Winds of Change
Part II
Inadvertently though, the affirmative action had produced a culture of racial gamification by encouraging black and Hispanic students and their parents to think about the ways race could boost or complicate their chances of admission. It thus became a game aimed at cornering the benefits of race preference. Such a situation was intrinsically counterproductive, because it sought to make a virtue of being a black or Hispanic.
But a remarkable feature of US systems and society is their capacity to acknowledge a challenge and find ways to address it. The Supreme Court ruling has done exactly that. It has spurred politicians, civil right leaders, academicians and opinion makers to vigorously look for other ways to ensure diversity on the college campuses. “We need a new path forward, a path consistent with the law that protects diversity and expands opportunity’, is not an uncommon response to the judgment.
Socio-Economic Disadvantage(S.E.D.)
The Supreme Court while dealing with Harvard and North Carolina cases relied, inter alia, on expert witnesses. One such witness was Richard D. Kahlenberg, a known authority on affirmative action and writer of several books including “The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action” and credited with a great deal of research on affirmative action.
His considered opinion is that if socio-economic disadvantage(SED) replaces racial preference, the diversity among the students will improve significantly.
His conclusions are based largely on research data but he also relies on logic and a historical perspective. Referring to the polarising schism between supporters and opponents of affirmative action, he advocates a middle path.
“Fortunately, an attractive third path is available: giving a leg up to economically disadvantaged students of all races, a disproportionate share of whom are people of colour. Dr Martin Luther King Jr. wrestled with the question of what steps should be taken to remedy America’s history in his 1964 book, “Why We Can’t Wait”. His elegant solution: rather than arguing for or against a Bill of Rights for the Negro, he advocated A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged of all races.”
The logic is impeccable and the invocation of King Jr. offers an additional ring of sincerity of his approach.
Larger Acceptability?
Incidentally, this approach also enjoys a broad appeal with the American public. A 2016 Gallup poll found that while 63% of Americans oppose colleges using race as a factor in admissions, 61% favour consideration of economic circumstances. The notion that the poor of all races have a special claim has been a universally accepted tenet across all political, religious and ethical beliefs and dispensations. And it. Social science research finds that today, being economically disadvantaged in America poses seven times as large an obstacle to high student achievement as does race.
So, SED is increasingly considered to be a far more rational criterion for admissions than race.
Adversity Score
Terms like ‘Adversity Score’, though broader in concept than mere SED, and adopted by some universities, has at its core SED as its most defining aspect. To build a diverse class of students, the medical school at U.C. Davis in California ranks applicants by the disadvantages they have faced in their lives.
Dr.Mark Henderson, the Head of admissions has developed an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D. The scale rates every applicant from zero to 99, taking into account their life circumstances, such as family income and parental education. Admissions decisions are based on that score, combined with the usual portfolio of grades, test scores, recommendations, essays and interviews.
The disadvantage scale has helped turn U.C. Davis into one of the most diverse medical schools in the country — notable in a state that voted in 1996 to ban affirmative action.
Can it work nationally?
Race V. Poverty
In a 1987 address at Harvard University’s chapel commemorating King’s life, King’s close advisor Bayard Rustin declared “Any preferential approach postulated along racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual lines will only disrupt a multicultural society and lead to a backlash,” He was pointing out the pit falls arising out of policies of racial preferences.
King himself, more than 50 years ago, advocated an inclusive path for the country. He favoured policies that uplifted the disadvantages people across races. Given today’s increasingly divisive discourses, Supreme Court judgment offers a pause to reflect and act in the larger interest of the society.
Kahlenberg writes, “Universities have taken a very different path from the one King and Rustin advocated, which demagogues both on the right and the left, have brilliantly exploited. Racial preference programmes surely help explain why 60% of white working-class Americans say that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks.”
Beyond Preferences
There is one advice that has forcefully been tendered by one of the most successful tutors for black and Hispanic aspirants for Ivy League universities. What advice would I give if I were tutoring again, sitting across from talented brown or Black kids worried that the Supreme Court has just made it easier to keep them out of the school of their dreams?
His message carries a far stronger conviction and resolution; and a vision far beyond present times and circumstances.
He says, “Remember that racial gamification is just that: a game. Ignore anyone who would have you believe that attending Ivy League universities — with their endowments as large as a reasonably sized country’s nominal G.D.P. — is the only path to happiness or success or racial equality. Civil rights leaders did not endure the dogs and the cold baptism of the fire hoses in the hopes that one day their children’s children could become Ivy-minted venture capitalists and management consultants. Remember that Martin Luther King Jr. did not dream of a multiracial oligarchy and that the “vaults of opportunity” of which he spoke are not hidden only behind a golden door at Yale University. There are other paths in life that do not require gaming anything. Remember that hope is wherever you find yourself.”
In building the case for his Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged, King wrote: “It is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up to his fellow runner.” But it is precisely because of that history, King argued, that a Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged would disproportionately benefit black people who “form the vast majority of America’s disadvantaged”. At the same time, it was appropriate for poor whites to benefit, King said, because they suffer deprivation, if not racial discrimination.
“It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor,” he wrote.
Words of great foresight reflecting extra-ordinary catholicity; and so free of any racial bias. But there were not many takers for this line of thinking in last 50 years, on both sides of the fence. The prognosis sadly, is no better.
(To be Continued….)
scribo ad LX 