Getting to Equality Means Creating Equitable Opportunities: Update on My Rantings on Affirmative Action
Or, Day 10: 30 Days of My Blah-Blah-Blah
Jia Tolentino nails it in her analysis of the Abigail Fisher Supreme Court case on Jezebel.com. Fisher claims she was unfairly not admitted to UT Austin, the whitest UT location in the state. Tolentino quotes Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 2013 ProPublica piece: “University officials claim in court filings that even if Fisher received points for her race and every other personal achievement factor, the letter she received in the mail still would have said no.”
What’s also not widely known is that Fisher was offered admission to UT Austin her sophomore year if she completed her first year at another UT campus with a GPA of 3.2 or better. Apparently, this is a standard UT offer.
But this wasn’t in keeping with Fisher’s understanding of what her white privilege should get her, perhaps because the other UT locations are significantly less white. So she declined the offer and decided to have that rich white guy make her a poster child for stupidity.
When Equal Isn’t Equitable
Over the weekend, a friend reminded me that people misunderstand the difference between equitable and equal. Equitable is “fair,” “just,” and “right”; equal is “the same.”
One of the things that Abigail Fisher says, which just makes my eyes roll and my stomach turn, reflects this idea that we are living in some world where race isn’t a negative any more. There are two things wrong with this idea. One is the most obvious: The data show that we have not achieved racial equity in employment, housing, lending practices, or just about any measure you want to choose. Nor do people believe that we have; 61% say more changes are needed, according to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey.
The less obvious (to many) problem is that this is the case because the playing field has neither been level (to wit, post-war housing policies, among other historical practices that give whites a nice handicap) nor is it level now. Research shows that racism affects the job market: The same resume submitted under two different names, one Anglo-sounding and one not, will get a different response. All you have to do is have a black-sounding name for people to decide you’ll be a trouble-maker in school or “imagined to be physically large, dangerous and violent.”
Can anyone reading or watching the news every day really think we’ve achieved any kind of racial neutrality? The 2016 Pew poll indicated that a substantial number of people — 30% — think there have been enough changes to give blacks equal rights with blacks. Perhaps Abigail Fisher is one of those people. Has she not noticed that in Trump’s version of America, white people feel justified in attacking Arabs, Africans, African-Americans, Latin@s, and others with words, fists, baseball bats, and bombs.
The Google Fray
In Silicon Valley, same basic problem, only with more of a focus on women. The memo writer may or may not be one of the 30% who think enough has been done; he sounds like someone who doesn’t believe anything can be done because women are simply inferior.
But Google made a colossal error by firing him, not because a company can’t control the speech of its employees but because it was an opportunity to start a dialogue, the very thing you would think a company that strives for “diversity and inclusion” might do. That doesn’t sound like support for diversity to me.
It would have been interesting, really interesting, to hear what the employee said when his boss said to him, “What are your thoughts about whether Google is a good fit for you?”