Affirmative Action

SCOTUS has deemed affirmative action illegal unless it’s integrated into a holistic approach to college admissions, that is, considered a “factor” but not a quota. This is largely due to Justices Roberts and Kennedy, in their swing-vote-y swinginess, Alito in his Scalia-bandwagoniness, Thomas in his frustrating silence and Scalia himself, in his full diversity-denying form.  

What? I just don't care about Brown people!

(IT'S A JOKE GOSH) 

But I am an affirmative action believer. According to Jeremy Pienik’s paper Race, Social Class, and Parental Involvement with Children’s Cognitive Development, Lareau and Horvat in 1999 indicated that Black students are less likely to do well in school independent of social class. According to Sean F. Reardon’s paper, The Widening Academic Achievement Gap Between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations, the class gap is twice as wide as the race gap. And other factors, such as gender, ability, orientation and mental illness all affect school performance and individually provide potential for the marginalization of students. So why shouldn’t college admissions boards be able to know these facets of identity in students?

There are a number of advantages to affirmative action. The first is empirical: Affirmative action for women has already been practiced in the U.S. (and with protest that pales in comparison to the protest that’s come from race-based affirmative action). And today, women actually surpass men in graduation (perhaps we overdid it), and we’ve closed the achievement gap, at least at face-value. But because we can whitewash feminism but not racism, we’re uncomfortable with race-based affirmative action. “But class is a real difference,” proponents of class- but not race- based affirmative action cry. And now people call for class-based affirmative action in lieu of race, because class is now considered somehow more real than race. But that isn’t true. It’s not only necessary that we give the poor equal access to education, but that we ensure the number of poor Blacks is at some point equal to the number of poor Whites.

Thus, I propose that affirmative action should apply to all facets of identity. That is, gender, ability, class, orientation, race/ethnicity, nationality/immigration status, mental health—everything. Because why shouldn’t college admissions boards know everything identity-wise about their potential students? There’s value in a diverse student body. There’s value in it because a breadth of perspectives in a classroom is most educational and because it’s also least marginalizing for a classroom to be segregated. It’s also most valuable to the entirety of the community if a classroom is diverse and available for all of its members.