Freedom, Affirmative Action, and the Black College Institute
I was eleven years old when I learned a new word – Bakke. I wasn’t sure what it was – a person or a disease. My parents angrily hurled the word out of their mouths like a venom: “Bakke, Bakke, Bakke”.
They acted as if their world had changed overnight. And perhaps it had. It was June 28, 1978, and the US. Supreme Court declared affirmative action constitutional, but invalidated the use of racial quotas.
I was too young to really understand the level of concern in their voices through the next days and weeks, as I heard other words, like quotas, diversity, opportunity, affirmative action, and racism.
Overtime, especially in law school, I learned more about Allan Bakke. He was an engineer working at a NASA lab and a former Marine who was 32 when he completed pre-med requirements at night, applied to Davis and was refused for two years running. Believing he would have qualified had Davis not reserved 16 of its 100 places for minority candidates, he sued as a victim of discrimination.
In June, 1978, the court affirmed the principle of affirmative action, endorsing those programs that made race only one of many factors to consider while prohibiting strict quota systems like Davis’. And it ordered the school to admit Bakke.
Bakke entered that fall at 38. He was greeted by demonstrations, dogged by criticism and kept to himself. After graduating in 1982, he took his residency at the Mayo Clinic and worked as an anesthesiologist in Rochester, Minn. Throughout the case, Bakke refused to give interviews or personal information to the press. If I could talk to him, I would want to understand more about what I consider his sense of entitlement–that all 100 seats should be available to him as a White man and others like him. It wasn’t enough that 84 seats were available to White candidates like him.
Over the years, there have been many challenges to the use of race in college admissions to elite institutions by other students who somehow felt a sense of entitlement to an opportunity and a seat. I suspect people of color rarely have a sense of entitlement to anything. What we do have is a sense of exclusion, marginalization, inferiority, and impostor syndrome.
Nothing is promised to most people, especially those who are people of color and who have accents, whose name signify difference, and who are without wealth. We are not entitled to many opportunities, including getting a great education or a great job. When there are 3700 applicants for 100 seats in a medical school or 40,000 applicants for only a few thousand undergraduate seats at an elite institution, it makes sense that a variety of factors could determine worthiness of the opportunity, including race and the importance of a diverse learning environment. Much about life in a capitalistic economy is not always about merit, but about access to opportunity, to the resources that are necessary to demonstrate merit. What affirmative action encouraged was a focus on thinking of potential and the capacity to achieve. It was about engaging in the “extra work,” as an institution to identify talent, or the capacity to succeed. I believe that so much is about luck, happenstance, and connections (legacy). Yes hard work is important, but many students work hard, and hard work is not a guarantee of success or opportunity. In America the reality is that schools are fairly desegregated; Black and brown students are in lower performing schools, not because of their desire to learn, but because of the conditions associated with their education, including the role of taxes and home ownership in determining the quality education; and many other factors. Dr. Bettina Love, brilliant as always, calls out the ways in which Black children are particularly harmed in the education system.
This week’s decision by the Supreme Court took me down memory lane. The Supreme Court banned the use of race in admissions’ decisions, unless connected to overcoming obstacles and challenges in life.
My parents were not the beneficiary of quotas or affirmative action when they began their educational journeys in the 1950s/1960s. They both went to historically black institutions in the 1950s/1960s for their undergraduate degrees. My father went to Hampton University for his BA (1963) in physics, coming to America to pursue educational opportunities not available in Sierra Leone, West Africa. My mother went to Jarvis Christian College, a small HBCU in Jarvis, Texas, where as a sharecropper and granddaughter of the formerly enslaved, she could work a year to go to school a year. Graduating in 1951, my mother went to predominantly White institutions, Butler (MA, 1952) , Indiana (1955), and University of Pittsburgh where she got her PhD in Social Work in 1969. My father went on to Carnegie Mellon where he got his MA (1965) and PhD in Nuclear Physics in 1968. Not only were my parents not beneficiaries of affirmative action as students, they had to work exceedingly hard, while being subject to discriminating from faculty. My mother frequently shared the level of racism she experienced, particularly at the University of Pittsburgh, in trying to get her doctorate. The book I wrote about her life details the extraordinary obstacles she had to overcome as a poor, Black woman in America, whose grandmother was enslaved, and whose parents were sharecroppers.
My mom did not celebrate the 4th of July. She celebrated Juneteenth, for as Frederick Douglass aptly noted, the celebration of freedom was inconsistent with enslavement:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.
