Abigail Fisher waited to speak to reporters at the Supreme Court on Wednesday after the justices heard arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, an affirmative-action case.
Perhaps two years ago when I sitting at a large conference room like the Varsity Hall, listening to an eloquent speaker, I had little associations in my mind with some of the most basic and extensive issues in the U.S. I was an FOB Chinese student to this country, and I was trying to interpret it at my own effort. Only till now have I realized that I cannot understand the United States without going through races, as China did not raise me to think that way.
It was my second time sitting with a couple hundred people in the Varsity Hall in Union South, University of Wisconsin-Madison. I had the honor to be part of the University’s annual Diversity Forum and listen to (in fact, I was working for the venue at the same time) civil rights attorney Lani Guinier‘s speech regarding current racial issues, education policies and multicultural intellectual development, etc. It was particularly inspirational and interesting for me as I just returned from talking to my professor of an immigration seminar about my paper on immigrants’ assimilation experiences.
It was also a coincidence that I came cross the news about debates from the Supreme Court on affirmative action, an impasse right now originated from the case of Fisher vs. UT-Austin. The courts were trying to get a more specific definition from the University of Texas-Austin about how much of diversity was ideal diversity and how can we decide race would not be necessary as part of the evaluation for getting higher education.
The definition of diversity has changed along the history in the United States. It started out with the exclusion of many non-White groups, such as blacks and Chinese. Later it moved onto the ‘separate but equal’ diversity, meaning a diversity without intersection. Finally, we came the age of affirmative action, which was supported as an instrument to correct racial discrimination in public institutions.
Truly, affirmative action was a necessary tool a while ago, which benefited many minority people disadvantaged by their races, so that they could reach at the platform where they can finally compete equally with the majority. The major paradox is that by benefiting one group for the sake of its race and discounting another on the same base, are we being fair and equal?
A widely read but never published paper from Duke University argued that affirmative action allowed less competent minority students to be admitted, and those students tended to switch to easier majors in their college career. The debates revolved around whether affirmative action benefited minority students at the cost of white students, with the negative ramifications including admitting unqualified students.
Many years ago, if some one is a minority, you would likely be able to predict one’s living condition. Now, there may be more prejudices or misunderstandings than accuracy if one would try to predict. The past in which race predicted social economic status has passed, and the present is institutional discrimination has been minimized. I am not trying to argue there is no racism, because I know there is still extensive discrimination and prejudices in people’s minds, which may disappear in the long run that at least everyone of my generation dies.
So what kind of diversity and how much are we looking for?
There are schools that completely abandon using race as a evaluation element, a possible result from the case against UT-Austin. Some adopted the strategy of reaching out to a diversity of communities, regardless of races, and reached out to people of economic disadvantages. I wonder if it would be OK to elevate someone from the lower-class at the expense of another candidate with same qualifications but from the middle class. When a case like this occurred, and when someone stood out like Fisher to oppose this philosophy, then what can we do?
An interesting question was raised in the Forum to Lani Guinier that whether she was seeing a trend in our society of more and more visible diversity instead of social diversity. Guinier simplified the question with the word “aesthetic diversity”. I couldn’t help think of how funny it was when I hear a Chinese friend of mine telling me how white-washed he was in a casual way. The so-called aesthetic diversity is the result of an old school of assimilation theory that all groups would eventually assimilate in the mainstream American society. Assimilation, meaning white-wash perhaps, is an inevitable result in this theory. Guinier said she wouldn’t like this result, though she agreed with the questioner that this might have been the trend.
I happened to be reading an extensive study done by Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut about assimilation experiences of the second generation immigrants in the book Legacies: The Story Of The Immigrant Second Generation lately. Portes and Rumbaut suggested that there are different patterns of assimilation outcomes, unlike the eventual and uniform assimilation outcome suggested by the older school in this field. With a mix of social, ethnic, economic and family backgrounds, as they argued, there were chances for immigrants to assimilate much better than others. The best outcome is a bilingual person who grasp both cultures and is able to preserve them without internal conflicts.
Speaking on a broader sense, the reason why we have international students like me on campus is to encourage an multinational or multicultural enrichment for the institution. Similarly, the purpose of racial or ethnic diversity on campus is also to enrich students and educate them to be inclusive individuals, who are able to collaborate with other groups in the society to create better social goods. Now we are promoting multinational exchanges so that we will have leaders who understand the world.
So is the diversity that we have been pursuing a final destination of cultural and social exchanges?
Are we pursuing a static point where we can finally give up all the criteria we use in order to reach good diversity?
The court asked the University how much diversity is enough and when is it the end of using race as way to increase diversity. Even if we stop thinking in terms of races, there will be other categories, like I mentioned, in the future and generate as much debates as race does today.
In the end, diversity is not a goal we aim for, because its nature is a never-ending process. Diversity means differences, slash, negotiation. In a society, when diversity as a process ends, there will be power imbalances. Diversity is exactly the process where we negotiate and are always trying to reach an unreachable equilibrium.
Affirmative action was the corrective mechanism for a market failure in social negotiation when the minorities did not have the access to supportive resources, such as quality education or better job positions. This mechanism might still last for a while, definitely not forever.
Long time ago, when affirmative action had positive results nationwide, our society needed the awareness and the respect for racial differences, because it was a necessary education for the public. Now, it’s really not awareness that we need, because it has become common sense to “be nice.” Therefore we must move on from the past of reminding people to “be nice” to a future where genuine respect for difference, diversity and negotiation prevails.
It might be another unforeseeable future, in the long run where everyone dies. As we can never really solve a problem, the point is that we are working on it. We can never have sufficient negotiation, or diversity, as long as winners and losers switch around.
