UNC-Chapel Hill announced last week that Black and Hispanic enrollment numbers are down following a Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says it’s part of a pattern in our education system.
It must be satisfying, for the people working so hard to keep Black and brown people at the back of the line in America, to see their maneuvers work exactly as designed.
Fourteen months ago, after a decade-long court battle, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court ended race-based affirmative action policies at U.S. colleges and universities. Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill were at the center of the case.
A few days ago, UNC-Chapel Hill released its most recent enrollment figures. And what do you know — they show a decrease in both Black and Hispanic students from the year before.
Black students make up about 8% of UNC’s incoming class, compared to about 11% the year before. Hispanic students make up about 10%, compared to 11% last year. UNC administrators have said it’s too soon to draw a conclusion from one year’s data, but if so, that’s some coincidence.
It pains me to have to explain why race-based affirmative action matters, but it’s clear that many Americans still either don’t understand or refuse to understand, up to and including the majority of the Supreme Court.
As a group, Black and Hispanic kids in this country are born into families with less money, less education, less power, and far more difficult lives than average white families. At every step in the education system, families with privilege and means bend the rules in the favor of their own children, and away from children who had less to begin with. Many minority children with intelligence and grit have lower test scores because of the environment they grew up in and the schools where they were taught. Race-based affirmative action was a way to acknowledge those truths, and to give a chance to kids who deserve it.
But the idea of somebody else being given a chance is galling to so many who believe in meritocracy, even though they don’t think much about how they acquired all that merit in the first place.
The plaintiffs in the affirmative action case said college admissions practices were discriminating against white and Asian American students. Now, there are a couple hundred Black and Hispanic kids who might have been accepted at UNC this year before the Supreme Court ruling. They are being replaced by a couple hundred kids who may or may not actually end up being better students. It’s just that some of them were born into an easier path.
Some of you out there this morning are old enough to remember when elementary schools taught you how to write in cursive. One of the exercises I remember is making a series of loops, each one reaching back and overlapping the one before. Eventually, you made it all the way across the page. But it took forever, because half the time you were going backward.
That’s the history of racial justice in this country. We have moved forward. But it seems like we spend half our time circling back. And because the Supreme Court sent us backward, Black and Hispanic kids all over the country will, once again, be denied the education they deserve.
Tommy Tomlinson’s On My Mind column runs Mondays on WFAE and WFAE.org. It represents his opinion, not the opinion of WFAE. You can respond to this column in the comments section below. You can also email Tommy at ttomlinson@wfae.org.