Frederick Douglass, What to the slave is the 4th of July speech
Both of my parents accepted faculty positions at Illinois State University in 1969. Whether the opportunity at ISU was based on affirmative action, I do not know. Affirmative Action had its genesis in 1961 through an Executive Order from President Kennedy establishing the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity requiring federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure” equal employment opportunities. It was expanded in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, and the protests by Black students, universities, including Harvard, decided to engage in affirmative action to give preference to a student who had “survived the hazards of poverty, was intellectually thirsty, and had room for growth.” Anemona Hartocollis, October 31, 2022 (New York Times). This perspective was adopted across a wide range of institutions to increase Black student enrollment cognizant of the historical reality that had created a disparity in opportunity.
Although I do not know whether Affirmative Action influenced ISU’s decision to hire my parents, what I do know is racism played a significant role in their experience. My mother became a full professor, overcoming extraordinary racism. I also know that racism killed my father’s career. Three years into his tenure-track career, his contract was abruptly terminated. The lawyer he hired to represent him in his discrimination case said he had never seen the magnitude of racism my father faced.
What stands out for me in both my parents’ lives, my life, and those of many people of color is that if (and that is a big if), affirmative action, (the action required by institutions to address years of discrimination resulting in lower access to opportunity, low performing schools, poverty-stricken lifestyles), could create an opportunity for a historically disadvantage student, the reality was that the student still had to perform at an exceedingly high level, often under even more difficult circumstances than any non-disadvantaged student. My parents repeatedly emphasized that I would need to work twice as hard to get anything and I have.
The color of our skin as African Americans is a visual marker for discrimination and hate. We who study history and the present know the stories and the experiences of African-Americans in White institutions, where our Blackness is a target, and we are treated as if we are a disease, and we are ostracized and humiliated. We are often still the only one in many environments, and we feel the need to be “overqualified.”
Today on the 4th of July, I am just reflecting on what freedom means. Ideally, freedom means the opportunity to pursue our goals and aspirations without barriers, without being discriminated against based on race.
In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson shares a definition of freedom for African-Americans, provided at the end of the Civil War:
“As the Civil War neared its conclusion, General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton convened a meeting of Black leaders in Savannah, Georgia. During the meeting, someone asked Garrison Frazier, the group’s spokesperson, what “freedom” meant to him. He answered, “‘placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves . . . to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor.’” Today’s gaps exist because that freedom was denied far longer than it was ever afforded. Therefore, as JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR correctly and amply explains, UNC’s holistic review program pursues a righteous end—legitimate “‘because it is defined by the Constitution itself. The end is the maintenance of freedom.’”
As African Americans, we are still pursuing freedom.
But, I am taking away a glimmer of hope. I will not be without hope. I am holding on to these few sentences in the majority opinion:
“At the same time, nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university. Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice.
It will be important for all students, particularly students of color, to reflect on the impact of race on their lives, and how their experiences as a person of color have enabled them to even be in a position to apply to a prestigious institution and to make significant contributions to enrich the culture and climate of higher education institutions. And though I disagree with the statement that institutions have focused only on the color of the skin of applicants, I believe that students of color in particular can share the “challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned” largely because of their experiences of people of color in America.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s brilliant dissent provides a starting point for student’s essays that address what it means to overcome obstacles, particularly for African Americans. She references the “well documented ‘intergenerational transmission of inequality that still plagues our citizenry.” She refers to Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissent in Bakke and his reference to enslavement: “Three hundred and fifty years ago, the Negro was dragged to this country in chains to be sold into slavery. Uprooted from his homeland and thrust into bondage for forced labor, the slave was deprived of all legal rights. It was unlawful to teach him to read; he could be sold away from his family and friends at the whim of his master; and killing or maiming him was not a crime. The system of slavery brutalized and dehumanized both master and slave.” Regents of Univ. of Cal. v. Bakke, 438 U. S. 265, 387–388 (1978
Then, Justice Jackson traces the historical record of obstacles created by the law and private parties, including Jim Crow, to “hinder the progress and prosperity of Black people.”
“Vagrancy laws criminalized free Black men who failed to work for White landlords. Many States barred freedmen from hunting or fishing to ensure that they could not live without entering de facto reenslavement as sharecroppers. A cornucopia of laws (e.g., banning hitchhiking, prohibiting encouraging a laborer to leave his employer, and penalizing those who prompted Black southerners to migrate northward) ensured that Black people could not freely seek better lives elsewhere. And when statutes did not ensure compliance, state-sanctioned (and private) violence did. Thus emerged Jim Crow—a system that was, as much as anything else, a comprehensive scheme of economic exploitation to replace the Black Codes, which themselves had replaced slavery’s form of comprehensive economic exploitation. Meanwhile, as Jim Crow ossified, the Federal Government was “giving away land” on the western frontier, and with it “the opportunity for upward mobility and a more secure future,” over the 1862 Homestead Act’s three quarter-century tenure. Black people were exceedingly unlikely to be allowed to share in those benefits, which by one calculation may have advantaged approximately 46 million Americans living today. Despite these barriers, Black people persisted.”
