Today the Supreme Court issued its ruling an affirmative action case. Rather than breaking new ground, the Court sent the case back down to the lower court to rule upon whether the University of Texas (the college from which the latest case emanated) proved: ” . . . that the means chosen by the University to attain diversity are narrowly tailored to that goal.”
Commenting on this ruling, the NAACP’s Julian Bond remarked:
“There is no alternative to some kind of race test in affirmative action . . . . If you want to get beyond race, as someone once said, you have to get to race. And if you want to have a diverse student body at the University of Texas, or other schools around the country, you’ve got to have a race-based formula.”
That Mr. Bond is correct is without question. Anyone who pays any attention to race and race-related issues in this country knows that many minority students have not and still are not getting an equal opportunity at educational opportunity.
But the issue here is not really about Black (or Brown) and White. It’s about Green.
Specifically, the Green color of money — the money that colleges charge for tuition, and the money you probably won’t earn without a college degree.
College, as we all know, is getting more expensive all the time. Why? No one has a good explanation. They have explanations, but none of them are good. Based on my own experience and my observations, I think it’s just about Harvard’s Dean playing a game of “let’s see how much I can get them to pay” and every other college ratcheting up their prices to keep pace with the big “H” (meaning Harvard, not horrific manners). Eventually, one-year’s tuition at Harvard will exactly match the U.S. deficit, which will mean that some lucky rich high-schooler will have the very real option of getting a Harvard degree or bailing out the country.
But, I digress.
The point is that college is getting so expensive it’s getting out of the reach of people of limited economic means. And, by the way, do you know who in this country tends to have “limited economic means?” Well, in a February 2013 CNN Money article, it was noted that:
The wealth gap between blacks and whites has nearly tripled over the past 25 years, due largely to inequality in home ownership, income, education and inheritances, according to a new study by Brandeis University.
That type of inequality can be a drag on economic growth for everyone, said Thomas Shapiro, director of the university’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy, which conducted the research.
The difference in wealth between typical households in each racial group ballooned to $236,500 in 2009, up from $85,000 in 1984, according to the study, released Wednesday. By 2009, the median net worth of white families was $265,000, while blacks had only $28,500.
http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/27/news/economy/wealth-whites-blacks/index.html
An April 2013 New York Times article reports similar results:
By the most recent data, the average white family had about $632,000 in wealth, versus $98,000 for black families and $110,000 for Hispanic families.
And, guess what else? If you don’t get a college degree, you’re far more likely to be unemployed or to get a job that pays less over your lifetime.
So, yeah, maybe our country isn’t still mired in Jim Crow and maybe George Wallace isn’t standing at the doors of the University of Alabama shouting “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” but there can be no doubt that the country’s race issues are still with us.
Which brings us to the current debate about affirmative action and whether it’s still needed. My argument would be it’s a debate that is incomplete, for it overlooks one of the key aspects of this issue — people of color, most notably Blacks and Hispanics — as a general rule (talking about groups here, not individual people or families) do not have the same financial resources as Whites, which then deprives individuals in these groups of the ability to purchase certain “luxuries” like: food, clothes, homes, insurance, college educations, transportation to and from work, computers, computer equipment, tutors for kids struggling academically, extracurriculars that will broaden kids’ horizons, and just about any other thing you can think of that helps enrich a person’s life.
Are Blacks and Hispanics the only ones suffering from economic disadvantage? No, of course not. There are plenty of lower income White people who can attest that they are struggling mightily. But the point is not to compare who’s suffering worse. It’s to highlight the fact that the affirmative action “conversation” is not just some hypothetical discussion that is the stuff of so-called Ivory Tower academics. There are real issues at stake here — namely giving those who have historically been denied equal access to higher learning (and, thus, higher wages and higher job satisfaction) such access and, at the same time, leveling the playing field (for example, while some decry the use of racial criteria in making admissions decisions they seem undisturbed by the fact that academically underperforming students can gain access to universities simply because their parent or grandparent donated enough money to the school).
Will there come a day when affirmative action is not needed? I think we all can agree that we hope for that day. When will that day come? I don’t know. But, I’ll tell you, I’ll be more inclined to think we’re getting close when the majority of voices calling for an end to affirmative action are Black, not (as is the case today) White.
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