On Tuesday, September 27, a student group at UC Berkeley sold baked goods with racially adjusted prices to protest the CA Senate Bill 185, a policy that would reinforce affirmative action in California. Governor Jerry Brown has since vetoed Bill 185, making it illegal in California. Coincidentally, the Supreme Court has been asked to hear an appeal regarding affirmative action within the following term, which, according to analysts, will lead to the deeming of the policy as unconstitutional. The Aragon Outlook believes that Brown’s actions were justifiable and, also, that race-based affirmative action should be ruled unconstitutional.
Essentially, affirmative action manifests in policies that take factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., into special consideration to benefit a minority constituency; such policies generally intend to rectify the lasting effects of historical discrimination against such minorities.
However, the results of affirmative action often fall short of its intentions. While initially intended to establish diversity on campuses, most affirmative action policies now establish reverse discrimination, a phenomena that passes over a qualified non-minority individual in favor of less-qualified minority.
Adverse to stereotype, the most disadvantaged individuals maintain their status not due to their race, but instead their socioeconomic backgrounds. Consequently, affirmative action policies that focus on ethnicity benefits wealthy minorities and exacerbating the situation of a poverty-stricken white, who faces the same dearth of opportunity as does his or her minority neighbor.
As such, minority groups’ standards of accountability drop due to their lowered standards of admission. Students whose acceptances bore the benediction of affirmative action often perform poorly and are ill-equipped to handle the rigor of their schools.
Clearly, this correlation is in no way true for all minority individuals admitted to top colleges. Nevertheless, the cases in which this belief validates itself perpetuate the perception that the success of many minorities is due to affirmative action, not individual skill.
In fact, many minorities oppose affirmative action for this reason. African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a notable critic of affirmative action, worked his entire life to remove the “taint of racial preference” that overshadowed his success. Moreover, many minorities oppose affirmative action on the basis that a policy that introduces the belief that minority groups are inferior is unjust.
Indeed, organizations have already endeavored to counteract, in the form of standardized testing, the obstacles faced by disadvantaged students. While the ACT measures achievement, or what a student has learned in school, the SAT measures aptitude, or each student’s potential. The SAT helps to identify bright students in low-performing high schools, one goal of affirmative action.
Still in the domain of college admissions, the UC system has arguably circumvented the illegality of affirmative action through its second prompt, which asks students to “[d]escribe the world [they] come from—for example, your family, community or school—and tell us how your world has shaped your dreams and aspirations.” While not explicitly, this prompt allows students to describe possible hardships placed upon them due to race or gender, information admissions readers can consider in the decision-making process.
Incidentally, this year the UC System expanded the number of students with Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) to nine percent. ELC rank is determined in each individual school, thus highlighting strong students in a potentially underfunded and disadvantaged school.
This expansion also addresses the aims of affirmative action; minority students facing handicaps to their success that might not have achieved ELC last year now are guaranteed into UC Merced, accounting for a more students in California.
Incidentally, the Outlook acknowledges that, as a relatively racially homogenous group of editors, our stance against affirmative action does benefit us as individuals. However, the Outlook determined its position against affirmative action for society, not a single group of individuals. For everyone, affirmative action is a toxic policy that, once entrenched, is difficult to remove, and hurt minorities more than it benefits them.