The upshot of all this is that, due to government policy choices, “[i]n the suburban-shaping years between 1930 and 1960, fewer than one percent of all mortgages in the nation were issued to African Americans.” Thus, based on their race, Black people were “[l]ocked out of the greatest mass based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history.” For present purposes, it is significant that, in so excluding Black people, government policies affirmatively operated—one could say, affirmatively acted—to dole out preferences to those who, if nothing else, were not Black. Those past preferences carried forward and are reinforced today by (among other things) the benefits that flow to homeowners and to the holders of other forms of capital that are hard to obtain unless one already has assets.
This discussion of how the existing gaps were formed is merely illustrative, not exhaustive. I will pass over Congress’s repeated crafting of family-, worker-, and retiree protective legislation to channel benefits to White people, thereby excluding Black Americans from what was otherwise “a revolution in the status of most working Americans.” I will also skip how the G. I. Bill’s “creation of . . . middle-class America” (by giving $95 billion to veterans and their families between 1944 and 1971) was “deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow.” So, too, will I bypass how Black people were prevented from partaking in the consumer credit market—a market that helped White people who could access it build and protect wealth. Nor will time and space permit my elaborating how local officials’ racial hostility meant that even those benefits that Black people could formally obtain were unequally distributed along racial lines.And I could not possibly discuss every way in which, in light of this history, facially race-blind policies still work race-based harms today (e.g., racially disparate tax-system treatment; the disproportionate location of toxic-waste facilities in Black communities; or the deliberate action of governments at all levels in designing interstate highways to bisect and segregate Black urban communities).The point is this: Given our history, the origin of persistent race-linked gaps should be no mystery. It has never been a deficiency of Black Americans’ desire or ability to, in Frederick Douglass’s words, “stand on [their] own legs.” Rather, it was always simply what Justice Harlan recognized 140 years ago—the persistent and pernicious denial of “what had already been done in every State of the Union for the white race.”
History speaks. In some form, it can be heard forever. The race-based gaps that first developed centuries ago are echoes from the past that still exist today. By all accounts, they are still stark. Start with wealth and income. Just four years ago, in 2019, Black families’ median wealth was approximately $24,000. For White families, that number was approximately eight times as much (about $188,000). These wealth disparities “exis[t] at every income and education level,” so, “[o]n average, white families with college degrees have over $300,000 more wealth than black families with college degrees.” This disparity has also accelerated over time—from a roughly $40,000 gap between White and Black household median net worth in 1993 to a roughly $135,000 gap in 2019. Median income numbers from 2019 tell the same story: $76,057 for White households, $98,174 for Asian households, $56,113 for Latino households, and $45,438 for Black households. These financial gaps are unsurprising in light of the link between home ownership and wealth. Today, as was true 50 years ago, Black home ownership trails White home ownership by approximately 25 percentage points. Moreover, Black Americans’ homes (relative to White Americans’) constitute a greater percentage of household wealth, yet tend to be worth less, are subject to higher effective property taxes, and generally lost more value in the Great Recession. From those markers of social and financial unwellness flow others.
In most state flagship higher educational institutions, the percentage of Black undergraduates is lower than the percentage of Black high school graduates in that State. Black Americans in their late twenties are about half as likely as their White counterparts to have college degrees. And because lower family income and wealth force students to borrow more, those Black students who do graduate college find themselves four years out with about $50,000 in student debt—nearly twice as much as their White compatriots. As for postsecondary professional arenas, despite being about 13% of the population, Black people make up only about 5% of lawyers. Such disparity also appears in the business realm: Of the roughly 1,800 chief executive officers to have appeared on the well-known Fortune 500 list, fewer than 25 have been Black (as of 2022, only six are Black). Furthermore, as the COVID–19 pandemic raged, Blackowned small businesses failed at dramatically higher rates than White-owned small businesses, partly due to the disproportionate denial of the forgivable loans needed to survive the economic downturn.
