Professor endorses equal opportunities for all

There is a lie about affirmative action that, like a weed, keeps popping up no matter how many times you nip it in the bud. The lie is that affirmative action means putting less qualified nonwhite applicants ahead of more qualified white ones. This is simply false, as even a little research would show. In fact, hiring unqualified or unneeded employees is explicitly prohibited by federal regulation. Since the original commentary lacked even a single fact, let me provide a few. Most affirmative action programs only use gender (and don't forget that the largest beneficiaries of affirmative action are white women, not people of color) or minority status as a factor in deciding among equally or comparably qualified candidates. It is true that the college admissions process is the one area where gender and minority membership are routinely used to decide among unequal candidates, but even here the argument is not as simple as it appears. It is a mistake to believe that SAT scores are the only important measure of a student's qualifications and that a student with a score of 1100 is clearly less qualified than a student with a score of 1200. Suppose I told you that the white student came from a wealthy family who paid for him to take an expensive SAT preparatory class (such as the Kaplan Premier SAT tutoring which is currently priced at $3,399) and that the African American student got his score totally on his own. Is my example realistic? Currently the average white family in America has eight times the net worth of the average Black family. Moreover, numerous studies have shown that SAT scores correlate with income. Should we admit the white student over the Black one simply because Daddy has a bigger paycheck? Let's assume for the sake of argument that both the white and the Black students came from families of equal wealth and that they both benefited from equally good primary and secondary schools and that the African American student was never exposed to (and therefore never internalized) the oppressive stereotype that Blacks are less intelligent than whites and therefore never experiences "stereotype threat" (a racially based type of test anxiety) when faced with a standardized test. That's not only a long sentence; it's also a lot to assume. For the sake of argument, I'll grant it all: equal wealth and never having to have dealt with any kind of oppression growing up. It is still not clear to me that a 1200 beats an 1100. Here's why. Suppose you have two white students: one has a 1200 SAT and pretty much nothing else. The other has an 1100 SAT and letters in three sports, was editor of the yearbook, starred in the spring musical and was captain of the debate team. Which student would you admit? The truth is that colleges give applicants points for all those things and many other factors that have nothing to do with how well you take a test. Many colleges even give you points if your parents went to the same school (the "legacy" factor), and since a generation ago it was even harder for African Americans to get into college, these points are essentially a racially based affirmative action for whites. One study found that 15.6 percent of all applicants to Harvard were accepted, but in that same year 35.2 percent of the children of alumni were accepted. President George Bush wasn't academically qualified to attend Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass, but he did. He was given three extra points on Andover's 20 point scale because his father went to the same school. He never made the honor roll at Andover and his SAT scores (566 verbal and 640 math) were way below the average for students in his year at Yale (668 verbal and 718 math). Nevertheless, Yale admitted him in part because his father had gone to Yale and because his grandfather was on the Yale board of trustees. This type of affirmative action for whites goes on all the time. It is a mistake to assume that the only students to benefit from increasing the diversity of the student body are the students of color. The truth is that white students benefit from their exposure to this diversity. We live in a diverse world. All our students benefit from sharing experiences with other students who may look different or who may have different religions, language, or cultures. These experiences better prepare them to go out into a global world and a global marketplace. The results of the average American's ignorance of other faiths and other cultures have been catastrophic both for this country and for the world. Finally, I would point out that this country has a long tradition of affirmative action but for most of its history it was for whites only. At the beginning only whites - and only white men at that - could be citizens, vote, be elected to public office and own property. In 1790, a law was passed that only "free white" immigrants could be citizens. After the Civil War, this benefit was expanded to include "persons of African descent" but the restriction barring other nonwhites from becoming citizens would not be removed until 1952. The largest "affirmative action" in the history of this country went almost exclusively to whites. In the 1930s, the government created the Federal Housing Authority, which used government money (taxpayers' money) to underwrite mortgages. Before this time if you wanted to get a loan to buy a house, you had to put down 50 percent of the purchase price and pay off the rest within 5 years. The FHA changed that with a government handout of $120 billion and less than two percent of that went to nonwhites. This was not illegal discrimination. It was official government policy to discourage giving mortgages to nonwhites until 1968, when President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act. The practice, now illegal, still continues. Just this year, a study was released in Massachusetts that found that banks were charging African-Americans higher interest rates than they were whites with equal incomes and credit histories. For most of this country's history, we have actively discriminated against people of color and that discrimination still continues, not to mention the ideology of white supremacy that continues to be fed to us from so many sources. This has created a huge legacy that isn't wiped out by simply ending discrimination. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. observed, "…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 with his fellow runner." Affirmative action is not reverse racism. It is an attempt to include people who, for the entire history of this country, have been systematically excluded from the American Dream, while whites, even those who are not personally racist, reaped the benefits of a racist system.

Stephen J. Clark, Ph.D Associate Professor of Psychology