Pictured: UC Berkeley – Sproul Hall, Photo Credit: Wally Gobetz
The following is an opinion contribution and reflects the author’s views alone.
There is deep irony underlying today’s progressive movement. While progressives claim to fight systemic racism and represent society’s most vulnerable, their policies achieve exactly what they claim to find so morally reprehensible. In an attempt to rectify historical injustices and achieve an “anti-racist” utopia, progressives have mistakenly adopted famous anti-racist Ibram X. Kendi’s mantra that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.”
Affirmative action has once again returned to the table in the form of Assembly Constitutional Amendment No. 5 (ACA-5). ACA-5 is California Democrats’ latest attempt to codify discrimination into law while deceptively euphemizing this initiative as righting historical wrongs and empowering minorities. ACA-5 will strike down the California Constitution’s anti-discrimination provision, Proposition 209, a section that borrows language from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The University of California System, which includes some of the most elite institutions of public higher education in the country, has unanimously endorsed ACA-5, an iniquitous display of virtue signalling at the expense of students’ success.
A central tenet of ACA-5 is that minorities need an institutionalized form of patronization to get into college, which is not only insulting but empirically false. A widely-circulated and cherry-picked piece of data claims that after the implementation of Proposition 209, the percentage of black students at UC Berkeley dropped from 8 to 3.6 percent in the year after implementation. Despite this drop at the flagship Berkeley campus, overall trends show that the number of Black and Hispanic enrolled undergraduates across the entire UC system steadily increased between 1998-2006 (controlled for population growth). Ten years after the passage of Proposition 209, “non-white ethnic minorities constituted over 60% of all freshmen and transfers at the University of California.” Today, minority students of California are still reaping the benefits of Proposition 209. As Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University found in his landmark study, a greater number of minorities began to enroll in less selective, although still academically rigorous, UC campuses, where they experienced significant academic improvement. Colleges began to focus more resources on keeping its enrolled students in school. Graduation rates and GPAs of minority students increased across the board, especially for STEM majors. These findings specific to Proposition 209 are in concordance with other well-established research which concludes that the best service to students is matching them with their appropriate academic fits—something affirmative action wants to villainize. No matter how “elite” the university is, a college degree proves more significant in affecting earning potential and upward class mobility than the credentialing effects of attending a top university.
However, the biggest mistake that ACA-5 makes isn’t the false premise that affirmative action will help minorities, but rather its insistence of a misguided vision of “equal opportunity.” Their vision trades real equality for discrimination against Asian Americans. Many already know of the alarming course that affirmative action has taken in its discrimination against Asian students among colleges practicing this policy, evidenced by ample empirical studies and a class action lawsuit against Harvard. College admissions standards reveal that, on average, Asian American students score 270 points higher than their Latino counterparts and 450 points higher than their Black counterparts. A Center for Equal Opportunity study also showed that even when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic status, extra-curricular activities, grades, test scores, and athletics, Asian Americans were less likely to be admitted to America’s top colleges than Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics. Asian Americans have been dealt discrimination in the name of “anti-racist equality.”
This is not to say that Black and Latino students aren’t deserving of acceptance into highly selective colleges. Everyone should have an opportunity to pursue higher education, and inequalities in access to education should be addressed at the foundation. The first issue on the list for California should be addressing the flaws in its K-12 public education system that has so utterly failed its minority students. Only 10 percent of African Americans and 15 percent of Hispanics scored at or above the proficient level when taking an eighth-grade math test as of 2019. These are the issues the state of California should be aggressively trying to eliminate, rather than funnelling millions of dollars into the UC system’s “diversity faculty” salaries. Per usual, progressives have trouble understanding what the difference between an outcome and an opportunity is. Anyone who simply wants to go to UC Berkeley or another elite school should not have guaranteed admission; that’s why getting admitted into these elite institutions is an outcome that comes with tenacity, hard work, and academic excellence.
Liberal activists have tried to make affirmative action a fringe issue even when 73% of Americans, including 65% of Hispanics, 62% of blacks and 58% of Asians, agree that universities should not consider race or ethnicity in admission decisions to any degree, according to Pew. Blacks and Hispanics—more so than Asians—overwhelming oppose affirmative action for good reason. Many of us are tired of being diminished to “affirmative action beneficiaries,” and have our attendance at top universities constantly questioned so that California Democrats can pat themselves on the back. ACA-5 sets the dangerous precedent that discrimination is now acceptable in higher education, even though its proponents irrresponsbly claim it will merely allow race as one of several factors for consideration in admissions. However, when the amendment dangerously removes an entire anti-discrimination section in the California Constitution, we must acknowledge its explicit purpose as well as the flipside of the coin: If you can be admitted because of your race, you can be rejected because of your race. You are no longer represented by your personality, achievements, or morals but rather by your immutable characteristics.
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