The NY Times ran a story about Obama and affirmative action earlier this week. The first question I asked was: why was it buried inside? Is this subject not as important as oil drilling or wind farms?
To me, there is no greater inequity in our country than the educational one and it's still pretty simple: students in rich districts are better educated than students in poor ones. Students with money are better educated than students without money. Students who are white, are still, by and large, educated better than are brown or black ones.
It's not rocket science or competing stats about whether offshore drilling will, or will not, improve the gas lot of all Americans, whether we'll save money in the long or short run, whether we'll ruin our beaches, whether we will be perpetually enslaved to foreign interests or whether we are in fact enslaved to our own.
It's a no brainer.
For a long time, affirmative action has been a hot button issue. When the parents of white kids began to realize the preferential treatment as the leg up it was, that it was harder for their own children to get into Yale than a comparable black or brown kid, even one who doesn't have comparable grades or scores, and our economy started shrinking, and the boomers produced just too many kids, white people started getting upset. Not poor white people. This was middle class or even well off white people.
As far as I know (and I haven't read the statutes themselves) no one ever said affirmative action was restricted to people of color. Besides attempting to deal with racial inequities at the outset, it later became a mechanism for addressing gender inequality via unspoken preferential treatment for women in college admissions and then very transparent Title IX for parity for women in sports (which itself has engendered a huge backlash as sports like men's wrestling has therefore been cut back.)
But there are lots of kinds of affirmative action, not just the kind that gets you into college. Affirmative action begins, or should begin, a great deal earlier.
And Barack Obama knows this better than anybody. He has been the recipient of the best kind of affirmative action, the kind that looks after children well before the college years, when it can make a difference not just about job potential but about everything.
But if you go to the Obama website, Affirmative Action does not pop up when you click on "Issues", nor even if you scroll down to "Additional Issues". And in his bio section, it skips right to law school.
I've been to the Punahou School in Hawaii (my husband's firm designed the theater) where Obama attended prep school. Even making allowances for his supposed need to be more centrist before the election, I'm wondering why he cannot tell the New York Times (he declined to be interviewed) that he was the beneficiary of a kind of affirmative action in attending this elite private school (btw, right back at him, Obama does not appear on the Punahou list of alumni in the news!). Obama already was lucky because his parents had each in their own way given him a world view, a global perspective that most students don't have. But places like Punahou do something else: they make you feel valuable. They anoint you as potential leaders. They say to you: you can be anything you want to be.
And Occidental College, which is known to be a melting pot in LA, though private also, is another place that confirms that message: you are special, and you can achieve and make a mark. Obama attended Occidental, and then Columbia and then Harvard (it is said he did not put his race on the Harvard app to avoid being categorized as an affirmative action candidate, but the campaign has not confirmed this), all private schools. Eventually, as he got older, based on merit.
But almost certainly also based on the fact that he was a mixed race boy with few economic resources.
Obama did say at a press conference last week, "We have to think about affirmative action and craft it in such a way where some of our children who are advantaged aren't getting more favorable treatment than a poor white kid who has struggled more" Ok, traditional suporters of affirmative action don't like hearing this. But affirmative action has always meant class, e.g. economic status. If it didn't , people would be less upset about it. Race historically conferred class in the US and even does today in certain sectors.
Let's look at my One Voice students as a case in point. For fifteen years, I have been mentoring about 25 "inner city" Los Angeles kids a year through One Voice, a small, social service organization. Inner-city is a euphemism for Latinos and African Americans and some more recent Asian immigrants, though I have had a couple of white students with few resources (some live in Santa Monica where not everyone is upscale). The brown students have parents who often don't speak English. The black students have parents who have been retrieving their other kids from ghetto wars in disproportionate numbers. The Asian students have families in Vietnam that have lost all their resources. Many are often beset with health issues from being uninsured (which makes them no different from Americans of all strata and color these days).
