My Case for Affirmative Action

To the generally privileged, poverty is incomprehensible. People of privilege, with pale skin and/or free vacations and/or “intellectual conversation” — which is almost always defined by conformity to the standard of the privileged class — cannot understand how central poverty, or social disadvantage, can be to a person’s life. Disadvantage shapes every opportunity, thought and desire. While privileged students can afford SAT prep books, poorer ones may not even know what those three letters stand for. While privileged students can debate what college to go to, poorer ones are oftentimes unsure about going to college — or simply unable to do so.

I am acquainted with certain types of disadvantages. My middle school was a tiny spot in the middle of the Mojave wasteland, a place where — two years after my family moved out — a war between Bloods and Crips erupted. Thinking about “college,” a term so distant and irrelevant that it bore absolutely no meaning, was unheard of. All conversations were combative, a show of masculinity or cruelty, often interlaced with homophobic and racist slurs. Most of my friends were trapped, unable to imagine a reality outside of this de facto oppression that perpetuated itself with each successive generation. My friends’ parents couldn’t speak English — or at least the version of English that is deemed “correct” — and their livelihoods depended on the whims of the government’s “immigration policy.” Others were the products of the United States’ history of black oppression, of redlining and segregation never corrected. In the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates, they were “responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to [them].” Their livelihoods also depended on the whims of government and the ruling class — namely, the government’s constant debate on whether to be “tough on crime,” oppressing the oppressed, or not.

I escaped merely because my family had the privilege of mobility, and of conforming to the ruling class’s standards. We were white, natively spoke English and could devote our time and resources to moving instead of surviving. We moved to Las Vegas, where I attended a public high school in a neighborhood known as one of the most dangerous spots in the county (a privilege compared to the many who remain trapped in the Mojave). There are more than three thousand students at that high school. Every class crams fifty students, and there are never enough seats. I happened to be accepted on luck — literally, via a lottery — to a selected community within that public high school with more courses and increased availability. Although almost all of those students came from disadvantaged families, pretty much all of them wanted to succeed academically. The privilege of that community allowed my escape. I learned that people were nice, what SATs were, that “college” actually existed. I am at Middlebury today because of the opportunities made available to me through that program.

These experiences inform my reaction to Rachel Frank’s “Conversation in Confines,” which was published last week. It’s frankly ridiculous that people of such disadvantage are oftentimes compared equally to students who face no obstacles but themselves, who have studied for the SATs since middle school, who come from backgrounds where college was “real.” I suffered disadvantage, but not nearly as much as many others face. Affirmative action is a means of making up for all of those obstacles; it is a basic step to actual equality of opportunity. To drop affirmative action is to confirm the immoral notion that the privileged have more of a right to attend colleges — to attend programs like my high school’s, which was the only reason I escaped — than those who face obstacles incomprehensible to the privileged.

Affirmative action is a moral requirement for more reasons than just the facilitation of “institutional diversity.”