PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE : I’m Not My Brother’s Keeper of Race Benefits

A few months ago, my younger brother graduated from UC Berkeley. His achievement was made possible, along with hard work and sacrifice, by a policy I have begun to question. Indeed, I have to admit that had my growing opposition to affirmative action been public policy at the time my brother applied to Berkeley, he might not have a UC diploma today. Worse, I would deny my brother the benefit of a policy that perhaps influenced my admission to a highly competitive college. Am I being fair?

This week, the University of California Board of Regents will meet to decide whether to dismantle the university’s affirmative-action programs regarding admissions, hiring and contracting. If the controversial proposal, authored by Regent Ward Connerly, is formally adopted, its effects could be felt as soon as January. And beginning with the freshmen class of 1996, prospective students who are Latino, African American, or Native American would no longer be aided in the admissions process by their race or ethnicity. With one exception: Race and other supplemental factors may be considered by admissions officers when applicants who have persevered against adversity can prove these factors have limited their opportunities.

UC officials and proponents of affirmative action are afraid that altering the university’s preference policies will inevitably lead to the enrollment of fewer minority students. Even Glynn Custred, co-author of the proposed California civil rights initiative, concedes as much--certainly in the short run--if his goal of dismantling affirmative-action programs becomes law. But he contends that, in time, the numbers of Latino and African American students will increase, and they will be a higher-quality crop of applicants as well.

Still, the question of whether to continue preferred admissions at colleges and universities represents the most formidable ideological hurdle for affirmative-action opponents. People who grumble about racial and gender favors in the workplace are not particularly troubled about making allowances for disadvantaged minority students applying to college. And while there are, in California, plenty of white parents of high school-age children who are annoyed at the possibility that affirmative-action policies might adversely affect their child’s chances of admission to UC Berkeley or UCLA, there are many others--ranging from liberal to conservative--who applaud minority students for trying to better themselves with a college education and who might view an attack on such preferences as ugly politics.

Linda Chavez, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a longtime critic--and admitted beneficiary--of affirmative action, also worries about the unintended consequence of limiting the number of minority students who enter universities. In opposing race- and gender-based preferences, she seeks to create ways to help the “deserving student who has overcome adversity, who is truly disadvantaged, who comes from a poor neighborhood [to succeed]” without considering skin color.

I know well the anxieties with which Chavez wrestles. I am a member of both the second generation of Mexican Americans to benefit from affirmative action and the first generation to do so having experienced little or no discrimination in the first place. Pressured by older politicos to join them in circling the wagons to preserve a hard-earned spoil of past civil rights victories, and bombarded with arguments about why racial preferences are worth preserving in the first place, I have resisted. What intrigues me is the idea that such programs are bad policy not because they discriminate against white males but because they cripple intended beneficiaries by lowering standards and killing individual initiative. A few years ago, when you could still get such information over the phone, a UC official told me that 70% of Latino applicants were accepted--that’s more than twice the rate for whites or Asians.

Day by day, I have moved toward a more critical view of a program that benefited me. I have become convinced that, while affirmative action was effective and necessary for my parents’ generation, it is the responsibility of my generation to boldly throw down this crutch and, in the process, grow stronger and more self-sufficient. What was passed onto me, I refuse to pass onto my own children.

And that is where it gets messy. In applying to college, I unwittingly struck a devil’s bargain with liberalism. I didn’t see the fine print on my application: Once I benefited from affirmative action, I could never criticize it later. Ralph G. Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, said recently that all who have benefited from affirmative action must now step forward to defend it. Why? Should mothers on welfare hold their critical tongue when asked about the efficacy of programs on which they depend?

The truth of the matter is that precisely those people who have benefited from preference programs and policies, and thus seen them up close, are in the best position to challenge them.

Still, in the Latino and African American communities, the debate over affirmative action is testing and straining the relationship between bright young stars who are critical of programs that, in part, made them what they are and those who, looking to the future, are worried that less affirmative action means diminished opportunity for young students who have yet to fill out their applications to, say, UC Berkeley. I am suddenly considered ungrateful, selfish and worse: Chicano affirmative-action baby now wants to bite the hand that fed him and deny your child the same opportunity he enjoyed.

But nothing about this complicated issue is as simple as either affirmative action’s harshest critics or its most devout supporters would have the rest of us believe. Those who oppose preferences have to acknowledge the obvious value of racial and gender diversity in a college environment as preparation for larger society. They have to concede that a minority student graduating from an inferior high school with a stunted sense of possibility can hardly be expected to compete, mano a mano , for college acceptance with a better-educated white who has spent years discussing, at the family dinner table, the various attributes of USC versus UCLA. They have to realize that tracking and “ability grouping” and dramatic financial inequities in public-school funding hardly add up to a level playing field.

On the other hand, true believers have some admissions of their own to make. They have to trust that, after 30 years and a generation, most American institutions of higher learning have learned the value of diversity and may no longer need the coercion of affirmative-action mandates to diversify their student body. They need to concede, as well, that lowering the bar of performance, even for the sake of achieving diversity, does students more harm than good by wrongly treating “Cs” as if they were “As” when, in the long run, “As” are better. They have to also realize that, while promising to expand opportunity, affirmative-action policies have had the negative consequences of putting off real education reform where it matters, at the K-12 level.

Yet, as I swipe away the entitlement of affirmative action, I will offer my brothers and sisters something more precious in return: the empowering satisfaction of knowing that, whatever they achieve in life, from this point forward, they will have accomplished fair and square with no lower standards and no thumb on the scale. That piece of mind was something I never was given with my feeding.