This message proved controversial in the extreme, both inside and out of the courtrooms. The court ruling stood at 6-2 in favor of the ban; however, associate justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote and passionately presented her lengthy dissent, mentioning that affirmative action has shaped her own life and career—having herself been a female Puerto Rican student at an Ivy League school. Her protest resounded internationally and sparked heated debate about affirmative action, despite the ban having already been passed. Sotomayor claims that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” Applying the constitution in this manner translates to allowing race to be factored into university admissions.
Supporters of this ban claim affirmative action is now doing its job too well—i.e. propagating reverse discrimination, as was previously stated, rather than contributing to molding diverse and better balanced student bodies.
If this is the case, should we not also cease to view a student’s academic desirability when they live in an underrepresented region, state or country as higher? Ah, no can do; different places shape people differently—the atmosphere and area people live in contribute to the experiences they have; experiences shape personalities, talents and relationships, which are all aspects colleges consider when trying to piece together a varied student body. However, can racial and cultural backgrounds not influence these aspects of people and their experiences just as much…and in some cases, even more?
For that matter, if race doesn’t matter, why should gender? Why is gender required information on every single college application? Neither gender is superior or more privileged than the other, yet non-gender exclusive colleges tend to aim for a balance of both.
Moreover, if discrimination and marginalization are no longer issues, why does the most recent EEO-1 report (“Equal Employment Opportunity,” from 2012) show that in industry, craft/artisan to executive and administrative sections have a significantly higher constituent of white employees than minority employees…while in the two categories yielding the lowest salaries and requiring the least skill, where laborers and service workers are employed, minority occupation fractions surpass those of whites? Why do minority workers get more of the physically grueling and less socially elite and well-paying jobs?
There are multiple possible answers to this query; however, given employment has been linked consistently through several studies to the successful attainment of a college degree, education indubitably opens doors in the workplace above and beyond hard labor—to students of all ethnicities. One recent example of such is a jobs report from September 2013 in the Huffington Post that showed students with only a high school diploma were on average 2% more likely to be unemployed than their degree-holding counterparts. Moreover, the percentage likelihood of getting a job without a degree is inversely proportional to jobs with more prestige, skill set complexity and often higher salaries; as the former goes down, the latter (i.e. the prestige, salary and skill set complexity of jobs) go up. If degrees are so useful for professional success, and minorities have fewer “good jobs” on average, then perhaps this inequality begins with more white than minority students successfully completing their degrees. Given that whites are not naturally smarter or more talented, prejudice, stereotyping, inferior average economic status and/or other negative occurrences must be making it difficult for minorities to obtain the necessary qualifications for the prestigious jobs. Affirmative action was designed to give students facing such momentous obstacles from a young age a leg up; if the statistics still show employment inequality across ethnicities, and employment has been linked to obtaining a college degree, then affirmative action should remain a common practice until statistics have evened out.