The Case for Affirmative Action .. at least for now..

Those who know me, know that I consider myself to be a Conservative. I believe in smaller government, free enterprise and lower taxes. Like most people, however I cannot be summed up with a single word. There are a couple of issues which I suppose I would have to admit, I am hopelessly liberal. Affirmative Action is foremost among those. Some would argue that this is a contradiction. That how can one believe in the things I cite, and yet still favor race based assistance for college admissions and hiring. Well the truth is, I don't really. It occurs to me that while ethnicity plays a major role in the extent to which equal opportunity is presented to people in this country, it is not the only player. Clearly socio-economic hardship plays a large part in that as well. The inner city is the inner city, regardless of what color your skin is, if your school spends more on metal detectors and grief counselors than on books and college preparations counselors and your parents are both junkies, you are at a significant disadvantage. Period.

At the risk of seeming narcissistic, I turn again to my own example. My annual statement from the Social Security Administration tells me that I have made several million dollars in my career so far and will make several million more before I die of a heart attack at my desk. It also tells me that by the time I have that heart attack I will have paid somewhere between 3 and 4 million dollars in taxes. Federal, state, property, sales etc. My Harvard education, most of which was paid by government grants and other aid, cost about $45,000. One need not be a Harvard economist to be able to compute that $3 million in return for a $45K investment is money well spent. 3000% ROI is a return Wall Street would turn cartwheels over. So what does that have to do with Affirmative Action?

Well listen up and I will tell ya. First let's look at what Affirmative Action (sorry I can't to the AA abbreviation without thinking of Alcoholics Anonymous so bear with me) for? What's it supposed to do? Well it's simple. It is supposed to afford an opportunity for people who, for reasons which can best be characterized as "institutional injustice" have not been afforded an equal opportunity by our society. So what the hell does that mean? Stay with me and I will explain. As has come to light with the New Haven firefighter case and the ongoing NYFD lawsuit, there are issues with how people are evaluated in this country. Not so much anymore because of any insidious desire for exclusion, but simply because the people doing the evaluation assume certain things, certain knowledge, a certain familiarity with concepts and ideas that are thought to be "common sense" so to speak. Yet for some, these concepts are as foreign as the Chinese alphabet to us Americans. The easy answer would be to say "Well if you want the job/college admission/whatever then it is incumbent upon you to go learn what you need to know to get it." And to some extent that would be true. If not for the not so small problem of people not even knowing what it is they don't know. Again to harken back to my own experience. When I took the SAT, I was immediately aware upon reading through the test that there was stuff on it that I had not ever touched in any classroom. Even though I was as intelligent as any kid taking that test, maybe more, there were questions on it that I was never going to be able to answer, at least not with any confidence. And there was no way for me to know what I didn't know, until I took the test. Yes I know that kids now have access to SAT prep classes and some schools even have the prep people on campus full time. I have seen the whole cottage industry that has grown up around test preparation. But again, how many of those facilities are in the inner city? Or out in rural Arkansas? Yes, kids who go to school in affluent areas have access to all that stuff, but what about the rest? What about the kids whose parents never finished high school, which is going to be a very large number in the next generation as dropout rates climb toward 20% nationwide? What about those kids who don't know enough about the college boards to even begin to know where to look for help preparing for them? What about the thousands and thousands of kids who go to high schools that don't even have guidance counselors anymore?

As luck would have it, I did well enough on the SAT to get into Harvard and every other school I applied to. Maybe I was a really good guesser. Was I an Affirmative Action admit? Maybe, maybe not, I don't really know.. And don't care.. I know that there were ZERO professors at Harvard who gave me "Affirmative Action" grades. My guess is Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson or Judge Lynn Toler or Governor Deval Patrick or yeah.. that President guy would probably say the same thing. Harvard professors as a rule seemed like hard asses who wanted to challenge and push all their students to the brink of suicide! But I digress. Once you get into the school, you still gotta do the work. And if you are underprepared, which I was, you will find it difficult to get off the ground. What I found upon arriving at Harvard was that there were kids, black and white and everything in between, who had come from MUCH better schools than my gigantic public school in Orlando. Nothing against public schools, but the prep schools in New England, the great schools in the Virginia commonwealth, the great schools in Cali, yes I said Cali, which used to have one of the 5 best secondary educational systems in the country. Those kids came to Harvard with a HUGE head start on kids like me. Faced with that, I had two choices. Fold and declare myself a failure who didn't belong here.. or get to work playin catchup. I chose the latter. So I caught up with some, passed some others and never got within shouting distance of still others because they were both at least as brilliant as me and worked just as hard or harder AND had the huge head start that I was never going to make up. But the point is, you have to take it on. A kid has to be willing to accept that challenge and fight that uphill battle for four years.

Without program like Affirmative Action, a kid like me might never get that chance to accept that challenge. My parents were both high school dropouts. I was the first member of my family to graduate from college. If I look at it honestly without the opportunity to go to a college like Harvard.. I probably still would have gone to college.. To UCF maybe.. Maybe Valencia Community College. Gee how different would my life be now had that been the case? I don't think I would have ended up on drugs or on welfare. I was never that kind of kid, but my earnings, and with it my taxes paid, would certainly be less than half what they have been. Harvard has opened more doors for me than I can count. I have had no less than a dozen interviews in my career for jobs I was unqualified for, just because the interviewer "wanted to meet somebody that went to Harvard." I have no illusions that I was somehow "special" and that's why I received the opportunity I did. I got lucky. I fell under Mrs. Betsy Folk's section of the alphabet. Mrs. Folk was a godsend. But she's a topic for another blog.

In the worst case scenario a kid like me struggles through one crappy job after another and spend a significant amount of my life on the government dole. My wife could give birth to 5 or 6 kids, each of which would increase the amount of the government dole we could qualify for, and maybe one day in a momentary lapse or reason or out of desperation I commit a crime, get busted, end up in jail. Get out a few years later, a convicted felon. Game over.. life over.. Likewise my kids just inherited that life sentence with me.. and probably their kids with me. Instead, my kids grow up with a college degree all but a foregone conclusion of their education process. Never get into any legal entanglements beyond traffic tickets and the like and the cycle, at least for my lineage, is broken forever. 45 G's = 3 million in tax revenue, 5 people (myself, my wife and kids) likely never to commit a crime and never to need government assistance (because I am certain I will die before I collect any social security.) Seriously, does anyone wanna argue that this is an investment worth making over and over again?

Oh yeah, I'm forgetting the "innocent victims" of Affirmative Action, the people displaced by the beneficiaries. These people argue correctly that "two wrongs do not make a right." And that is true. However, the continuation of the rewarding those for whom the system is already rigged in favor of, is a greater wrong. Affirmative Action is our society's way or recognizing that we have a system that is rigged in favor of some to the detriment of others and attempting to make amends. Some would ask "Okay fine, but how long do we keep this up? At what point will the debt be repaid to minorities in this country?" My answer is always the same.. My people were oppressed in this country for 300 years. My parents were alive when it was still illegal to teach a black child to read in some Southern States. 300 years. Let's go ahead and keep Affirmative Action in place for half that.. Then let's talk..