Challenging Conventional Notions of Affirmative Action & Blackness: Utilizing Intersectionality to Amplify the Perspectives of Descendants of American Slavery in Elite College Admissions

Kamilah Moore
16 min readDec 8, 2024

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  • Written by Kamilah V. Moore (Originally published in Fall 2017 as a Columbia Law School student in Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectionality Seminar).

An 82-year-old woman, enslaved at birth, learns to read. She is working to get the things she couldn’t have as a young woman, even in her later years. Gee’s Bend, Alabama. May 1939.

On August 13, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice notified Yale University of its findings that Yale illegally discriminates against Asian American and white applicants in its undergraduate admissions process in violation of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The letter, which came after a two-year investigation, is a major escalation of the Trump administration’s attacks on affirmative action. In light of this recent news, I re-worked a research paper originally written in 2017 for Professor Kimberle W. Crenshaw’s Intersectionality Seminar at Columbia Law School.

On September 20, 2017, board members of the Black Students United organization at Cornell University delivered a list of demands to their university president. One of the demands requested a “plan to actively increase the number of underrepresented Black students on [the] campus”, defining underrepresented Black students as “Black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country.” In expounding on this demand, board members of the BSU stated:

“…the Black student population at Cornell disproportionately represents international or first-generation African or Caribbean students. While these students have a right to flourish at Cornell, there is a lack of investment in Black students whose families were affected directly by the African Holocaust in America. Cornell must work to actively support students whose families have been impacted for generations by white supremacy and American fascism.”

This particular demand generated widespread media attention and prompted many negative responses from international and first- and second-generation African and Caribbean students at Cornell, which then reverberated throughout various college campuses.

One of the more notable critiques came from undergraduate student Chimaoge Ibe in the Harvard Political Review. In Wrong Targets: Black Xenophobia and Cornell’s BSU, Ibe referred to the demand related to African and Caribbean students as an “ignorant surrender to xenophobic impulses” and “foolishness [which] insults black immigrants and first-gens, and only serves to weaken the entire black community in its fight against the forces that oppress all its members.”

Herein lied Ibe’s larger concern with Cornell BSU’s demand: in highlighting the disproportionate representation of international or first-generation African or Caribbean students, Cornell BSU leaders, either knowingly or unknowingly, contributed to what Ibe considered a larger trend of xenophobia in America, while simultaneously contributing to the division of the African diaspora.

The debate regarding who ‘counts’ as an underrepresented Black student is not new. Almost yearly there is a news article highlighting the success of a Black high school student who gets accepted to every Ivy League school, often revealed later to be either a first- or second-generation student of immigrant origin. For instance, in praising Kwasi Enin, a first-generation Ghanian-American student accepted by all eight Ivy League schools in 2014, IvyWise CEO Katherine Cohen proclaimed that “being a first-generation American from Ghana also helps him stand out. He’s not a typical African-American kid.” Such a statement begs the question: what did she mean by ‘the typical African-American kid’? Did she merely mean Black people who have lived in the United States for multiple generations? Or is her statement more loaded?

Harvard University alumni and professors Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates noted sixteen years ago at a Black alumni event that 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates, were Black with “the majority of them [Black students at Harvard], perhaps as many as two-thirds, [being] West Indian and African immigrants or their children.” Only about one-third of their Harvard class comprised of American descendants of west and central Africans who were trafficked to the United States.

From the perspective of these two professors, the implication of this phenomenon is that Black American descendants of slavery are being overlooked in higher education admissions. Even further, this phenomenon implies that American descendants of slavery, who many argue are the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action, are being left behind, particularly at the most selective colleges and universities where there is perceived to be closer proximity or access to influence, power, and wealth.

There are meritorious positions on both sides of the debate. Yet, as stated by Ibe in Wrong Targets, there is a potential framing problem with Cornel BSU’s demand. While there is nothing inherently wrong with demanding university administration address the underrepresentation of American descendants of slavery on college campuses, concerns of promoting xenophobia and ‘divide-and-conquer’ tactics can be legitimately raised if the debate centers the disproportionate representation of international and first- and second-generation African and Caribbean students as compared to or juxtaposed against American descendants of slavery on college campuses.

This ‘zero-sum’ framing also promotes division within the African diaspora, as the message conveys that American descendants of slavery can only succeed at the expense of international and first- and second-generation African and Caribbean students and vice versa. In effect, this rigid, juxtapositional framing of the demand, which also fails to acknowledge the social and historical context of post-colonialism and its effects on immigration, has inadvertently exacerbated existing tensions within Black academic and activist spaces, as reflected in Ibe’s critique.

