Defending a High Achiever
By that standard, race would be an obvious plus-factor for Enin, but not his only one. He also is a shot putter who sings in his school's a capella group, plays the viola and volunteers at Stony Brook University Hospital. He's also on track to complete an impressive eleven college-level Advanced Placement courses by the time he graduates.
After all of that good-faith effort on his part, I am less troubled by how much race might have weighed in Enin's favor than I am relieved by how little it appears to have weighed against him.
What all of us Americans should find troubling is not Kwasi Enin's historic achievement but the larger questions it raises about why we don't have more high-achieving blacks and Latinos in the education pipeline, so race wouldn't have to be a plus-factor.
In that regard, both sides of the college admissions debate are missing what may be the most significant aspect of Enin's success: He's a child of immigrants. His parents are nurses who emigrated from Ghana, studied at public colleges here and reportedly stressed the value of education to their son from an early age.
Similar cases help to explain a startling development that Harvard professors Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., reported 10 years ago to a black Harvard alumni gathering: As many as two-thirds of Harvard's black undergraduates were West Indian and African immigrants or their children or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.
The lesson? Culture matters. Americans are reluctant to talk about culture for fear of raising suspicions of racism. But, as Yale professors Amy Chua (of "Tiger Mom" fame) and Jed Rubenfeld argue in their new book "The Triple Package," we have a lot to learn from how some cultural groups succeed better than others -- within every race.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
(c) 2014 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
