Affirmative Action?

The Supreme Court's review of affirmative action in college admissions raised a great variety of connexions with other topics. What is race? What does it have to do with diversity in a university?  What sort of action does it call for? What does it have to do with education? In what ways is it affirmative?

The entire human race is one species. It arose in Africa and spread from there to Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas. Recent findings about our gene pool indicate that along the way there may have been some mixing with Neanderthals. Otherwise the cosmetic differences among us are just that--cosmetic. When people of different skin colors engage in sex they have no difficulty in reproducing and their children are not neuter like a mule. They are human like Pres. Obama.

So how did we end up with racial subspecies based primarily on skin color? We know that skin color can be a factor in "survival of the fittest" because of its effects on susceptibility to skin cancer and on receiving our daily requirement of vitamin A. The need for dark skin is high in an environment of intense exposure to sunlight and low in the higher latitudes. So it appears that our color differences are adaptive. However, if we are going to continue to migrate from one climate to another perhaps a bit of a mix is the safest strategy for the future.

Skin color has historically led to segregation in America for slaves, former slaves, native Americans, and Chinese, Japanese, and Latino immigrant groups. But even immigrants from various parts of Europe have been segregated until they assimilated into the community. An important part of the assimilation process is our public schools. We have desegregated the public schools and employed affirmative action at the college level in order to break the cycle of segregation and provide equal opportunity for all our citizens. Affirmative action is also supposed to expose our light-skinned collegians to the diversity of American culture so that they will better understand the world they are preparing to face. It turns our that being able to see the world as people from other backgrounds see it is part of education. Who knew?

But is affirmative action still needed? Diversity in our public schools has helped to raise the performance of children from the formerly segregated groups so that more children from these groups qualify for college admission without affirmative action. We have not reached equality of performance yet, unless you are talking about athletics, but there has definitely been progress. What the Supreme Court is trying to assess is whether there has been enough progress to stop being affirmative. Affirmative, it turns out, means using lower standards of admission for dark-skinned students than for light-skinned ones.

Something like affirmative action was clearly needed when desegregation began because most of our previously segregated population had not received proper preparation for college. By now, however, we should be able to build equality from the ground up by assuring that all of our children get a good education pre-K and K through 12. Research has shown a key to this goal lies in assuring that our school populations are truly diverse so that children whose families lacked opportunities are exposed to children with higher aspirations. If we can affirm that we probably won't have to affirm anything else.