New York Times surveys the results of 35 years of affirmative action

By Fred Mazelis
13 September 2017

In a front-page lead article over a two-column headline a few weeks ago, the New York Times informed its readers that its own detailed analysis had shown that “Black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the national’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago, despite decades of affirmative action efforts.”

What the Times presents as the somewhat unexpected result of longstanding social policy was illustrated by an unusually detailed full-page series of graphs for 100 institutions of higher education, broken down into five categories: The Ivy League, Flagship Public Universities, Other Top Universities, Top Liberal Arts Colleges, and the massive University of California system.

The graphs use percentages of white, Asian, Hispanic and black students at each of these schools, compared to their numbers in the college-age population, to depict the degree of “overrepresentation” or “underrepresentation” for each group.

Overall, the survey shows that white and Asian students are more “overrepresented” than ever, and blacks and Hispanics more “underrepresented” today than in 1980. Hispanic students made up 13 percent of the freshman class among these 100 schools, for instance, compared to 22 percent of the population. In 1980, with a far smaller Hispanic population, the “gap” was only 3 points.

Black freshmen were 5 percent of the enrollment in 1980 and 12 percent of the population. Thirty-five years later, the gap has grown to nearly 10 points: the percentage of African-Americans is 15 percent, but the college freshman enrollment is only 6 percent.

The rationale for affirmative action, which has its origins in policies initiated by the Nixon administration more than 45 years ago, was that it would level the playing field and enable broad layers of black and Hispanic youth to obtain enter colleges and universities for the first time.

The failure of affirmative action to meet these promises is not accidental, nor was it unforeseen—certainly not by socialists, who understood the real purpose of this program.

It is obvious that without providing tens of millions of good-paying jobs, without vastly improved educational opportunities for all youth from pre-kindergarten through high school, and without the provision of free universal health care and child care, there can be no serious expectation that the latest generation of black and Hispanic working class youth will fare any better than its predecessors in obtaining and in making use of a quality higher education.

The decades of affirmative action have coincided with the decades of social counterrevolution, of the shredding of the social safety net that increased under the presidency of Ronald Reagan and that has continued since then, under Democrats and Republicans. The political and corporate establishment demagogically used the suffering of minority workers and youth to promulgate programs that were never designed to help them in the first place.

This does not mean that some aims of affirmative action have not been achieved. They have—but they are for the most part unstated ones.

A small slice of the African-American population, largely from the middle class, has been selected and integrated into the ruling elite, including the corporate and political establishment. These are the men and women who have been elected to high office, who occupy a few more of the top rungs of the corporate ladder, and who are helping to set the agenda in higher education and other spheres of social life. They in turn are presented as role models and representatives for a small but significant upper middle class constituency, in that way serving as a new base of support for the capitalist system.

The image of “progressivism” and diversity is also used to burnish the image of American capitalism as it competes against its rivals internationally. The small layer that has benefited from affirmative action is utilized to showcase the supposed virtues of the market and the endless possibilities for success under the profit system.

At the same time, however, a political division of labor involved in affirmative action has also become ever clearer with the passing years. The program was first backed by Nixon, who saw no contradiction between affirmative action and his own racist views. For about a decade the programs were largely bipartisan policy, accepted by both major capitalist parties. This began to change, especially in the 1980s. While the Democrats became the program’s biggest boosters, the Republicans discovered that Nixon’s “Southern strategy” could be expanded throughout the country by utilizing resentment caused by racial preferences.

The two big business parties developed a reactionary and cynical means of magnifying and promoting racial division. Affirmative action was attacked from the right, and challenged up to the US Supreme Court. It continues today, as college administrators are for the most part allowed to take race into account in admissions policies, as long as they do not employ quotas.

Affirmative action was never the demand of the working class. It was the brainchild of the political establishment, of a faction of the ruling class, with the approval of sections of the middle class civil rights leadership. And it has been used for decades to encourage resentment among white workers and youth, among students passed over for college admission, all the while ignoring the conditions and needs of the vast majority of the youth—black, Hispanic and white.

The challenges that black and Hispanic youth face are essentially no different than those facing millions of white working class families. The purpose of the Times study, even as it acknowledges part of the truth about affirmative action, is to cover this up so as to continue the effort to divide the working class on racial grounds.

The New York Times put its reporters and researchers to work for many hours, if not weeks, to document the racial breakdown of the student body all over the country. No one appears to have been assigned to analyze the class reality underlying the percentages, however. No one looked at the plight for the vast numbers of white working class youth for whom college has become increasingly unaffordable, and who are likewise “underrepresented” as compared to the upper middle class families, of all races. The category of “whiteness,” by combining the poor, the unemployed, the underemployed and the victims of deindustrialization and wage-cutting, together with the wealthy, is being used to obscure the reality of class relations.

