In this attempt to begin a new conversation about affirmative action, we wrestle with these concepts when measuring progress nationally and here at the University.

Making progress in this conversation must also be an exercise in how much information we’ve retained this campaign season about the “racial stalemate” President-Elect Obama mentioned in his famous speech on race, “A More Perfect Union.” Obama’s speech on race offers that it’s also important to not dismiss “legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.”

It’s tempting to frame the debate as a “litmus test for one’s human decency” in the words of T. Alexander Smith and Lenhan O’Connell’s 1997 text “Black Anxiety, White Guilt and The Politics of Status Frustration.” But to do this would ignore the findings of a 2004 study conducted by Dr. William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton, that found 19 of America’s elite colleges and universities did not give additional consideration to low-income students when considering applicants, thus not accounting for poor whites.

The affirmative action in higher education debate straddles two lofty concepts: racial justice in America and the creation of the ideal educational environment. In this attempt to begin a new conversation about affirmative action, we wrestle with these concepts when measuring progress nationally and here at the University.

MEASURING PROGRESS

When attempting to quantify the progress that has been the result of affirmative action policies in America, the statistical breakdown is a reasonable starting point. In 1965, when President Johnson advocated for equality as a result rather than just a theory in his commencement address at Howard University, the diversity rates at colleges and universities were abysmal.

At the time of Johnson’s address, 4.8 percent of undergraduate students, 2 percent of medical students and 1 percent of law students in the country were black, according to an article in the summer 2004 Journal of College Admission.

Ultimately, resistance and affirmative action legislation led to increased enrollment and graduation rates for students of color in American colleges and universities. A 2001 National Center for Education Statistics report showed that in 1988 black undergraduates accounted for 11 percent and Latinos counted for 9 percent of the total enrollment at colleges and universities.

The most recent Census Bureau’s reports that the number of black adults with advanced degrees has nearly doubled and more than a half a million more black students are in college today than in the early 1990s. It is statistics like these that advocates of “race neutral” policies for higher education cite as reason to revise or eradicate affirmative action.

But these people do not always ask the right question: who exactly is progressing?

Stephen L. Carter, a law professor at Yale and author of the Times article, “Affirmative Distraction,” opined that affirmative action can otherwise be known as “racial justice on the cheap” when our measuring sticks for progress solely evaluate “where children start and where children come out” without ever fully addressing “those who suffer from the legacy of racial oppression who are not competing for spaces in the entering classes of the nation’s most selective colleges.”

A Native American law student who asked for anonymity because he didn’t want future law firms to look unfavorably on his opinions advocated for the importance of race.

“Class is an important category that needs to be taken into account but people are disadvantaged because of the color of their skin regardless of class,” he said.

This discrepancy is fully apparent in the 2001 report from The Urban Institute, “Who Graduates? Who Doesn’t?” The most recent findings show that nationwide, blacks graduate from high school at a rate of 50 percent. On average, African American, Latino and Native American populations graduate at 55 percent compared to the 75 percent of whites and Asians.

The notion of progress extracted from data on university admissions should not be entirely dismissed, but it is misleading to couch that progress in rhetoric of racial equality considering that more than 50 percent, at minimum, of the Black community doesn’t even figure into the college admissions data. A true measurement of racial progress in this complex landscape would address the long-term consequences of legalized discrimination.