Sophia Wushanley | Imaginary America

Another Look | If you think measures like affirmative action impose inequality on an equal society, you’re living in an imaginary America

By Sophia Wushanley 10/27/14 10:53pm

A few weeks ago, a Penn alumnus emailed me regarding an article in which I had argued that grading should be blind, because graders are affected by race and gender-based implicit bias when they evaluate a student’s work, and blind grading can mitigate this.

The writer expressed his belief that Penn admissions ought to be blind too — that Penn’s commitment to diversity means better-qualified candidates are “cheated” out of their chance to attend this prestigious institution just because they are white.

My fellow columnist, Jeremiah Keenan, similarly bemoaned Penn’s attention to race in a recent article in which he took issue with “the black call for special treatment” that he sees in affirmative action and black organizations at Penn.

They’re not alone in this view. Many people bristle with indignation at the mention of affirmative action. If you read the comments section on almost any article about racism on a mainstream news website, you might conclude that a lot of people see affirmative action as the race problem of the 21st century. It leaves me wondering what America they’re living in.

Here are some facts about real America: From the 16th through the 19th centuries , black people were brought here as slaves. After slavery was abolished, institutional racism continued, marginalizing not only black people but also other minorities. Today, roughly 27 percent of black and 26 percent of Latino people live in poverty, compared to 10 percent of white people .

Given the prevalence of personal and institutional racism and the dismal state of social mobility in this country, the idea that minorities ought to have somehow closed the gap without any institutional advocacy is absurd.

In light of these facts, I’m forced to the following conclusion: Either the people who believe affirmative action constitutes the race problem in America think minorities ought to work harder than everyone else in order to reach the same social positions, or they live in an imaginary America.

In imaginary America, affirmative action is unfair because it treats two equally privileged candidates unequally. It is unnecessary because Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream has been realized and we all see character, not skin. It is nonsensical because minorities aren’t disproportionately poor, uneducated and incarcerated. We can hope for this America but we cannot pretend it exists or has ever existed.

Affirmative action is a recognition of real America, which has an appallingly unequal past and present. Institutions practice affirmative action because they understand that the circumstances of a person’s birth form that person’s opportunities, and that race, in real America, is one of those formative factors.

Because real America’s past and present has and continues to produce a racial class divide, affirmative action allows educational institutions to attempt not to enforce this racial division, even while their cost means they are de facto enforcers of our stratified class system. Affirmative action should attempt to combat this as well by taking socioeconomic status into account for candidates of all races. That it does not is a crippling failing of our current system.

Even if we set aside the obvious disparity in effort necessary for two candidates of a privileged and underprivileged group to produce the same resumes, the job of a college admissions office is not to evaluate the personal worth of each candidate, but to build the best class they can and to further the social good that is education.

This means including people who bring different life experiences to the classroom. It does not come at the cost of lowering standards. Anyone aware of how cutthroat college admissions are is also aware that there are far more qualified candidates than there are places. Diversity improves intellectual life, which is why it is absolutely misguided to believe that including minorities in education is primarily a form of charity.

I support blind grading as a way to diminish the effects of racism, but I’m not under the illusion that it eliminates them. Grading can be done “blindly,” but everyday life cannot. Pretending that we live in a race-blind society won’t make our society race-blind. With measures that acknowledge and combat inequality, we must continue to push ourselves towards an equal America. For now, it exists only in our imagin a tions .

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