They’re the most recent cases that will put to the test former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s closing words in her Grutter v. Bollinger opinion in 2003, which came 25 years after the original affirmative action case—Regents of the University of California v. Bakke—back in 1978. “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today,” O’Conner wrote.
“How are applicants from Middle Eastern countries classified, from Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and the like?” Kavanaugh asked Park.
“My understanding is that, just like other situations where they might not fit within the particular boxes common on an application, that we rely on self-reporting and they can volunteer their country of origin,” Park answered.
“But if they honestly check one of the boxes, which one are they supposed to check?” Kavanaugh asked.
“If a person from a Middle East country self-discloses their country of origin, it would be considered in the same way that we consider any box that matches one of the boxes that’s available in the common application, which is it would be an individualized holistic analysis,” Park replied.
It was an exchange that hit home for me because I am of Middle Eastern descent and my daughter recently filled out her application to the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where our family lives. While doing so, we had an exchange that was similar to Kavanaugh and Park’s.
It turns out Ole Miss applications have a box for blacks, whites, Hispanics and Pacific Islanders, but none for Middle Easterners. Luckily for me, it never crossed my 17-year-old daughter’s mind to do what Park suggested and “self-disclose” her Arab roots. As she cheerfully told me, it was odd to be asked about her ethnic heritage in a college application, but it would be odder for her to choose her Lebanese heritage over her Italian and German roots on my side of the family. Or her Irish, Scandinavian and American Indian heritage on her mother’s side.
My daughter had more sense than the solicitor general of North Carolina and a better understanding of her country too. Her family tree is absolutely American: a walking, talking United Nations, a real-life diversity billboard. She also knows that she’s more than her bloodlines and DNA—that she’s a human being, a child of God taught by her multi-ethnic family to give no favor or disfavor to another human being based on race, ethnicity, religious preference or wealth. She knows in her bones that reducing her identity on a college application to a single ethnic strand wouldn’t just be a lie. It would be something far worse: morally wrong.
She’s not alone. Many American kids face the very same box-checking conundrum. A case in point: In 2011, The New York Times told the story of Natasha Scott as she was beginning her college application journey. A high school senior from Beltsville, Maryland, she had a problem, one that she shared on the electronic bulletin board College Confidential.
“I just realized that my race is something I have to think about,” she wrote in her post, describing herself as having an Asian mother and a Black father. “It pains me to say this, but putting down black might help my admissions chances and putting down Asian might hurt it,” the Times report said. Scott confessed that even her mother urged her to put down African American.
“I sort of want to do this but I’m wondering if this is morally right?” she wrote. After some encouragement from her peers to do the wrong thing, she checked the Black box. “I must admit that I felt a little guilty only putting black because I was purposely denying a part of myself in order to look like a more appealing college candidate,” she confessed.
That’s the tragedy of slicing and dicing Americans by ethnic and racial categories. The admissions process didn’t just pit Natasha against her peers; it pitted her against herself. She lied about her Asian heritage, a type of moral fraud she perpetrated not just on the college but on her own sense of right and wrong.
The news about the two cases before the Supreme Court provides me an opportunity to also share some history of affirmative action and its well-intentioned purpose to redress decades of overt discrimination against Blacks at colleges. The university my daughter was applying to, Ole Miss, didn’t allow Blacks to enroll until James Meredith, with the help of the National Guard, did so in 1962. Riots ensued. People died. To Black people in the South—and across the nation—this isn’t ancient history: Any Black person now in their 70s or older lived through this gross injustice.
It got a bit hard to explain to my daughter why we still need affirmative action today—and harder to explain why some ethnic groups get preferences while others don’t. And why, in 2022, it’s perfectly OK to discriminate against one group, even a minority group, to advance another.
Asian Americans in the top 10 percent academically, it turns out, have a 12.7 percent chance of getting into Harvard, compared with 15.3 percent for whites, 31.3 percent for Hispanics and 56.1 percent for Blacks, according to the plaintiff in the two Supreme Court cases.
UNC’s admissions data is nearly as troublesome. “An out-of-state Asian-American in the fourth highest academic decile has only a 6.5 percent chance of admissions compared to 57.7 percent for a black,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “Another analysis finds that a white, out-of-state male with 10 percent odds of admission would have a 98 percent chance if he were black.”
The Journal wasn’t finished. “Online chats among admissions officers also show that UNC held non-Asian minorities to lower admissions standards—what George W. Bush once called the soft bigotry of low expectations,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote. “If it’s brown and above a 1300 [SAT] put them in for [the] merit/Excel [scholarship],” one officer wrote.
When did Black applicants in need of affirmative action and scholarships become brown? And why weren’t Italians, Greeks, Spanish and Middle Easterners thrown into that “brown” mix?
What we also learned from this litigation was the bigotry attached to some of those “holistic” methodologies that Park described to Kavanaugh. A study of nearly 160,00 student records consistently found that Asian American applicants rated lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” “likability,” “courage,” “kindness” and being “widely respected.” To call this a blatant and disgusting caricature of Asians would be an understatement.
But the best reason to end affirmative action is this: It doesn’t work. In their 2012 book, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It, authors Stuart Taylor Jr. and Richard Sander wrote about the unintended consequences of affirmative action—primarily what they called academic mismatches.
“There is now increasing evidence that students who receive large preferences of any kind—whether based on race, athletic ability, alumni connections or other considerations—experience some clear negative effects,” Taylor and Sander wrote in an opinion piece.
They went on: “Students end up with poor grades (usually in the bottom fifth of their class), lower graduation rates, extremely high attrition rates from science and engineering majors, substantial self-segregation on campus, lower self-esteem and far greater difficulty passing licensing tests (such as bar exams for lawyers).”
But there was good news. “These same students have dramatically better outcomes if they go to schools where their level of academic preparation is much closer to that of the median student,” the two authors said. “That is, black and Hispanic students—as well as the smaller numbers of preferentially admitted athletes and children of donors—excel when they avoid the problem of what has come to be called mismatch.”
One study showed that students who got large preferences were almost 80 percent more likely to complete a STEM degree if they went to a less elite school. Eighty percent!
The best news of all came from, of all places, California, where it’s been illegal to consider race in admissions since 1998.
“Race-neutrality has produced stunning benefits for minorities in the [University of California] system as a whole, as shown in a data set that economists obtained from UC administrators,” Taylor and Sandler wrote. “Black, American-Indian and Hispanic students made up 26% of all UC freshmen in 2010, up from 16% in 1997; the number of B.A.s earned by black and Hispanic students in four years rose 55% between 1995-97 and 2001-03, while the number with GPAs above 3.5 rose 63%.
There is much work to be done in our education system to make opportunity more equal for all. More money for remediation and more choices for kids trapped in failing schools is a starting place. But the current methodologies deployed by colleges to advance diversity aren’t working. And are just plain wrong.
Just ask my 17-year-old daughter. Or Natasha Scott.
