National
Scholar Says Race-Neutral Approach Needed for Affirmative Action
By Freddie Allen
NNPA Senior Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – In the wake of unrelenting law suits seeking to abolish affirmative action coupled with nearly half of all universities dropping consideration of race as a factor in college admissions, it is time to shift gears and devise a less objectionable race-neutral approach that will diversify higher education, says a noted Black law professor.
During a recent discussion on affirmative action at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Sheryll Cashin, a professor of law at Georgetown University and author of Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America, said that as long as race-conscious affirmative action remains a factor in college admission, there will always be White students challenging affirmative action.
Cashin, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, said “that law or politics will render race-based affirmative action extinct” and argued that it makes “sense to get started on race-neutral reforms that have the potential to create diversity and more social cohesion.”
She said that the percentage of four-year colleges that consider racial, ethnic or gender status in admissions has fallen from about 60 percent to 35 percent.
Others, however, do not favor a switch to de-emphasizing race and point to race-neutral affirmative programs in Texas and California that have not achieved the same results as previous race-conscious approaches. Even Texas’ 10 Percent Plan that guarantees the top 10 percent of each high school graduating class in Texas will be accepted at the University of Texas, the flagship campus, was challenged by a White applicant who had been rejected.
Backed by the Edward Blum’s Project for Fair Representation, a nonprofit group that wants to ban race-, gender- and ethnic-conscious affirmative action, Abigail Fisher a White woman, alleged that the University of Texas at Austin refused to accept her, because she was White, while Black and Latino students that she outperformed were admitted
Admission officials look at factors in addition to grade to determine the composition of an incoming class, not just grades.
In its “Brief of Opposition,” the university said: “The undisputed evidence demonstrated that Fisher would not have been offered fall admission in 2008 even if she had scored a perfect ‘6’ on her PAI – the portion of the admissions process where race is considered as ‘a factor of a factor of a factor.’”
Investigating Fisher’s claims, Pro Publica reported that 42 White students with less impressive grades than Fisher got in compared to just five Black and Latino students with similar academic achievement. Meanwhile, almost 170 Black and Latino students with the same or better grades as Fisher were also turned away.
In the 2012 term, the Supreme Court punted in Fisher v. University of Texas, sending the case back to the lower court for reconsideration. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the 7-1 majority, said: “…Strict scrutiny imposes on the university the ultimate burden of demonstrating before turning to racial classifications, that available, workable race-neutral alternatives do not suffice.”
In other words, the university had the burden of showing that show that gender- ethnicity- and race-conscious affirmative action admission policies are the only way to effectively achieve diversity on campus.
After the case was remanded, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit again ruled in favor of the University of Texas.
In 2003, the Supreme Court issued a pair of rulings involving University of Michigan that many thought had settled the issue.
By a vote of 6-3, the justices outlawed an undergraduate admissions process that, among other things, automatically awarded 20 points to people of color. But on a 5-4, the Supreme Court ruled that race could still be a factor in admissions as long as it is not given too much weight.
However, led by anti-affirmative action foe Ward Connerly, in 2006, Michigan voters banned the use of race in public education and employment, a state constitutional amendment that was later upheld by the Supreme Court.
In the May/June 2014 issue of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council (PRRAC) journal, Cashin, who is also a PRRAC board member, wrote that “place rather than race in diversity programming will better approximate the structural disadvantages many children of color actually endure, while enhancing the possibility that we might one day move past the racial resentment affirmative action engenders.”
Cashin said that when college graduates sequester themselves it can lead to a phenomenon known as “opportunity hoarding,” when a well-resourced, educated ingroup sanctions practices that exclude outgroups.
“And the exclusion does not have to be intentional,” said Cashin.
Cashin said that place, or where you live, locks in advantages and disadvantages that are reinforced over time.
“What has happened increasingly is the affluent and the highly educated are separated from everyone else and that often determines who has access to high quality elementary and secondary education,” said Cashin.
“And when you have geographic concentration of highly educated affluent people in direct horizontal competition with people from lower-income impoverished settings for finite public resources you get savage inequality in the allocation of public resources,” said Cashin. “College-bound students from middle- and low-income environments, particularly African Americans students, disproportionately attend segregated schools and they have to be superhuman to overcome the structural disadvantages of place.”
In Cashin’s article on affirmative action published in the PRRAC journal, she concedes that, “Fewer African Americans may enter elite institutions under an affirmative action system based on structural disadvantage rather than under race-based affirmative action.” However, she argued that the social costs of racial-conscious programs outweigh any marginal benefits when race-neutral alternatives are available.
Lia Epperson, a law professor at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, D.C., said that addressing racial disparities is not about totally abandoning policies that use race. She said it’s about the robust enforcement of laws that bar discrimination and inequality, existing compliance reviews that have proven helpful at the elementary and secondary education levels and expanding the role of data collection and the dissemination of data.
“The reality is that we are in a time that is difficult, because we do have this societal indecision with respect to matters of race,” said Epperson, who formerly led the education law and policy group of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “The reality is also that we have a Constitution that supports remedying a history of slavery and Jim Crow. We have to expand our political imagination beyond the reality of the moment.”
Richard Rothstein, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute said on the panel:
“There’s no doubt that we need to pretend to be colorblind in the current legal climate, but it’s also very important to realize that we have a separate challenge from the challenge of enhancing equity. And that is the challenge of increasing justice.”
