Wounds That Will Not Heal: Affirmative Action and Our Continuing Racial Divide by Russell K Nieli

Author:Russell K Nieli [Nieli, Russell K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Ideologies, Social Policy, Political Science, Conservatism & Liberalism
ISBN: 9781594035821
Google: TaMNuiF7lScC
Goodreads: 13236113
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2012-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

Admissions deans are not likely to send out such a letter, although it would conform to the prescription the River Pilots offer for making lower-achieving black and Latino students feel welcomed and valued on highly competitive college campuses even though they may not be equal to others in terms of narrow “test-taking ability.” People who gain admission to prestigious colleges usually want to think they got accepted on some genuine accomplishment—if not top academic performance then at least some valued nonacademic achievement, as in music or sports. But being told that one is valued because one is an African American or member of an “underrepresented minority group” would be taken by most as both an insult to the group (“Truth be told, Ms. Jones, without special admissions few from your group could make it”), and to the individual given preferential acceptance (“You have a pretty good scholastic record Ms. Jones—for an African American”). Focusing on being valued because of one’s race or ethnicity, or for some other nonacademic reason, would seem to be a prescription for enhancing the disidentification—or lukewarm identification—with the realm of learning that the River Pilots themselves believe is partially responsible for underperformance among many black and Latino youth. Such valuation is not likely to lead to greater ease of integration into a white- and Asian-dominated campus and will surely increase protective self-segregation by black and Latino students told that their race or ethnicity is what helped them gain admission to a competitive college.

At one point the authors of River III suggest a comparison between the lowered standards for underrepresented minorities and those for athletes and legacies, and they conclude that just as the latter two groups are not stigmatized by lowered standards and do not display underperformance, so wise policy should enable the minorities to achieve similar results. But they are clearly wrong about the stigma issue regarding recruited athletes, at least those in the higher-profile sports, who are probably even more negatively stigmatized in terms of their intellectual abilities (“dumb jocks”) than blacks or Latinos, and the most comprehensive study of the academic performance of recruited athletes finds a pattern of underperformance (achieving grades in college below that predicted by one’s SAT scores and high school grades) very similar to that of blacks. Legacies are a different matter, since they usually have entering credentials better than recruited athletes or blacks (i.e., admissions officers do not reach down as far to accept them unless their parents are really big-bucks donors), and not being visibly recognizable as such, legacies are presumably less prone to the debilitating effects of stigma and stereotype threat.138 And they also do not confront the disincentive effects of an across-the-board system of preferences such as that in place for blacks and Latinos, which reaches well beyond college to professional schools, graduate schools, and jobs in the corporate sector.

The River Pilots are simply wrong to believe that perceptions about racial minorities who receive admissions preferences can be easily manipulated by college administrators and faculty.

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