It's Only "Race-Based" to SCOTUS If It Doesn't Benefit White Folk

Walk with me to the admission office at any four-year college or university. Sit down with me to read the files. Notice that we must first pay attention to children of extremely wealthy people, particularly those who have already donated or who have pledged to donate huge sums, because we need their money in order to build more buildings. Notice that we must also pay attention to the children whose parents are alumni of the school because that’s how we get them to increase their donations and help the school in other ways. Also notice that we have to pay attention to NCAA athletes because we want to have a strong sports program.

Then notice that we also pay attention to black and brown kids because we know they have been denied equal opportunity in America for generations, perhaps including what they’re getting at their high school.

---

You’re reading the latest news out of Julie’s Pod, which is a subscription-based newsletter.

---

A few years back, I read an early version of a book on the college admissions process that focused on how to turn the tide in your kid’s favor. As a fellow author, I was being asked to endorse the book with what’s known as a “blurb” that would grace its back jacket.

In the opening chapter, the author described the various thumbs on the scale in the admissions process, and he laid them out just as I did above. I emailed him back. “I can’t blurb your book,” I told him. “If you’re going to put race on the page, you can’t let whiteness lurk unnamed.”

What I meant was, the applicants in the first paragraph above are overwhelmingly white. Why not say it? Why not admit that this is effectively an affirmative action program that mostly benefits certain white kids, and that it was in place long before any college cared about bringing black and brown kids into the fold?

To his credit, the author was willing to name whiteness in the pages of his book. And with that, I was delighted to lend my name to its cover.

_____

I am the beneficiary of affirmative action. When I applied to college, I was a black female kid at an almost entirely white high school in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin. Ding Ding Ding.

In April of my senior year of high school, the father of one of my classmates walked into our 7th period math class to confront me on why I had gotten into Stanford “over” his white son who had a higher standardized test score than me. The inference: I had stolen his son’s spot with my Blackness. Only one parent confronted me, but in recent years I’ve learned that there were more who felt that way.

I’m proud of myself for surviving that school, where my eleventh grade English teacher ridiculed me in front of the class for writing a paper about the value of Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign; two white male friends put a noose around the neck of a doll that resembled me and hung her from my bedroom door; and where on my seventeenth birthday an anonymous classmate wrote the N-word on my locker three times.

I told no one about any of it until l was in my forties, until I put stories like these in a memoir called Real American. (Get it here.) When on my book tour, a white male audience member shot his hand into the air and said, “I mean it couldn’t have been all bad. You were student body president your senior year, after all.” Indeed I was. And maybe that’s why I got into Stanford over that guy’s son.

---

You’re reading the latest news out of Julie’s Pod, which is a subscription-based newsletter.

---

Regardless of their reasons for plucking me from relative obscurity, I am grateful to Stanford University, and then to Harvard Law School, for prioritizing me. I imagine their thinking went something like this: “We haven’t had people like her much here, and we want to give people like her a chance.”

_____

I think college admissions in this country yields a lot of good, in the form of trying to provide access to terrific opportunities, and trying to right some historic wrongs as they do so. But it also wreaks a lot of harm.

For example, as long as they rely on standardized test sores, they’re privileging the wealthy. (SAT and ACT scores are correlated with zip codes. In wealthy zip codes, kids have higher scores. In poor zip codes, kids have lower scores. Rich kids aren’t inherently smarter; their scores are higher because their parents pay for prep courses, tutors, and repeated testing to help the kid improve their scores.) And wealth in America is tied to race.

Privileged white folks tend to like to feel that the system in which they’ve come up is a meritocracy, and they want admissions to be all about the merit of test scores . . . until it’s a contest between them and Asians, who as a group, broadly stated, score higher than whites do.

Meanwhile, colleges tend to ask Asian kids to demonstrate that they are somehow something BEYOND the test scores they’ve spent much of childhood prepping for. (If the “meritocracy” of test scores actually took precedence in the admissions process, colleges would be majority and even super-majority Asian and most colleges have decided that they do not want to be that. It sure looks to me like a modern day quota akin to what women and Jews faced in American colleges, in the nineteenth and better part of the twentieth centuries.)

Who has no thumb on the admissions scale? Low-to-middle class white kids who are not athletes. Also with no thumbs on the scale are poor international kids for whom no federal aid is available (which means if the college admits them they must provide 100% of the scholarship, and colleges only make such an expensive outlay when the kid is drop dead brilliant). I had the pleasure of working with many of them as a Stanford dean. I also oversaw the academic standing process, where even an extra big thumb on the admissions scale couldn’t save you from being suspended.

_____

So let’s fix the system. Let’s figure out how to assess a candidate in a manner that values the entirety of a human’s experience and their future potential. But let’s not fool ourselves that race isn’t embedded in all of it. Race is embedded in every system America has ever built. And most of those systems are still standing.

xo

🏡 You've been in Julie's Pod, an online community of over 12,000 people who want to open up about our lives, be vulnerable, learn and grow, and in so doing help others learn and grow.

🤗 Here’s a hug for anyone who has just had it this week.

🇺🇸 In my view, the oldest form of affirmative action in the U.S. is the Electoral College which gives voters in small states 2-3x the weight of a big state voter in a presidential election. Who lives in those small states, disproportionately? White folk. That’s a different essay.

✍ If you left a comment on any post before today, thank you. I've probably responded. Typically, comments are quite thoughtful, so please feel welcome to join the conversation whenever you feel like it.

☎️ For those who are not comfortable commenting publicly, call my anonymous hotline 1-877-HI-JULIE where you can leave a voicemail to let me know what's on your mind, whether about a piece I wrote or something going on in your life.

𝟭+𝟭The Julie's Pod community grows fastest when you share this post with a friend. So, think about who might want to read this piece, and please forward it to them. If you want to just provide the link, it's here:

© 2023 Love Over Time LLC All Rights Reserved