After George W. Bush's statements against affirmative action were reported in the news, I said to a friend, "I cannot believe that Bush spoke out against affirmative action with all of the opposition that he faces already. Maybe this will open up some people's eyes for the next election."
"What?" my friend said, her eyes suddenly widened. "You support affirmative action?"
"Yes, you don't?"
"It's racism! How will we ever have a fair country if we continue to distinguish people based on their race?"
And so the debate regarding class- and race-based affirmative action began. We are both white women who grew up in working to middle-class suburbia, given nearly identical opportunities in education and extracurricular activities. We are both from towns in which the majority of parents participate in and donate to the PTA, meet regularly with their children's teachers, pick their children up from school and school functions and are usually home enough for support.
Our schools have new textbooks, adequately paid teachers, sports programs, clubs and preparation for SATs, APs and college applications. By the time we were in high school, or even middle school, we were convinced that scholarships and financial aid exist to help us through college, college is there for us to succeed in the world and the world is ours for the taking.
We are the privileged. Though the majority of students here contest that they worked hard to get here, and I have no doubt they did, it is necessary to see that we were given the opportunities to do so. It isn't necessarily wrong that we were given these chances, but it is quite abhorrent that so many human beings aren't given them. Regardless of how we manage to produce the tens of thousands of dollars every year, we all do it, and not just at our own expense. For every hard-earned American dollar made, there is someone being exploited; the system works in favor of white, wealthy individuals.
My friend's answer to this: The world is unfair, and we must subscribe to the society into which we are born. There will always be injustice and we must live with whatever problems and inequities that we encounter. For example, she continued, millions of people have cancer, and it is not their fault.
Isn't that why we are working toward a cure? If we can improve the quality of living for more human beings, shouldn't we? Of course, affirmative action does so little in the expansive exploitative world in which we live, but it is far better than giving in to social injustice.
For individuals, and especially students at universities, to say that affirmative action is unfair is hypocritical. How can any student at Duke self-righteously proclaim that it is unfair, preferential treatment when they will accept preferential treatment for having an alumni connection? There is nothing wrong with having a grandfather who donates thousands of dollars to the Annual Fund to help you to get into Duke, but it is immoral to give a student "extra admission points" because she lives in a country that defines individuals by class and race?
The claim that white students are put at a great disadvantage because of affirmative action is unfounded; if affirmative action was eradicated, the chances of white students being admitted to the most prestigious universities would only increase from 25 to 26.2 percent. Less than 17 percent of blacks earn college degrees each year, while 30 percent of whites and 40 percent of Asians do.
America is full of opportunity, for those who are lucky enough to be born into comfortable communities. Affirmative action and state and federal financial aid exist so that individuals who are not given the same privileges that others inherit by birth can be given opportunities to succeed. In this capitalist society, there is unfortunately no other way for lower and working class individuals to gain education and hopefully create more economic equality in the nation.
The ideal society would have economic equality and there would not have to be policies such as affirmative action. But we are no where near that. As long as society still uses exploitation for profit, we will have to counteract the effects as much as we can. If individuals are forced to be identified by their class and race, let's not pretend we are blind to it. And let's not contribute to oppression.
Emily LaDue is a Trinity freshman. Her column appears every third Thursday.
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