What Happens After the End of Affirmative Action?
“The Supreme Court is expected to rule that colleges can no longer rig for racial diversity. Some say ‘that’s dangerous and cruel.’ Others say it’s about time.”
The writer tells the complicated story of affirmative action through its history and stories, including that of David Malcolm Carson, a half-Jewish, half-black individual who supported affirmative action but now “isn’t sure where he stands—on Harvard, North Carolina, and on the affirmative action policy that may have given him a critical boost so many years ago… ‘When affirmative action was conceptualized, it was to right past wrongs,’ he said. ‘Then, it became sort of endless. It wasn’t just African Americans... and that wiped out the moral imperative of it a little, because diversity is not quite as strong a claim as correcting past wrongs.’”
The piece also profiles a high-achieving Asian-American rejected from Harvard (“He’d done everything right. Harvard didn’t agree.”) and a Black American woman, accepted to many elite institutions, who discusses the importance of one’s circumstances, including community and personal experiences.
