Editorial: Affirmative action must be protected — not attacked

Last week, UNC — alongside Harvard University — made national headlines after the Supreme Court agreed to reconsider the universities’ affirmative action policies.

According to the ACLU, affirmative action is a policy that allows factors like race and gender to be taken into account in order to ensure equitable admissions opportunities for minority students and women.

The lawsuit, which will appear before the Court in October, states that these admissions practices have benefitted Black and Hispanic students here at UNC. The case against Harvard's affirmative action policy rests on the idea that Asian American students are unjustly penalized.

This thinking relies on research from a 2009 book: “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal” by Princeton sociologists, which compared the SAT scores that Black, Hispanic, white and Asian American students must receive in order to have equal chances of admissions under affirmative action.

The resulting data was framed in a way that forever changed the legal debate around affirmative action: white and Asian students are “penalized” for their standardized testing performances, while Black and Hispanic students receive “bonus” points to their scores. White opponents to affirmative action have long exploited this way of thinking.

In reality, affirmative actions policies are more nuanced than this framework leads us to believe — college admissions do not dole out bonuses or penalties on SAT scores based on race as a means of getting a holistic view of an applicant for admissions.

This way of thinking also perpetuates the idea that colleges are manufacturing artificial hierarchies of achievement that unjustly situate Black and Hispanic students at the top, leaving white and Asian students lower on the totem pole.

The first and perhaps most obvious way in which this thinking is dangerous is because it assumes that — in absence of affirmative action — white and Asian students would “naturally” rise above other minority students. While systemic racism in education impacts achievement for many students of color, this thinking challenges the inherent merit and ability of these students.

It's worth noting that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action policies.

Secondly, it assumes that Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately advantaged under affirmative action, relative to white students. In reality, students of color struggle to attain equal footing with their white counterparts, especially at predominantly white institutions like UNC.

As of last semester, UNC’s student body was only 8.5 percent Black or African American. Furthermore, nationwide, only 8 percent of Black students attend research institutions, and only 15 percent attend highly selective institutions. 

Black students are disproportionately underrepresented on college campuses and in higher education entirely. Opposition to affirmative action fails to realize the long-standing barriers that people of color have faced in accessing college educations that are equitable to their white peers.

The school-to-prison pipeline. Funding disparities in public education. The test score gap. There are countless ways that racism permeates K-12 education, which puts Black and Hispanic students at a disadvantage before it's even time to submit college applications. Affirmative action is necessary to remedy these, among other barriers to success.

The attempted erasure of students of color and their perspectives from education is hard to ignore. We see it when North Carolina limits how critical race theory can be taught in schools. We see it when UNC fails to value its Black, Indigenous and other educators of color, resulting in poor faculty retention. 

And, we see it here, where systematic steps are being taken to limit admissions opportunities for students of color across the country.

@dthopinion

opinion@dailytarheel.com