Sixteen years ago, the World Socialist Web Site, in a statement on “Affirmative action and the right to education: a socialist response,” contrasted the demands of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, for greater social equality, with affirmative action, part of “the politics produced by [the capitalist] system, which is based on splitting working people along racial, ethnic religious and other lines to cover up the fundamental class divisions of society.”

For as long as it has been used, the WSWS explained, “affirmative action measures have benefited primarily a small section of middle and upper class minorities. … Affirmative action not only fails to overcome the problem of racism, its discriminatory character inevitably exacerbates racial divisions and pits white and minority workers and youth against each other in the struggle for a completely inadequate number of jobs and educational opportunities.”

In 2001, the average tuition at a public university was $3,500. Today it is $9,650 for state residents, and more than $24,000 for those out of state. For private schools, average tuition in 2001 was more than $15,000. The latest figure is $33,480, not including $10,000-$15,000 in room and board and other expenses. More than ever before, affirmative action has become a means of integrating a very small section of the upper middle class and grooming it for future roles presiding over increasing inequality and repression.

Growing sections of the working class, including African-American and Hispanic families, are coming to recognize that affirmative action is worth no more than any other promise made by any capitalist politician. This recognition must be translated into a complete break with the Democratic Party.

In opposition to the promise of a step up for a select few by trampling on the hopes and futures of the vast majority, the working class must fight for a socialist program of free quality higher education for all. This is part of the struggle to defend and extend the basic rights of the working class and eliminate the social inequality that is the product of the profit system. This fight is taken up only by the Socialist Equality Party.

WSWS

Donald Trump, a classic case of affirmative action for the wealthy, wants to take it away from the disadvantaged

THURSDAY, AUG 3, 2017 02:00 AM PDT

President often claims he’s “like, a smart person” — but he didn’t get into Wharton on his academic merits

PETER DREIER

Of all the issues facing higher education today — skyrocketing student debt, for-profit colleges ripping off its students and government subsidies, declining college enrollment – President Trump has chosen to make it harder for black and Latino students to get into college.

The Trump administration is preparing to sue universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.

Apparently Trump objects to affirmative action for African-Americans and Latinos, but not to affirmative action for the super-rich and the well-connected. That’s how Trump got into the University of Pennsylvania in 1966.

Over the years, Trump has frequently referred to his Ivy League credentials as evidence of his intelligence. In a 2004 interview with CNN, Trump said, “I went to the Wharton School of Finance. I got very good marks. I was a good student. It’s the best business school in the world, as far as I’m concerned.”

In 2011, Trump told ABC News, “Let me tell you, I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country,” referring once again to Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s business school, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1968.

“I went to the Wharton School of Finance,” he said during a campaign speech in Phoenix in July 2015. “I’m, like, a really smart person.”

In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in August 2015, Trump described Whartonas “probably the hardest [school] there is to get into.” He added, “Some of the great business minds in the world have gone to Wharton.” He also observed: “Look, if I were a liberal Democrat, people would say I’m the super genius of all time. The super genius of all time.”

During a CNN-sponsored Republican town hall in Columbia, South Carolina in February 2016, Trump reminded the audience that he had gone to Wharton and then repeated his boast: “Look, I went to the best school, I was a good student and all of this stuff. I mean, I’m a smart person.”

Last December, in an interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, Trump repeated those same words to explain why he didn’t need daily updates from intelligence professionals about national security threats, a tradition that goes back to President Harry Truman. “I’m, like, a smart person,” he told Wallace.

He did it again on Jan. 21 of this year, the day after his inauguration, during a visit to CIA headquarters. Trump’s scripted remarks turned into a rambling rant that included attacks on the media and his insistence that as many as 1.5 million people attended his inauguration. In the middle of his tirade, Trump felt the need to tell the nation’s top spies that he is a bright guy. “Trust me,” Trump said, “I’m, like, a smart person.”

Trump has repeated that claim many times. Each time, it isn’t clear if he’s trying to convince his interviewer or himself. Indeed, anyone who feels compelled to boast about his academic pedigree and how smart he is clearly suffers from profound insecurity about his intelligence and accomplishments. In Trump’s case, he has good reason to have doubts.

Trump surely knows he didn’t get into Wharton on his own merits. He transferred into its undergraduate program after spending two years at Fordham University in New York, where he had no significant achievements.

“No one I know of has said ‘I remember Donald Trump,’” Paul F. Gerken, a 1968 Fordham graduate and president of the Fordham College Alumni Association, told the Chronicle of Higher Education. “Whatever he did at Fordham, he didn’t leave footprints.”

