Is Affirmative Action On the Way Out? Opportunities Still Endure

The Supreme Court’s latest affirmative action case reminds me of a married couple I know who both happen to be attorneys of color.

He’s a U.S.-born Black lawyer. She’s an Afro Dominican and Puerto Rican-born Black American lawyer.

They both vote similarly as liberal Democrats, as he describes them. But they sometimes surprise each other on such sensitive issues as the law and civil rights.

“We’re both patriotic but I can’t help but remember that America as a land with a history of oppression,” he said. “She tends to see it as a land of opportunity.

That’s a profound point that sounds even more profound the more I think about it.

It comes to mind now as the Supreme Court begins its new session with yet another affirmative action case on its docket that could end affirmative action for college admissions.

A long trail of cases since the 1970s has established that race can be used as one of several factors in deciding who gets admitted, as long as it’s not the only factor.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor famously concluded in her opinion in the landmark 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger case that affirmative action in college admissions is justifiable, but not forever: “We expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences (in student body diversity) will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.”

While it never has been clear where she found that “25 years from now” goal, Chief Justice John Roberts’ very conservative court appears to be teed up and ready to do away with the preferences.

This time, the court is set to hear two cases filed by Students for Fair Admissions on behalf of Asian American students who claim they were passed over for admission to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, essentially because they didn’t belong to the right minority group.

It’s an argument that was just waiting to happen, helped along by conservative legal activists. But I’m also not surprised to see a lot less agitation around this issue than, say, the high court’s recent overturning of the Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision.

As an African American parent, I’m not delighted that affirmative action might end, but I was never that satisfied with it anyway.

For one thing, It reaches too few children who need help. Instead we see a “creaming,” as some call it, to help the high-performing students who are the most likely to succeed anyway.

As a step toward racial equality, affirmative action is constantly at war with the more fundamental principles of fairness that Americans of goodwill would prefer.

Certainly, after centuries of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and systemic discrimination, we needed radical steps to move our racial divided country closer to true equality of rights and opportunity.

But the end of affirmative action would not mean the end of opportunity. Rather, it should be the beginning of a new movement to take better advantage of the opportunities recent decades of hard-won progress already have brought to us.

Which brings me back to the subject of Black American immigrants.

Conservatives often argue that the academic performance of immigrants from Asia, in particular, and their offspring has been so successful without affirmative action that it has produced a new — and misleading — stereotype: the “model minority.”

In fact, in America’s ethnic mixing bowl, immigrants and their children often have excelled more, regardless of race, than native-born children.

The same spirit of relentless optimism that has driven countless immigrants to seek and find opportunity in this land shows up among Black immigrants too.

Overall, Black immigrants earn college degrees at a similar rate to U.S. immigrants overall. Some 31% of Black immigrants ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, almost as high as the 33% share of the overall immigrant population in the U.S. with a college degree, according to a study r by the Pew Research Center in January.

In fact, Pew reports, the number of Black immigrant bachelor’s degree holders has grown faster between 2000 and 2019 than that of the Black U.S.-born population (8 percentage points), the entire U.S.-born population (9 points) and the overall immigration population (9 points).

I don’t view that as a reason to celebrate and declare that we Americans have made so much progress that we don’t need some sort of action, “affirmative” or otherwise to help equalize opportunity for children of color.

Quite the contrary, I think the success of immigrants of color, including Black immigrants, offer excellent underappreciated examples of how and why we need to help more young African Americans take advantage of the opportunities that we already have.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)