Race (Still) Matters

Inside Higher Education, August 13, 2007

Advocates for black students have long turned to social scientists for help. Think of Kenneth Clark’s experiments with children and black and white dolls, work that was cited in Brown v. Board of Education. More recently, social scientists were mobilized to file briefs (with some success) on behalf of landmark Supreme Court decisions in 2003 that upheld affirmative action in public college admissions in some circumstances and (without success) in this year’s Supreme Court decision rejecting two school districts’ use of race in school assignments.

With voters and the courts increasingly skeptical of affirmative action in college admissions, scholars gathered at the annual meeting Sunday of the American Sociological Association presented new research designed to shift the debate. The scholars, all supporters of affirmative action, said that they recognized that arguments were being shot down if based only on the lack of diversity that would result from the elimination of affirmative action. If voters are warned that ending affirmative action will result in sharp drops in black and Latino enrollments, voters (or at least white voters) will go ahead and abolish affirmative action, speakers said.

As a result, the research presented was less about the fact that eliminating affirmative action results in such enrollment shifts, but that such drops do not mean that black students (the focus of much of the discussion) have not demonstrated “merit.” Robert T. Teranishi, assistant professor of higher education at New York University, said that his research was designed to counter the “blaming the victim” mentality in which he said people assume black enrollment declines suggest a lack of merit by black students.

The reality, he said, is that a new form of school segregation has taken hold in which in post-affirmative action California, the best way for a black or Latino student to get into a University of California campus is to attend a “white” high school.

Teranishi’s research focuses on California high schools and the relationship between attending high schools with certain characteristics and enrolling at a University of California campus. He started by noting that while California is famous for its ethnic and racial diversity (in statewide totals), 88 percent of high schools have a racial majority of one group. Of those schools, he said, 44.7 percent have a white majority, while 43.4 percent have a black or Latino majority. But among new University of California students, 65.3 percent come from white majority schools and only 21.7 percent come from black or Latino majority schools.

From there, Teranishi presented data showing educational inequities in the different kinds of schools, such as studies showing that the greater the proportion of black and Latino students in a high school, the fewer Advanced Placement courses that are likely to be offered.

The cumulative impact of these inequities is such that minority students who are admitted to top University of California campuses are more likely to have attended white majority schools than other schools.

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