In her 2001 biography, “The Trumps,” Gwenda Blair reported that Trump’s grades at Fordham were not good enough to qualify him to transfer to Wharton. According to Blair, Trump got into Wharton as a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who was a high school classmate of Trump’s older brother, Freddy. The college’s admissions staff was surely aware that Trump’s father was a wealthy real estate developer and a potential donor.

Other than his father’s money and his family’s connections, Trump had no qualifications that would have otherwise gotten him into Wharton. (Most people who mention Wharton refer to its prestigious MBA program, but Trump was an economics major in the undergraduate program.)

In high school at the New York Military Academy, Trump was not an outstanding student. He didn’t organize his fellow students to tutor underprivileged kids or raise money for cancer research. In his senior year, he was removed from his post as captain and transferred to a job on the school staff, with no command responsibilities. According to his fellow students, Trump wasn’t able to control the cadets under his command.

Moreover, for years Trump exaggerated his academic accomplishments at Wharton. On at least two occasions in the 1970s, the New York Times reported that Trump “graduated first in his class” at Wharton in 1968. That’s not true. The dean’s list for his graduation year, published in the Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus newspaper, doesn’t include Trump’s name. He has refused to release his grade transcripts from his college days.

The fabrication that Trump was first in his class has been repeated in many other articles and books about Trump, but he has never bothered to correct it.

Upon graduating from college, Trump didn’t have to apply for jobs or go through interviews with potential employers who would judge him on his merits. Instead, his father Fred Trump handed young Donald the keys to his real estate empire.

Despite this, Trump often tries to portray himself as a self-made entrepreneur. “It has not been easy for me,” Trump said at a town hall meeting on Oct. 26, 2015, acknowledging, “My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars.”

But an investigation by The Washington Post last year demolished Trump’s claim that he made it on his own. Not only did Trump’s father provide Donald with a huge inheritance and set up big-bucks trust accounts to provide his son with a steady income, Fred was also a silent partner in Trump’s first real estate projects. According to the Post:

Trump’s father — whose name had been besmirched in New York real estate circles after investigations into windfall profits and other abuses in his real estate projects — was an essential silent partner in Trump’s initiative. In effect, the son was the front man, relying on his father’s connections and wealth, while his father stood silently in the background to avoid drawing attention to himself.

Born into privilege, Trump got into Wharton through family connections and then inherited a fortune. Now his administration is preparing to thwart efforts by colleges and universities to recruit students of color who had to overcome obstacles that Trump can’t even imagine. The Justice Department memo uncovered by The New York Times described its plan as challenging “intentional race-based discrimination,” referring to programs designed to bring more minority students to college campuses.

Affirmative action programs were designed to help qualified students who lack the sorts of connections that Trump used to get into Wharton. The purpose is to level the playing field by helping students who have had to cope with considerable economic and social disadvantages, including racism.

No selective university or college simply uses grades and test scores in deciding which students to accept. Colleges accept students whose high-school grades and SAT scores meet a basic threshold, and then give extra points to students with various characteristics, based on such factors as athletic or artistic ability; urban, suburban or rural background; demonstrated commitment to public service; attendance at public, private or religious high schools; and ethnic and racial backgrounds. All of this is done to create a diverse student body.

The Justice Department memo noted that the anti-affirmative action project will be run out of the Civil Rights Division’s front office, comprised of Trump administration political appointees, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is staffed by career civil servants who normally deal with issues involving schools and universities. This suggests that the entire scheme is designed as a political gesture to Trump’s base of conservative white supporters who view affirmative action as a form of reverse discrimination.

Candice Jackson, acting head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (who would certainly play a key role in the administration’s attack on affirmative action), once complained that she was discriminated against for being white while she was a student at Stanford.

But an even more egregious form of discrimination is the kind of class privilege that allowed a second-rate student like Trump to get into Wharton, depriving a more deserving but less well-connected student a spot in that elite institution. Now, as president, he wants to deprive tens of thousands of truly worthy students the opportunity to overcome disadvantages and become our nation’s future leaders.

Peter Dreier is professor of politics and chair of the Urban & Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. His most recent book is “The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame” (Nation Books).

http://www.salon.com/2017/08/03/donald-trump-a-classic-case-of-affirmative-action-for-the-wealthy-wants-to-take-it-away-from-the-disadvantaged/

The social roots of racism in America

23 June 2015

On Monday, President Barack Obama used a podcast interview to argue that racism is in “the DNA” of Americans. In the course of his discussion with comedian Marc Maron, Obama declared, “The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on.”

Obama’s use of the term “DNA,” even if intended as a somewhat poorly chosen metaphor, serves definite political purposes. It facilitates the attempt to present racism as essentially a biological phenomenon—a conception that, like all racialist thinking, is unscientific and reactionary.

