DAVIS-MARKS: Affirming action

One day, in my junior year of high school, I decided to sacrifice my lunch period to work on my Advanced Placement U.S. History assignment. When I sat down to work on a computer in the library, a classmate of mine — whom I barely knew at the time — looked up at me and said that affirmative action shouldn’t exist.

On a surface, this claim may seem benign. Not true. When many of my black classmates were admitted to elite schools in my senior year, many of our predominantly white and Asian peers asserted that our admission was inevitable because we were black. Together with my black classmates, I spent time defending our admittances to places like Yale, Harvard, Princeton and Columbia.


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