Race Still Matters Race Still Matters
washingtonpost.com
By Theodore M. Shaw
Saturday, March 1, 2003; Page A19
I was at the U.S. Supreme Court when the Bakke decision was announced in June 1978. I was a second-year law student at the time, and I had followed the case with great personal interest. Affirmative action had helped open doors for me, beginning as a high school student from a public housing project in the Bronx. In the aftermath of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, I participated in a leadership project established for black students by the Archdiocese of New York.
This program unlocked the door to Wesleyan University, which was seeking qualified minority students and providing the financial and academic support to help them succeed. Wesleyan led to Columbia Law School, where affirmative action again aided my admission. So, when Alan Bakke, an unsuccessful applicant to the University of California at Davis Medical School, went to the Supreme Court seeking to rule affirmative action unconstitutional, I understood what was at stake for African American students. For them, the Bakke decision was a devastating loss.
By a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court rejected arguments that the 14th Amendment, primarily enacted to bring black Americans to full and equal citizenship, allowed colleges and universities to take deliberate steps aimed at remedying the effects of centuries of slavery and segregation. The court called all discrimination not specifically attributable to an individual defendant "societal discrimination," for which, no matter how lamentable it was, no one was responsible and for which there was no remedy.
But Justice Lewis Powell, who announced the court's judgment, snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by writing that colleges and universities could consider race as one factor among many in pursuit of diversity. Thus, for 25 years, access to higher education for minority students has rested not on its own bottom but on universities' diversity interests.
Now I am heading back to the Supreme Court as it again wrestles with affirmative action. This time, I will be representing African American and Latino undergraduate students who want to see affirmative action continue at the University of Michigan. As we prepare our case, dueling voices in the affirmative action debate resound. Arguments focused on "quotas," colorblindness and merit face off against those that emphasize historical and continuing discrimination, cumulative disadvantages, uneven playing fields and diversity.
For a generation of us who grew up in poor and segregated black and Latino communities, affirmative action opened opportunities to attend our nation's best institutions and exponentially increased our life chances. A few of us would have made it anyway, but I don't claim to be one of them. In the early 1990s I served on the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School. I was also a member of the admissions committee that designed the policy now before the Supreme Court. My goal was to ensure that the law school abided by the letter of the law; I knew the importance of a squeaky-clean, Bakke-compliant admissions policy. Even then, it was evident that the university might be sued by those bent on ending affirmative action.
The policy we adopted is faithful to Bakke -- no quotas, no separate admissions pool, a broad commitment to diversity of all types, and individualized consideration for all applicants. It is not the policy President Bush recently described when he announced the government's position in the Michigan cases. The president's opposition to Michigan's diversity efforts is woefully misguided. His mischaracterization of the selection process encourages white students who are not admitted to the school of their choice to blame affirmative action.
Perhaps it is easier to attack the minuscule number of minority students admitted than to accept rejection. In most cases it is the end result of intense competition for limited slots (at the University of Michigan, more than 25,000 applicants seek about 5,000 freshman slots), coupled with a host of other demands ranging from recruitment of residents from the rural part of the state to preferences for children of alumni. These factors, ostensibly race-neutral, usually benefit white students. Before the University of Michigan undergraduate program began to consider race as one of the many factors in admissions, black and Latino students made up only 3 percent of the student population.
Our nation's progress in reversing the effects of our long, dark night of slavery and legalized segregation -- begun merely a generation ago -- did not emerge serendipitously. Deliberate efforts to redress racial inequality have netted tangible results. Despite progress, entrenched racial inequality from cradle to grave remains a feature of the American landscape.
Colorblindness is not reality. Let us see race, and then act justly. Theodore M. Shaw, associate director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., represents African American and Latino student interveners in the University of Michigan affirmative action case involving undergraduate admissions.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company This broad support underscores the importance of affirmative action to the nation's welfare.
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