Author: Mathew Mikuni
The election of Barack Obama was surely a historic moment in our country’s history. Major newspapers declared that the last racial barriers had come crashing down in what the New York Times called a “national catharsis.” However, on Nov. 4, I watched something else come crashing down: the last foundations holding up race-based affirmative action.
While it is true that African Americans and other minorities were no better off on Nov. 3 than they were on Nov. 5, Obama’s election, in an extremely visual sense, undermines the conventional argument that institutional racism keeps minorities from succeeding in the United States. Make no mistake, racism still exists in this country, but it has been long been relegated to the margins of society. Obama’s election thoroughly debunked the so-called “Bradley Effect” and the notion that closet racist whites would tell pollsters one thing and then vote a different way. CNN exit polls showed that Obama was actually helped by his race.
Those who continue to support affirmative action in higher education point to the fact that African Americans, Latinos, and other minorities are still stuck in low income areas and failing schools. But they always seem to forget one thing, poor minorities aren’t the only ones. Also, the insistence that all members of a minority group are deserving of some type of preferential treatment only contributes to the stereotype that are all either poor or can’t compete with other ethnic groups. The poor Caucasian kid stuck in an underfunded school and living in the violent neighborhood is just as disadvantaged from seeking higher education as the poor African American kid. It never made much sense to me why a privileged African American student, living in a suburb with access to good schools, private tutors and SAT classes should be given preferential treatment over a Caucasian student living in a poor rural area who doesn’t have access to any of those things. President-elect Obama seems to agree. When asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos if his own daughters deserved preferential treatment, Obama responded that “my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged” and that “we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty.”
The insistence that racism contributes to the low test scores of minorities is similarly false. It is frequently cited that, at the same income level, whites still outperform blacks on all areas of standardized tests. This must mean that the atmosphere of racism which permeates every facet of our society must be holding them back, right? However, studies by sociologist Dalton Conley find that when adjusted for wealth, which includes assets such as stocks, bonds, saving accounts and home equity, the gap between whites and blacks evaporate. When given the same socioeconomic level, African Americans are actually more likely to graduate from high school and also earn more per hour than whites.
However, simply abolishing all kinds of affirmative action would do nothing to solve the problem. African American students (and other minorities) typically underperform in education because they are poor, not because they are black. Here at Oxy and out in the “real world” I feel that we focus way too much on the importance of race. By focusing solely on diversity we tend to ignore the much greater problem, inequality. The traditional race-based affirmative action system should be scrapped in favor of a system that grants preferential treatment based on wealth. If the United States really wants to move to a post racial society, it should start here.
Mathew Mikuni is a senior DWA and Asian Studies major. He can be reached at mmikuni@oxy.edu.
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