The president’s remarks coincide with an escalating campaign in the media to use last week’s tragic shooting in Charleston, South Carolina to filter every question of American society through the prism of race, outside of any social, economic or historical context. The New York Times, in particular, has devoted a significant portion of its opinion pages to polemics on the nature of “whiteness” and “blackness” and the supposedly unbridgeable racial divide in America.

Historically, the conception that racism is rooted in the actual makeup of different races found its most consistent and reactionary exponents among those who proclaimed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. The Nazis in Germany employed crackpot arguments about a biologically determined divide to justify their program of mass relocation and extermination. Racism and racist policies were explained and rationalized on the basis of the fundamental differences between the races themselves.

Socialists reject these conceptions. Racism exists, and has existed, in the United States. It has, not infrequently, taken horrific forms: bombings, lynchings, segregation. Yet racism can be understood only within its actual social context, as a distorted expression of class relations and social interests.

American racism had its origins in the slave system. The racism of the Old South served the interests of the slave owners in justifying, through the lie of racial inferiority, their own cruel and shameless exploitation of the socioeconomic system upon which the southern plantation aristocracy was based.

The slave-owning class was crushed through a massive social mobilization in the form of the American Civil War, in which, supposed genetic coding aside, 300,000 white people in the North set out to “die to make men free,” in the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

The decades following the Civil War saw economic development at a dizzying pace, including the massive expansion of cities and industrialization on a hitherto unknown scale. These processes came together with the growth of the workers’ movement and militant strikes. Many of those who had led the fight against slavery—the great abolitionist Wendell Phillips is one example—became active in the labor movement.

In the South, where sharecropping replaced slavery, the last two decades of the 19th century saw the emergence of populist movements that drew the support of millions of agricultural workers, white and black.

It was under these conditions that legal segregation was enshrined by the Supreme Court (in the 1896 case of Plessy vs. Ferguson) and racist violence was actively encouraged and promoted. The Ku Klux Klan had as its goal not only the terrorizing of blacks, but—inextricably tied to this—the defeat of all efforts to unify black and white workers on the basis of their common class interests.

The social progress of African-Americans in the subsequent period would have been impossible without the workers’ movement, including the Russian Revolution and the great industrial struggles of the 1930s and subsequent decades.

In the first decades of the 20th century, the socialist-minded workers and intellectuals who spearheaded the organization of the industrial unions courageously fought against the racism that was encouraged by the corporations and the old AFL craft unions. However, these efforts, particularly in the South, were compromised by the unions’ political alliance with the Democratic Party, at that time the party of segregation and white supremacy.

In the 1960s, the deepening crisis of American capitalism exploded in the civil rights movement, the ghetto rebellions, a wave of militant strikes, and the mass movement against the Vietnam War.

The response of the ruling class to these upheavals was to once again turn to the promotion of race as the fundamental category in American society. This was accompanied by the elevation into positions of power and privilege of a section of the African-American population through race-based policies such as Affirmative Action. African-Americans became CEOs, mayors, congressmen, judges, police officers and—with the election of Obama—the president of the United States.

While the new type of race-based politics differed in form from the old racism of the Southern slavocracy and the white supremacists, it came to serve a similar function—to obscure the basic class questions and block the development of a unified movement of workers of all races on the basis of their common class interests.

The integration of the politics of race into the framework of bourgeois rule has coincided with a massive assault on the social conditions of the working population. Among those most affected by the growth of poverty and social misery are the poorest sections of African-Americans, who are without a doubt economically far worse off than they were in the 1960s.

What is striking in the statements of Obama and recent editorials and columns in the New York Times is the degree to which supposedly “left” or “liberal” political forces are seeking to promote what can only be called a fundamentally racialist understanding of racism. They are engaged in creating and developing arguments that go very far toward legitimizing intellectually the arguments of the racists themselves.

With social inequality and class divisions now at levels not seen since the 1920s, the media, the political establishment and the various identity politics-based organizations that orbit the Democratic Party never pass up an opportunity to reinforce the supposed massive racial divide in America. Hence the endless calls for a “national conversation on race.”

Totally absent from these “conversations” is any consideration of the social conditions confronting the great majority of the population. Inconvenient truths such as the decay of cities like Baltimore and Detroit, despite having been governed by African-Americans for decades; the growth of poverty in predominantly white areas; or the consequences of the policies of the Obama administration are simply ignored.

These class issues cannot be discussed because to raise them would highlight what millions of workers of all races are coming to understand: that racism and racial politics are ideological props for a bankrupt and diseased social order—capitalism.

Andre Damon

 

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/23/pers-j23.html