Bandaids don’t fix oppression
Affirmative Action is too little and too late a policy to fix deeper socio-economic and racial inequity
Graphic by Megan Serfontein, Copy Editor
Casey Wong, Staff Writer
It is expected that those in charge of creating educational changes would be educated themselves, but the sad irony is not even the basics of race theory were taken into account for affirmative action. Affirmative action was introduced as a new way to ensure racial diversity and increase inclusivity in higher education, but racial inequality goes beyond higher education and begins well before it.
Affirmative action was created to provide underprivileged students with a chance to succeed despite race-based barriers. The hard truth is that academic discrepancies foster low academic achievement and high dropout rates among minority students who require a racial bias in securing admission. It is fruitless to accept competent students, only for them to graduate in the bottom ranks as they cannot compete with exceptional students created through years of private tutoring and unconditional familial support. This is not to say that students are better off going to less selective schools, as quantitative evaluations (test scores, GPAs) of individuals with comparable academic credentials regularly indicate that students who attend more elite institutions are often more likely to graduate. There is a clear gap between socioeconomic classes that disproportionately affects Black and Indigenous communities. Affirmative action fails to acknowledge institutionalized racism and is an inadequate remedy to decades of marginalization. The priority should not be on selective schools pressuring multiculturalism, but on ensuring that existing racial inequities remain in the past and do not nurture disparities for future generations. Only by recognizing these deeply embedded issues can we begin the discussion about how to work through them rather than around them.
Academic prowess is derived from many factors, including social class and excluding race. Affirmative action only contributes to the dehumanization of minorities, as it does not recognize them as equals. Minority students are not a monolith and straining diversity does not guarantee the successes of minorities, as life after college still works in their white counterparts’ favor. Students cannot be expected to excel in rigorous academic environments they have little to no experience in.
Those of higher socioeconomic strata are often more educated and wealthy, which enables them to offer educational benefits to their children as well. An example of such benefits would be a legacy or familial tie that is certain to maximize one's chances of admittance to a specific academic institution, namely an elite one. Historically speaking, people of color were not allowed to be educated. Even after this was outlawed, a significant gap still exists in educational funding between predominantly white or more affluent areas and less affluent areas that are predominantly Black and Indigenous. It is a privilege to not be the first in a household to be educated.
Instead of attempting to even the playing field by handicapping the majority, we should prioritize issues such as low-income communities’ educational funding, legacy applicants, how gentrification and redlining continue to negatively impact minorities, and so much more. Unfortunately, rather than moving toward solving the issue of racial inequity, affirmative action has instead acted as a bandaid over a wound running centuries deep.
