The Paradox of Affirmative Action

Affirmative action continues to mean different things for Americans.

Viewed as a helping hand, a handout or a hindrance to meaningful progress, how it is decided who has access to higher education continues to hold back discussions on deracialized equality.

The phrase passed along to him by African American lawyer Hobart Taylor, Jr., it was first used by then President John F. Kennedy in March 1961, establishing the President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity.

Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925, instructing federal contractors to take “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are treated equally without regard to race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Despite its history, with each generation, the term and the programs that followed continue to get lost in translation.

Debates about affirmative action in education are making the rounds again. With the Supreme Court hearing two cases, a university’s ability to consider the race of an applicant continues to receive scrutiny.

Not one but two court cases are being argued, addressing the admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

In both cases, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. seek to have Grutter v. Bollinger overruled, arguing that Asian Americans are being discriminated against due to the “model minority” stereotype and, consequently, held to a higher standard than other applicants.

Harvard argues that the lawsuit, principally led by Ed Blum who is neither a recent student nor Asian American, is “politically motivated” and says, “At risk are 40 years of legal precedent and diverse campus communities that prepare students for an interconnected world.”

USA Today writer Alia Wong says, “Asian Americans are widely stereotyped as studious, smart and hard-working. As minorities who have managed to overcome racial obstacles to success. As evidence that affirmative action is no longer necessary – or, even, that it hurts the very types of students it’s meant to protect.”

Wong writes that Asian Americans often “downplay their Asian identities on applications. … But that doesn’t necessarily mean affirmative action is to blame.”

Staff writer for The New York Times Louis Menand wrote in “The Changing Meaning of Affirmative Action”: “The terrible paradox of the civil-rights movement is that outlawing racial discrimination made it harder to remediate its effects. Once we amended the Constitution and passed laws to protect people of color from being treated differently in ways that were harmful to them, the government had trouble enacting programs that treat people of color differently in ways that might be beneficial. We took race out of the equation only to realize that, if we truly wanted not just equality of opportunity for all Americans but equality of result, we needed to put it back in. Our name for this paradox is affirmative action.”

A paradox and proof that using race in service to equality is untenable. Still, it is an affirmative action, a step in the right direction and away from America’s history of school segregation.

Defined by Cornell Law School as “a set of procedures designed to eliminate unlawful discrimination among applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination, and prevent such discrimination in the future,” it’s been up in the air since its inception in the 1960s.

Though the highest court in the land has repeatedly ruled in favor of the practice, there is talk that this time affirmative action could be banned. But this is not the first time the hotly contested policy regarding higher education in the U.S. has been on the chopping block.

Regents of the University of California v. Bakke established its constitutionality in 1978, ending racial “quotas” while ruling that affirmative action programs were constitutional in some cases. The court ruled that a university’s admissions policy could not use race as an exclusive basis for admission.

In 2003, the twin cases of Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger also argued that the school’s use of “racial preferences” violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The court ruled that the use of affirmative action in school admissions was constitutional so long as race was not the sole factor and did not replace the review of the applicant or raise their chances of admission.

Used to address centuries of racialized inequality and exclusion in America, affirmative action has taken on new and problematic meanings. What began as a response to systemic injustice is now viewed unjustly.

Consequently, I highly recommend reading William G. Bowen’s The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions.

Rooted in empirical evidence, Bowen will prepare you for an informed conversation about what affirmative action meant for 45,000 students. It may change its meaning for you.