As an employee of Associated Students of UCLA Event Services, I
recently had the opportunity to work at the Black Law Student
Association graduation banquet in Kerckhoff Hall. Usually the food
for these types of banquets disappears, but not this time. In fact,
there was such a small crowd at the banquet that almost all of the
food was still left at the end of the ceremony.
Why should you care about this seemingly insignificant fact?
Because the reason why there were so few people at the banquet is
because there are only six black law students graduating this year.
And the association was ecstatic because these six black graduates
are the most they’ve had in a long time ““ ever since
Proposition 209 ended affirmative action in the University of
California system in 1997.
Indeed, in the name of admitting only “qualified”
applicants, color-blind admissions policies such as Proposition 209
will deny blacks and Latinos access to top-tier universities. The
United States’s universities will be segregated in two: the
top schools comprised of elite white and Asian students, and the
second-rate schools comprised of everyone else.
The guest speaker for the ceremony was renowned black attorney
Joseph Duff, who was one of nine black students in UCLA’s
freshman law school class when affirmative action first began in
the UC back in 1968. In the 1980s, UCLA freshman law school classes
regularly included 40 or more black students. Then Proposition 209
reduced UC black and Latino enrollment to pre-1968 levels.
In a color-blind system, such as the one enforced in the UC
under Proposition 209, maintaining proportional populations of
black and Latino students is impossible. Despite UCLA’s
extensive minority outreach programs in 1999, the 2000 freshman law
school class consisted of only 1.4 percent black students. That
class graduated last year with all of two black students.
In fact, there has not been a sizeable black student population
at UCLA’s law school since 1996, the year before the ban on
race-based admissions went into effect, when 10.3 percent of the
freshman class was black.
In the 1954 case, Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court
decided unanimously that school segregation is unconstitutional,
because separate schools are inherently unequal. However, banning
affirmative action will resegregate this nation’s top
universities. Our schools will regress, becoming similar to how
they were before the Brown case was decided.
According to William Bowen and Derek Bok, past presidents of
Princeton and Harvard universities respectively, the percentage of
black students at many selective schools across the nation would
drop to as low as 2 percent of the student body without affirmative
action.
Color-blind admissions policies create the illusion of
generating a level playing field for all applicants, when in fact
white and Asian students enjoy significant educational advantages
over black and Latino students. The policies ignore the long
history of oppression these populations have endured in the United
States.
Blacks endured 245 years of slavery and 100 years of legalized
discrimination. Simply making the system color-blind after 345
years of racism does not automatically make things better.
A common argument against affirmative action is that other
minorities like Asian Americans have been able to advance quite
well without racial preference. While both are minorities, Asian
Americans and blacks have two very different histories. Blacks were
brought here as slaves, whereas many Asian Americans immigrated to
the United States as doctors, lawyers, professors and
entrepreneurs. Thus, it is unfair to expect the same upward social
mobility from blacks.
The argument that affirmative action is reverse discrimination
is a gross mischaracterization that uses the same word to describe
two completely different things. Discrimination is grounded in
prejudice and exclusion. Affirmative action is grounded in
inclusion. When certain groups are being excluded, like blacks and
Latinos in a color-blind university admissions process, then
society must make special efforts for the sake of inclusion.
The fight to protect diversity in America’s universities
continues to this day, as the Supreme Court considers a case
dealing with the University of Michigan’s affirmative action
policy. Hopefully the court will affirm its 1954 decision against
school segregation and keep affirmative action in order to assure
minorities a place in our top universities.
Bitondo is a second-year political science student. E-mail him
at [email protected].