It is not enough to proclaim that elite colleges and universities need to make greater investments in Black American descendants of slavery, and it is also misguided to juxtapose their admissions rates to those of other groups without a deeper analysis; one must situate this proclamation in a particular historical, social, and even political context, which is infinitely possible without alienating first or second-generation students of African and Caribbean immigrant origin.

In this essay, I aim to explore the debate of who counts as a ‘Black student’ in order to offer a fundamental reframing of the issues and the debate at-large. Henceforth, I will center American descendants of slavery in this analysis in order to tease out their particular experiences from the often one-dimensional and traditional constructions of race in the United States, which, ironically, seem to obscure the lived experiences of American descendants of slavery in elite higher education admissions and society more broadly. The core of this essay will not focus on the disproportionate representation of first- and second-generation African and Caribbean students in elite higher education admissions; while I reference the admissions statistics of the aforementioned groups towards the conclusion, it is only as a brief frame of reference.

Instead, I will highlight and make use of the theory of intersectionality as it relates to race, ethnicity, and nationality in order to make the larger point that certain interventions are, in fact, needed for American descendants of slavery seeking admission to institutions of higher education, and particularly to selective colleges and universities. Furthermore, none of the proposed interventions would function to exclude African and Caribbean immigrants or first and second-generation students on college campuses or reduce their admissions rates to institutions of higher education.

II. Race as An Evolving Social Construct

Traditional constructions of race in America have been complicated by post-colonialism and immigration. So, what does it mean to be a Black person in America, today? Prior to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the majority of Black Americans living in the United States were almost exclusively direct descendants of Africans who were trafficked to and enslaved in the Deep South, southeastern and other parts of the United States.

When the United States Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, many African and Caribbean countries were gaining independence from their European colonial masters. This seminal piece of legislation played a major role in U.S. demographic shifts as it ended the ‘National Origins Formula’, a policy that had been in place since the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 (whereby the admission of immigrants from western and northern European countries was favored, while the admission of immigrants from countries within Africa and the Caribbean were drastically limited). Consequently, the foreign-born Black population in the United States rose nearly seven-fold between 1965 and 1980 and more than tripled between 1980 and 2005.

AAPI Data

Immigration contributed to about 17 percent of the growth of the U.S. Black population in the 1990s, and at least 20 percent between 2000 and 2006. In all, the foreign share of the U.S. Black population increased from less than 1 percent to 8 percent between 1965 and 2005. This data suggests that the concept of what it means to be Black in America is evolving as demographics within the Black community shift to include the increasing numbers of African and Caribbean immigrants coming to the states.

While Black people of immigrant origin share similarities with each other and with American descendants of slavery, there are also fundamental differences between each groups’ immigration patterns and cultures that are worth considering (notably American descendants of slavery were kidnapped from Africa and forced to work on labor camps called plantations in the United States). Even in recognizing the differences between African and Caribbean foreign-born people and American descendants of slavery, they are all often referred to as ‘Black or African-American’.

For instance, former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s parents are from Jamaica. Former Attorney General Eric Holder’s family emigrated from Barbados. Former United States President Barack Obama’s father emigrated from Kenya. The late Congresswoman Shirley Chisolm’s parents emigrated from British Guiana and Barbados. United States Senator and now U.S. Vice Presenditial candidate Kamala Harris’s parents emigrated from Jamaica and India. Yet, each of these notable figures is considered to be the first ‘African-American’ holders of their respective positions. While these designations are technically true, such framing has worked to misrepresent and even obscure the (academic and political) accomplishments of American descendants of slavery.

The larger implication of this one-size-fits-all descriptor (of Blackness/Black/African-American) is that it homogenizes otherwise heterogeneous characteristics of an ever-evolving Black population in the United States. Due to this homogenization, ethnicity, and nationality are often deemphasized and as a result, distinctions among people who so happen to be of the same race but who vary in ethnicity and nationality are often ignored.

III. The Urgency of Intersectionality

Intersectionality functions as a buzzword in many different spaces, and as a result, there are competing views of what the term actually means. Some people think intersectionality is too complicated or non-exhaustive and, in turn, refrain from deeply engaging with the legal and sociological theory and its practical implications.

Alternatively, some people regard intersectionality as an amplified version of identity politics. Since identity politics has a somewhat negative connotation in American society, the misconception that intersectionality is an amplified or more complicated version of identity politics only serves to underplay and even discredit the theory’s significance.