Most of them attend high schools that have one college counselor per 1000 students. They are on double or triple session throughout the school year. Some of their schools have such ailing infrastructure that the kids laugh at me when I ask them about certain course offerings. Their schools are doing everything they can to help, including making "academies" within the schools that focus on business or tech or art and these students are extremely resourceful. But they cannot compete with Westside private schools. They cannot compete with the lessons and endowed sports teams and private instruction and summer camps and tutoring.
When I first made contact with these kids, the counterpoint between my own, and them, was so dramatic as to send me into a tailspin. At first, my own kids were younger, then they were the same age and the college thing really was brought home and now they are older.
Every year, I have felt precisely the same way, even as I saw what the preferences meant to my own children (one of whom was receiving his own preferential treatment for athletic ability, something he too was born with); these kids need our help.
One Voice seeks to level that playing field. It provides the things they need: help with counseling and essays, yes. But more importantly: direct access to college recruiting officers who visit the students at the One Voice offices, help at home where the disconnect between immigrant families and life in the USA can be overwhelming. Continuing help once the kids are in college, navigating in a new, whiter, richer, often colder (they have no winter clothing, no money for air fares to visit the schools etc.) world. And my own small contribution, introducing them to the arts and culture which none of them have had access to even though they often live steps away from Disney Hall. Every one of them has enriched my life, but more importantly, the national conversation. They are indeed poster children for America's future. Some are more talented intellectually than others, but they are all motivated and they respect their families and the sacrifices their parents have made for them. Many are religious.
Some people think affirmative action should still mean women: my personal experience with young women of every race and class shows the majority of them to be already leap years ahead of their male peers in focus, attitude and maturity. But if there are pockets of young women, be it in industry or the sciences, that still need balancing, it should include them too.
A few weeks ago, I missed my high school reunion which was back east. The pictures uploaded onto the net by my classmates tell everything about my high school experience. New Rochelle was the first northern city to have court ordered integration. My high school was at least forty percent black and had a huge Italian American and Jewish population also. It was on double session. It was 25 percent vocational. It burned down my senior year, torched by an arsonist. We were surrounded by a few other NY suburban schools like ours (Yonkers, Mount Vernon), but mostly all-white rich suburbs with none of these problems. It is IMPOSSIBLE to come from a high school like mine and not be sensitized to race and class, just impossible, and impossible to emerge a Republican. Once you've seen how allocation of resources is everything, how Eddie Vanderlip, who came on a bus by himself from downtown to our north end elementary school in third grade in the vanguard of bussing, was so brave, how Nora Davis, daughter of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, the extraordinary black actors, navigated the mine field of being black but separated from most of the other black kids because we were tracked by test scores, you can't help but want sensitivity and awareness training like this for your own children.
Obama says his own girls shouldn't have advantages over poor white girls, and he's right in the traditional sense. But they will bring unbelievable stories to any school they attend ... and we should listen to the Davis kids tell how it was for them -- Nora says she plans to write about her own experience.
I missed the reunion, but I didn't miss my meet and greet with this year's new class of One Voice students, now between their junior and senior years or the graduation party with this year's graduating seniors. These are days that bookend the year and that make me know we are doing the right thing. Twenty five young lives have been immeasurably altered, for the better. If having access to these kinds of students still needs to be artificially induced in certain institutional settings, so be it.
Therefore, anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives that McCain is supporting in Arizona, Nebraska and Colorado need to be soundly defeated.
There is also personal affirmative action, the kind that makes up for other unquantifiable deficits . It's the kind each of us could practice every day if we were really concerned. We wouldn't leave it up to the colleges or the government to pick up our slack, which is why this always gets so testy. Look around you in your own community: we can nip the need for affirmative action later on down the pike if we all do more sooner.
All disadvantaged students still need a boost, white and black and brown. It's just about access to the good stuff. It should come from the public sector, the private sector, individuals, anywhere we can get it. We should not be thinking of exclusivity when it comes to affirmative action! Obama is precisely the kind of guy who could bring this conversation to a new level and I hope he doesn't feel the need to back away from it after the convention. For I fear we have now come to the stage when:
Affirmative action needs its own affirmative action!
If it makes people less insecure to call it something else, let's do.
Let's call it One Voice.