Rothstein added, “We have a constitutional obligation to undue centuries of slavery, segregation and exploitation. As recent events have demonstrated to everybody, we have made very little progress in undoing that unconstitutional placement of African Americans in a caste system in this society.”
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Arts and Culture
In ‘Affrilachia: Testimonies,’ Puts Blacks in Appalacia on the Map
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez
An average oak tree is bigger around than two people together can reach.
That mighty tree starts out with an acorn the size of a nickel, ultimately growing to some 80 feet tall, with a canopy of a hundred feet or more across.
And like the new book, “Affrilachia” by Chris Aluka Berry (with Kelly Elaine Navies and Maia A. Surdam), its roots spread wide and wider.
Affriclachia is a term a Kentucky poet coined in the 1990s referring to the Black communities in Appalachia who are similarly referred to as Affrilachians.
In 2016, “on a foggy Sunday morning in March,” Berry visited Affrilachia for the first time by going the Mount Zion AME Zion Church in Cullowhee, North Carolina. The congregation was tiny; just a handful of people were there that day, but a pair of siblings stood out to him.
According to Berry, Ann Rogers and Mae Louise Allen lived on opposite sides of town, and neither had a driver’s license. He surmised that church was the only time the elderly sisters were together then, but their devotion to one another was clear.
As the service ended, he asked Allen if he could visit her. Was she willing to talk about her life in the Appalachians, her parents, her town?
She was, and arrangements were made, but before Barry could get back to Cullowhee, he learned that Allen had died. Saddened, he wondered how many stories are lost each day in mountain communities where African Americans have lived for more than a century.
“I couldn’t make photographs of the past,” he says, “but I could document the people and places living now.”
In doing so he also offers photographs that he collected from people he met in ‘Affrilachia,’ in North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, at a rustic “camp” that was likely created by enslaved people, at churches, and in modest houses along highways.
The people he interviewed recalled family tales and community stories of support, hardship, and home.
Says coauthor Navies, “These images shout without making a sound.”
If it’s true what they say about a picture being worth 1,000 words, then “Affrilachia,” as packed with photos as it is, is worth a million.
With that in mind, there’s not a lot of narrative inside this book, just a few poems, a small number of very brief interviews, a handful of memories passed down, and some background stories from author Berry and his co-authors. The tales are interesting but scant.
For most readers, though, that lack of narrative isn’t going to matter much. The photographs are the reason why you’d have this book.
Here are pictures of life as it was 50 years or a century ago: group photos, pictures taken of proud moments, worn pews, and happy children. Some of the modern pictures may make you wonder why they’re included, but they set a tone and tell a tale.
This is the kind of book you’ll take off the shelf, and notice something different every time you do. “Affrilachia” doesn’t contain a lot of words, but it’s a good choice when it’s time to branch out in your reading.
“Affrilachia: Testimonies,” by Chris Aluka Berry with Kelly Elaine Navies and Maia A. Surdam
c.2024, University of Kentucky Press, $50.00.
Black History
Alice Parker: The Innovator Behind the Modern Gas Furnace
Born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1895, Alice Parker lived during a time when women, especially African American women, faced significant social and systemic barriers. Despite these challenges, her contributions to home heating technology have had a lasting impact.
By Tamara Shiloh
Alice Parker was a trailblazing African American inventor whose innovative ideas forever changed how we heat our homes.
Born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1895, Parker lived during a time when women, especially African American women, faced significant social and systemic barriers. Despite these challenges, her contributions to home heating technology have had a lasting impact.
Parker grew up in New Jersey, where winters could be brutally cold. Although little is documented about her personal life, her education played a crucial role in shaping her inventive spirit. She attended Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C., where she may have developed her interest in practical solutions to everyday challenges.
Before Parker’s invention, most homes were heated using wood or coal-burning stoves. These methods were labor-intensive, inefficient, and posed fire hazards. Furthermore, they failed to provide even heating throughout a home, leaving many rooms cold while others were uncomfortably warm.
Parker recognized the inefficiency of these heating methods and imagined a solution that would make homes more comfortable and energy-efficient during winter.
In 1919, she patented her design for a gas-powered central heating system, a groundbreaking invention. Her design used natural gas as a fuel source to distribute heat throughout a building, replacing the need for wood or coal. The system allowed for thermostatic control, enabling homeowners to regulate the temperature in their homes efficiently.
What made her invention particularly innovative was its use of ductwork, which channeled warm air to different parts of the house. This concept is a precursor to the modern central heating systems we use today.
While Parker’s design was never fully developed or mass-produced during her lifetime, her idea laid the groundwork for modern central heating systems. Her invention was ahead of its time and highlighted the potential of natural gas as a cleaner, more efficient alternative to traditional heating methods.
Parker’s patent is remarkable not only for its technical innovation but also because it was granted at a time when African Americans and women faced severe limitations in accessing patent protections and recognition for their work. Her success as an inventor during this period is a testament to her ingenuity and determination.
Parker’s legacy lives on in numerous awards and grants – most noticeably in the annual Alice H. Parker Women Leaders in Innovation Award. That distinction is given out by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce to celebrate outstanding women innovators in Parker’s home state.
The details of Parker’s later years are as sketchy as the ones about her early life. The specific date of her death, along with the cause, are also largely unknown.
Activism
U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club
Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”
By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”
Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.
Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”
Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.
“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”
On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”
He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.
Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”
With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”
He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”
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