Identity politics is inherently simplistic and is based on the notion that particular aspects of identity are fixed while intersectionality is about describing the variety of intersecting oppressions hyper-marginalized communities face (e.g. Black women experience a distinctively gendered form of racism and a racialized form of sexism). Intersectionality theory re-focuses attention upon systems and structures rather than on the identity of the individual.

Law professor Kimberle W. Crenshaw first coined the term ‘intersectionality’ in a legal paper entitled, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics. The paper, which was published over 28 years ago at the University of Chicago Legal Forum, describes the ways in which multiple oppressions are experienced by members of historically marginalized communities. More specifically, the paper describes the intersecting effects of racism and sexism on Black American women. Crenshaw describes several Title VII cases, such as DeGraffenried v. General Motors, and utilizes the following analogy referring to an intersection at a traffic stop to concretize the theory:

“Consider an analogy to traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all four directions. Discrimination, like traffic through an intersection, may flow in one direction, and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. . . . But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: Sometimes the skid marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused the harm.”

By utilizing this analogy, Crenshaw makes the larger argument that certain individuals or groups of people, such as Black women, face multiple oppressions and that it is often difficult to ascertain where the discrimination stems from. Thus, intersectionality is an incredibly valuable concept and analytical tool as it allows for a more nuanced understanding of discrimination. Intersectionality allows us to understand that discrimination comes in multiple forms, and can inform one another, which, in turn, has created new experiences of oppression that cannot be easily conceptualized by linear or singular-issue narratives.

As self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” Audre Lorde once proclaimed, “there is no [such] thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Yet, it is important to note that intersectionality is not about the politics of recognition. At its core, intersectionality is about the relationship between identity and power and about how certain groups have been historically impacted by institutional structures of power.

The lens of intersectionality also allows us to identify the root causes of discrimination. As Professor Crenshaw emphasized in a recent talk on the urgency of intersectionality, “if you cannot see the problem, then you cannot solve the problem.” Utilizing intersectionality to investigate and interrogate race and ‘Blackness’ as social constructs allow for a more transformative understanding of race, ethnicity, and nationality. This is why it is incredibly urgent to apply an analytical framework such as intersectionality to the issues of race and Blackness in America: not only does intersectionality allow us to see the problem more vividly, but it also helps us to propose more informed and meaningful solutions.

IV. The Implications of the Radical Reconstruction Era and Affirmative Action on American Descendants of Slavery Educational Attainment

Nearly four million enslaved Africans in America were suddenly free when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Subsequently, the remainder of the enslaved who were not made aware of the Emancipation Proclamation and its implications were officially granted their freedom after Congress formally abolished slavery in 1865. Yet, what were emancipated Black people to do once free, especially without compensation?

Contrary to popular belief, newly freed Black women, men, and children were empowered to control their own destinies and did not stay idle. During the first period of Reconstruction, seven emancipated Black men from southern states became elected Congressmen. A majority-Black legislature in South Carolina taxed the (white) rich to support public schools. Emancipated Black people were pioneers of collective self-determination in America, most notably in the Georgia Sea Islands, where 400 freedmen and women divided up the land, planted crops, started schools, and created a democratic system with their own armed militia, constitution, congress, and supreme court.

Enslaved Africans in the United States were denied the human right to education. In fact, enslaved Africans in America could face torture and even death if they were caught reading or writing. In Black Reconstruction of America, sociologist, writer, and activist W.E.B. DuBois emphasized that unlike the white laboring class who largely viewed education as a luxury connected to wealth, given their relationship with education prior to emancipation, the newly emancipated Black laboring class “connected knowledge with power” and “believed that education was the stepping-stone to wealth and respect, and that wealth, without education, was crippled.” Consequently, emancipated Black people demanded educational services in mass. This extraordinary demand for education on behalf of emancipated Black people is well described by educator and influencer Booker T. Washington:

“Few people who were not right in the midst of the scenes can form any exact idea of the intense desire which the people of my race showed for education. It was a whole race trying to go to school. Few were too young, and none too old, to make the attempt to learn. As fast as any kind of teachers could be secured, not only were day-schools filled but night-schools as well. The great ambition of the older people was to try to learn to read the Bible before they died. With this end in view, men and women who were fifty and seventy-five years old would be found in the night-schools. Sunday-schools were formed soon after freedom, but the principal book studied in the Sunday-school was the spelling-book. Day-school, night-school, and Sunday-school were always crowded, and often many had to be turned away for want of room.”

National Archives

This incredible demand for education was an effective force for the establishment of public schools throughout the United States. Prior to the Civil War, there were virtually no universally state-funded public school systems. During Reconstruction, however, thousands of educational facilities were being built at an unprecedented rate, which was the direct result of newly freed Black people, in large part, leading a movement to secure public education for themselves.

