Erin Aubry Kaplan writes:
UCLA has always had a hard time recruiting decent numbers of black students. I should know. I worked for a couple of outreach programs in the admissions office in the mid-1980s, when such programs were not only legal, they had some cachet.
It was tough. The critical mass of university-ready black students that I imagined was out there in the public schools, just waiting for a bit of encouragement from a friendly role model like me, was just that — imaginary. I pored over lists of black students at high school campuses in the allegedly fertile San Fernando Valley as if I were panning for gold. I had to play the talented-tenth game, prodding and pleading with my few black prospects to come to Westwood, or at least to apply.
But blacks never got close to the holy grail of parity: reaching the same percentage of the UCLA student body as in the statewide population of high school graduates. The irony is that affirmative action was banished in part because of a perception that students of color were overrunning universities like UCLA — that is, the policy was working too well. But in fact, it wasn't working well enough, certainly not for blacks.
Which, of course, should've been expected. Affirmative action, as understood by whites, was the conferral of unneeded advantage for a genetic trait that did no educational harm. When it was eliminated, the idea was that black kids, who are as smart as any other kids, would simply compete on an even playing field -- and if you thought they would fail, you were a racist who thought blacks were stupid. Of course, when you're dealing with college admissions, each high school is it's own playing field. And they are separate, and not equal. Some lack resources, others need teachers, the worst are overrun by a culture of anti-intellectualism and violence. Some playing fields, as it turns out, are mined.
Conceptually, affirmative action was always in a tough spot. After the left had so effectively and vigorously argued for the innate equality of the races, it was too tough, and too superficially contradictory, to then uphold that some races were simply poorer students. That was never the argument, of course, but that was what it could easily be warped into, particularly by self-interested voters who felt they bore no blame for historical racism.
For that reason, I've always been a massive advocate of class-based, or economic, affirmative action. The connection between lack of resources and poor educational attainment is an obvious one: Americans know that money matters. And helping to rectify the advantages offered by SAT classes and high property taxes is only leveling the field. While it may be arguable that the average white has no innate advantages over the average black, the median rich kid is certainly favored over his poorer competitor. With race-based affirmative action lying bruised and broken at the ballot box, it's time not to give up on the concept, but to rebuild it in a better targeted, more politically defensible way.
