(Re)-Education: Déjà Vu?
February 24, 2004
According to Albert Einstein, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” I couldn’t help but think of this quotation as I sat down to write yet another defense of affirmative action. Yes, there are facts and figures, and legal, moral and logical arguments that can be made—I have made them in daily conversation, in debate forums, even in the pages of this very newspaper—yet after four years, I am still facing the same demand I faced at Days on Campus: prove that you belong here.
Confronted with that silent and ever-present demand, I cannot help but be reminded of James Baldwin. He wrote, “Any Negro who is born in this country and undergoes the American education system runs the risk of becoming schizophrenic. . . . It does not matter whether it destroys [the black child] by stoning him in the ghetto or by driving him mad in the isolation of Harvard. . . . It is an absolute wonder and an overwhelming witness to the power of the human spirit that any black person in this country has managed to become, in any way whatever, educated.”
I must wonder, when I find myself and other students of color repeating the same explanations and thinking they’ll mean something, attending the same meetings with the same people and thinking it will change something, whether we are all crazy for perpetually attempting to answer the same question and explain the same circumstances, even in a situation where we have no other option.
It is with this in mind that I set out to answer the question, again. First, I will try to expound the logical argument for affirmative action. Any insinuation that some people are less “qualified” to be here than others hinges on two central falsehoods: that there are such things as “objective” standards, and that there can be such a thing as color-blindness. In fact, every measure of success is, at a minimum, arbitrary and, at worst, biased by the fact that it is created and enforced by the people who hold the most power in this country (hint: not minorities).
Then there is the reality that everyone, including the legal minds defending affirmative action, tends to ignore: racism still exists. These days even the pro–affirmative action crowd has shunned citing case studies and statistics on institutionalized racism, and made an argument that essentially boils down to “diversity is a compelling interest because it gives the white students colored people to eat lunch with.”
Meanwhile, racism continues to exist in both subtle and blatant contexts. It exists in the form of the often cited pervasive economic inequality that plagues minority communities, but it also exists, at times more directly, in suburban neighborhoods and high schools and all of the other places from which middle-class black students who supposedly do not “deserve” to benefit from affirmative action come. Yet, affirmative action, championed by civil rights leaders in order to fight the residual and ongoing effects of racism, is ironically called the last form of racism.
I must confess, however, logic is not always the first response to what feels like an attack on your right to be at a place that you have given four years of your life. For every smug individual who fake-politely inquires about your test scores, for every loud publicity stunt urging that only “qualified” students be admitted to Columbia, for every 25 cent brownie that implies your life has been handed to you where white men have struggled for theirs, there is a part of you that wants to scream something like: “I belong here because I have been here for four years and learned to function on three hours of sleep daily so there would be time to finish two majors and a concentration while working and never serving on less than three club boards at any given time. If you really want to be embarrassed let’s talk about my GPA and my test scores because I bet they’re higher than yours. That’s in spite of the fact that I spend half my life at meetings, even when I need to be working on my thesis, because I am forced to be angry even on days when I have absolutely no time to be black and female in addition to everything else, and it’s a good thing I have nothing left to prove because I am tired and running out of things to give.”
Such rants are ultimately ineffective, because they give in to the impulse to seek other people’s validation. All I can do is come to the conclusion that I owe explanations to no one but myself. To the extent that this means I am not fulfilling my “compelling interest” obligation, the administration will just have to deal with it, because the diverse group of people I choose to eat lunch with are people who don’t need my value explained to them.
By my standards, an understanding of the past and present realities of racism, and an understanding of what kinds of harmful actions in which you shouldn’t engage, even if you can, ought to be qualifications for coming to college. I’m waiting for a lot of people to start proving that they deserve to attend Columbia.