The election of 1876 reflected a fundamentally violent backlash against the progress emancipated Black people had made for themselves between the short period of 1865 and 1876. The southern Democrats resorted to armed terrorism to prevent Black citizens from voting in the election. Consequently, the Democrats won the election, and soon after, funding for the education of Black people was either drastically diminished or eliminated altogether.

The election led to the socio-economic and political abandonment of emancipated Black people. As a result, Black people in the South found themselves subject to racist and draconian policies like the Black Codes. American descendants of slavery also faced de facto and de jure discrimination during the Jim Crow era which severely limited the civil liberties and civil rights granted to them by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the United States Constitution.

The election of 1876 was so monumental that it critically impacted the educational attainment and determined the future of the majority of American descendants of slavery until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Prior to the civil rights movement, American descendants of slavery were largely excluded from colleges and universities that were not designated historically Black colleges and universities. Black American descendants of slavery also faced obstacles integrating all-white schools after the Supreme Court issued its second decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), holding that school desegregation must proceed “with all deliberate speed,” but set no specific timetable.

The educational landscape started to change after Congress enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After its enactment, elite colleges and universities began to initiate “affirmative action” programs to increase enrollment of American descendants of slavery. As expressed in a speech made by President Lyndon B. Johnson at Howard University’s Commencement Address (June 4, 1965), race-based admissions programs, such as affirmative action, were initially enacted to provide restitution for race-based chattel slavery in the United States:

“You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the commencement address to the 1965 graduating class of Howard University. In the speech, which was delivered two months before he signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Johnson detailed his civil rights vision.

According to this logic, elite colleges and universities were justified in deliberately recruiting American descendants of slavery to rectify over 6 generations of racism and exclusion. Yet, in inevitably broadening the scope of civil rights advocacy to also include other marginalized groups, the moral justification for affirmative action in higher education admissions shifted from providing restitution for chattel slavery and eliminating the legacy of anti-Black racism and fascism in the United States to promoting a more generalized form of multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion.

V. Intersectionality-Informed Interventions

So, which groups stand to benefit from this fundamental reframing of affirmative action from restitution for chattel slavery to diversity and inclusion for its own sake? In addition to white women and first and second-generation students of Asian and Latinx descent, recent studies have demonstrated that an often overlooked group of people also benefit: Black people of immigrant origin. Data analysts found that although first- and second-generation Black immigrants aged 18–19 years old accounted for only about 13 percent of the United States’ Black population, this group comprised 27 percent of all Black freshmen admitted to elite colleges and universities in 1999. This number may be larger today.

An intersectional analysis reveals that American descendants of slavery are a minority within a minority of minorities in elite college and graduate admissions. The presence of Black immigrant, indigenous, and other people of color collegians at elite colleges and universities enhance campus diversity and multiculturalism. Yet, it is important to consider who can be harmed, disadvantaged, and hyper-marginalized when we view Blackness as a monolith or, for instance, when we lose specificity and label the aforementioned groups with monikers and catch-alls, like ‘BIPOC’.

In all, Black American descendants of slavery are not fully benefiting from affirmative action, a higher education initiative initially created to redress past wrongs committed against enslaved Africans in the United States and their direct descendants. In acknowledging the dual purposes of affirmative action: 1) restitution for chattel slavery and 2) promoting diversity and inclusion, I propose the following intersectionality-informed interventions:

  • Reexamine admissions policies and data collection at elite colleges and universities
  • Build and maintain the practice of disaggregating data below the level of major racial groups on the federal level, state and local levels (ex. ‘Black American descendant of chattel slavery’ designation on the U.S. Census)
  • Build and maintain the practice of disaggregating data below the level of major racial groups at elite colleges and universities and linking that data to factors related to college admissions and retention rates
  • Create legacy-based special admissions programs for American descendants of slavery at elite private colleges & universities (in line with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 directive speech)
  • Create race-based special admissions programs for American descendants of slavery at elite public colleges and universities in states where affirmative action is legal (ex. upon passage of Proposition 16 in California)
  • Create pre-college initiatives at the K-12 level targeting American descendants of slavery
  • Raise awareness about the history of affirmative action and Black-within-group diversity in the mainstream media
  • Pay reparations to American descendants of slavery in accordance with the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and international law.

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Kamilah Moore
Kamilah Moore

Written by Kamilah Moore

UCLA alumna. Organizer. Filmmaker. Researcher. Writer. Friend of justice. Foe of ignorance. Aspiring human rights lawyer.

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