Health gaps track financial ones. When tested, Black children have blood lead levels that are twice the rate of White children—“irreversible” contamination working irremediable harm on developing brains. Black (and Latino) children with heart conditions are more likely to die than their White counterparts. Race-linked mortality-rate disparity has also persisted, and is highest among infants. So, too, for adults: Black men are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer as White men and have lower 5-year cancer survival rates. Uterine cancer has spiked in recent years among all women—but has spiked highest for Black women, who die of uterine cancer at nearly twice the rate of “any other racial or ethnic group.” Black mothers are up to four times more likely than White mothers to die as a result of childbirth. And COVID killed Black Americans at higher rates than White Americans.
“Across the board, Black Americans experience the highest rates of obesity, hypertension, maternal mortality, infant mortality, stroke, and asthma.”These and other disparities—the predictable result of opportunity disparities lead to at least 50,000 excess deaths a year for Black Americans vis-à-vis White Americans.That is 80 million excess years of life lost from just 1999 through 2020. Amici tell us that “race-linked health inequities pervad[e] nearly every index of human health” resulting “in an overall reduced life expectancy for racial and ethnic minorities that cannot be explained by genetics.” Meanwhile—tying health and wealth together—while she lays dying, the typical Black American “pay[s] more for medical care and incur[s] more medical debt.”
This powerful dissent provides a guide for any student of color who wants to demonstrate the impact of race on their current life situation.
As the founder of the Black College Institute, now in its 6th year, I know that race matters. The Black College Institute, a program for students interested in the African American experience, is held over 3 weeks in June for high achieving and intellectually curious African American students. Being in an affirming environment focused on academics, leadership, and social justice has transformed over 500 high school students lives this year, and almost 2500 students over the past 5 years. It has been not only life changing for the students in the program, but for the almost 30 current students who support the program.
I hope that all these students talk about the impact of the program for them and that it helps them pursue their dreams, hopefully at Virginia Tech. The students worked on incredible social justice projects that highlighted hiring biases against African Americans, the impact of imposter syndrome, the challenges of mental health in the Black Community, the exploitation of Black college athletes, and so many other issues.
Please take a minute to watch this video of impact of the BCI on both students and the student leader
We are making a difference at Virginia Tech and because of the commitment of our president and institution, we will continue to do so. President Tim Sands’ remarks at the last Board of Visitors’ meeting signify the depth and breadth of his commitment and understanding about the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion and the impact of diversity on African-Americans in particular.
I would like to highlight is the intense scrutiny of DEI nationally and in some states. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, has become a lightning rod for some, many of whom feel that DEI puts them at a disadvantage. Others feel that it is time to move beyond affirmative action – the concept that we have made enough progress as a society and that it is time to look forward and not backward. Of course, we are awaiting a Supreme Court decision that is widely expected to end the practice of considering race and ethnicity in college admissions. For decades, Virginia Tech has focused on diversity and inclusion as a proactive effort to address the injustices that are propagated, if not originated, at our historically White male institution. Our first Black student was admitted 70 years ago after 80 years of resistance. Still today, despite doubling the number of Black students over the past decade, only 6% of undergraduates identify as Black. There are still many talented and qualified Black students in Virginia who do not consider Virginia Tech. The way I see it, that is a talent resource that is not yet fully embraced at Virginia Tech, and employers have not been shy about admonishing us for not doing better – not just in representation, but also in the development of highly-valued cultural competency for all of our students. I highlight Black students here because of Virginia’s unique history of more than 400 years since the first enslaved Africans landed on our shores. A similar assessment can be leveled in our service to rural, low-income, low-generational-wealth, first-generation and veteran students, not to mention women in Engineering and especially Computer Science. If we are passive in our efforts to create an inclusive environment that is conducive to the success of all of our students, and we are passive with respect to creating pathways for historically underrepresented and underserved students, we will most certainly backslide, guaranteeing another century or more of a steadily shrinking pool of talent from which we draw to develop. At Virginia Tech, we have relied on a holistic admission process that includes race and ethnicity among many other factors. Of course, we will obey the law, but at the same time, we are committed to InclusiveVT now more than ever. Does the current political environment make our work more challenging? Of course it does, but it also makes it more important. And frankly, I think the harder work ahead will make us better.
President Tim Sands, Virginia Tech
As Justice Jackson said, “Despite these barriers, Black people persisted,” and as President Sands said, “the harder work ahead will make us better.”
I hope, too, that more institutions and individuals more courageously speak out in support of diversity, in support of the necessity of diversity programs, or the importance of affirming identities that have been minoritized and minimized and dehumanized. There were so many affirmative voices after George Floyd murder, and then now, many seem to have gone silent, as states are defunding and eliminate diversity programs.
Now, more than ever, it is time to speak up and to creatively explore ways of increasing racial diversity in critical segments in society.