Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled to eliminate affirmative action — i.e., racial preferences in college admissions. In other words, no more college or university acceptances based on “this kid’s grades aren’t what they could or should be but he/she has experienced everyday racism and a culturally disadvantaged life in other respects so let’s cut him/her a break, and in so doing try to redress social wrongs.”
Affirmative action, in short, was about addressing the inescapable fact that life is unfair. From the vantage point of the early to mid ’60s, life had always been deeply unfair for persons of color.
The term was first heard via “Executive Order No. 10925“, signed by JFK on 3.6.61 — over 62 years ago. On 9.24.65, LBJ issued Executive Order 11246, which required government employers to “hire without regard to race, religion and national origin” and “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
As a lad I was subjected to a standardized educational meritocracy, which I personally found brutal and exclusionary because the system back then wasn’t geared to recognize and accept, much less encourage, intelligent rule-breakers and clear-light-seekers like myself.
If you wanted to get into a top university you had to play along, ace your SATs and manage an excellent grade-point average…period. Alas, like Oliver Stone, Jim Morrison and others from a certain spiritual congeregation, I was more into the poetry of experience and upheaval and transformational rock music and pyschedelic Bhagavad Gita fulfillment than studying and brown-nosing my way into a sanctified community of Ivy League shitheads who play golf on weekends.
Affirmative action dismantled much of that for certain under-privileged youths, but now it’s back to struggling and scrambling and trying to out-point or out-maneuver those brilliant Asians and those smart white kids with rich parents. The unfairness of life has once again reared its head.
If I was a diehard progressive on a university admissions board, I would probably be telling myself “fuck those conservative Supremes…I’m going to finagle and pull strings and administratively pretzel-twist in order to approve disadvantaged kids of color anyway.” I can’t imagine that admissions criteria geared to favor non-whites and non-Asians whenever and wherever possible is going to just screech to a halt like that.
