complaints about affirmative action for white women.
Affirmative action helped the nation build a fairer society. The people who fought for civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s understood that the passage of federal civil rights legislation, however critical, would not root out racism in people’s hearts or end racial discrimination in their actions.
A year after the Civil Rights Act was passed, President Johnson called on the nation to move to the “next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights” when he delivered the commencement address at Howard University in June 1965: “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
In Johnson’s words, it was “not enough just to open the gates of opportunity” if Black Americans did not “have the ability to walk through those gates.” Telling Black people that we were equal under the law without providing the federal resources to implement that equality was meaningless.
White America’s resistance to Johnson’s more aggressive action has led to the persistence of dramatic racial inequality in employment, access to health care, education, student loan debt, housing, household income, criminal justice, and environmental conditions. By 2019, for example, median household income for Black households was $45,438 compared to $76,057 for non-Hispanic white households, according to the Census Bureau. Even as Black families began to move to middle-class suburbs, they gained the illusion of equality but were never fully equal with their white counterparts whose families maintained a head start because their parents or grandparents were never forced to attend underfunded racially segregated public schools.
By ignoring the historical context that led to racial disparities, the same white Americans who fought against civil rights for Black people suddenly found a way to portray themselves as victims of affirmative action. They called it “reverse discrimination.” It was an argument as old as Reconstruction, when Judge Daniel G. Fowle complained as early as 1866, one year after the formal end of slavery, about “unjust discrimination against the white race and in favor of the negro.” Then in 1883, as the Ku Klux Klan began to rise in power, the Supreme Court warned that basic civil rights protections for a people who had only recently been liberated from enslavement would somehow make Black Americans “the special favorite of the laws.”
No one ever questioned how those students were admitted.
I heard similar arguments as a college student when pampered white classmates would complain that Black students like me had taken spots from their peers. It didn’t matter that we had classmates who received preferential treatment because they came from wealthy families or were children of alumni, or both. One of my schoolmates, Nelson Rockefeller Jr., had an entire building named after his famous father on campus. But no one ever questioned how those students were admitted or whether they had special advantages from their upbringing that Black students rarely did.
It was the Reagan ’80s, and the idea of white victimhood was popular because it promoted the myth that the remedy for centuries of racism was the same as, or worse than, the disease itself. Mediocre white men had been admitted to elite schools for centuries without raising an eyebrow of concern on those campuses, but the presence of intelligent Black and brown students caused a ruckus among white conservatives.
No one had an absolute right to attend any selective college.
Conservatives promoted myths that colleges and employers were selecting unqualified people. But in my case, I came to learn this was not true. Yes, my test scores were not the best, but I was differently qualified. Despite all the obstacles I had faced as a young Black kid in a white society, I had become the president of my student government at a non- Black high school, an award-winning debater, an editor of our school newspaper, a columnist for the local city newspaper, a successful varsity athlete, the chair of the local school board student committee, and a member of the Safety Harbor Parks and Recreation Commission.
I also understood that no one had an absolute right to attend any selective college because admissions decisions are based on the needs of the institution in any given year. If there had been ten other kids like me who applied, I might not have been admitted, but that year I stood out. Years later, when I helped my friend Chris Georges on a book called 100 Successful College Application Essays, I read binders of boring, predictable essays to find a few gems to include in the book and came to appreciate how important it was for admissions officers to identify students who make a unique impression.
If they wanted to, top schools could probably limit their incoming classes to people with perfect test scores, but they might end up with a student population from privileged backgrounds who all took the same test prep courses and all attended the same prep schools in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and California. But what would this accomplish?
When voters in California passed Proposition 209 in 1996, prohibiting public universities from considering race in admissions, the Black share of the freshman class at UC Berkeley fell by half, to 3 percent, and the Latino share dropped to 7 percent. By 2022, Latinos, who accounted for 55 percent of California’s public school students, represented only 19 percent of UC Berkeley undergraduates. How does it help students to navigate their young careers in a diverse state when they graduate from a school without the same diversity as the population into which they enter?
Race and ethnicity should never be the only factor determining whether a student is admitted to a college, but neither should it be the only factor that college admissions officers cannot consider. Just like test scores and numerical indicators, race does not tell us everything we need to know about a student, their full story, or their potential, but it does give us one valuable data point to consider.
Affirmative action is not about selecting ‘unqualified minorities’ to fill a quota.
Many colleges already recognize the limitations and false sense of meritocracy provided by test scores, and some have started to move away from them. Test scores don’t measure raw intelligence, artistic or athletic talent, tenacity, honesty, courage, or other nonacademic abilities important for success in life. If universities focused on only one criterion or were forced to ignore an important criterion, they would deprive students of the opportunity to learn from people who look, act, think, and experience the world differently.
For me, the experience of college was enriched by heated debates with conservative intellectual friends, passionate conversations with liberal activist friends, late nights with student newspaper colleagues, and field trips with track-and-field buddies. We were all differently skilled and differently qualified to be there.
Despite the conservative rhetoric to the contrary, affirmative action is not about selecting “unqualified minorities” to fill a quota. It’s about selecting among many qualified candidates to provide opportunities to people who have often been overlooked. It’s about building a pipeline for future qualified candidates. And it’s about understanding which qualifications are essential and which reflect preconceived biases not relevant to a candidate’s performance or ability.
The great irony here is that for all their complaints about liberal “identity politics,” conservative critics of affirmative action in the GOP often engage in the very sin they decry by elevating right-wing women and people of color for prominent positions as a political tactic in response to the diversity they see in the Democratic Party. But the true purpose of affirmative action is not to help any political party make short-term electoral gains. The concept of affirmative action that Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon articulated was about rebalancing the scales of justice after centuries of weighted favoritism for white men.
The work ends when we finally reach equality and eliminate racial disparities.
So when does it end? Unfortunately, you can’t erase the scars of 350 years of slavery and 100 years of state-sponsored racial terrorism with 50 or 60 years of a limited government policy. As President Johnson said in his speech at Howard, we must commit to equality not just “as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” So the work ends when we finally reach equality and eliminate racial disparities. That hasn’t happened and isn’t likely to happen soon without a major shift in our priorities.
Maybe affirmative action is not the answer for the long-term future. Maybe there’s another way to reach “equality as a result.” Before we replace it, though, we ought to have an alternative solution, or we’ll find ourselves moving backward on race issues instead of forward. Whatever method we choose to reach President Johnson’s goal, it will be controversial because the only way to disrupt the inertia of four hundred years is to change the status quo.
Any alternative solution must prove itself to be more effective and less disruptive than affirmative action at reaching the goal of equality.
That’s a difficult task because affirmative action benefits everyone. It creates a more just society. It exposes all of us to new people, ideas, and experiences. It makes us more competitive as a nation in a world where most of the inhabitants are people of color. It creates opportunities for historically underrepresented groups. It reduces social tension in marginalized communities. So if we are going to improve on affirmative action, those are the baseline qualities we should expect.
It is not easy or quick to root out racial discrimination. We should still be guided by the words of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. In a speech at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, in 1968, Dr. King articulated the need for transformational public policy to confront the centuries-long legacy of racial bias and white supremacy: “We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.” Four days later, he was assassinated in Memphis.
This article has been excerpted from “Why Does Everything Have to Be About Race?: 25 Arguments That Won’t Go Away” by Keith Boykin. Copyright © 2024. Available from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
