Opportunities endure as affirmative action is threatened

The Supreme Court’s latest affirmative action case reminds me of a married couple I know who happen to be attorneys of color. He’s a U.S.born Black lawyer. She’s an Afro Dominican and Puerto Rican-born Black American lawyer.

They vote similarly as liberal Democrats. But they sometimes disagree on such sensitive issues as the law and civil rights.

“We’re both patriotic, but I can’t help but remember that America is a land with a history of oppression,” he said. “She tends to see it as a land of opportunity.”

That profound point comes to mind as the Supreme Court begins its new session with a case on its docket that could end affirmative action for college admissions.

A long trail of cases has established that race can be used as one of several factors in deciding who gets admitted, as long as it’s not the only factor.

Chief Justice John Roberts’ very conservative court appears to be teed up and ready to do away with the preferences.

The court is set to hear two cases filed by Students for Fair Admissions on behalf of Asian American students who claim they were passed over for admission to Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, essentially because they didn’t belong to the right minority group.

I’m not surprised to see a lot less agitation around this issue than, say, the high court’s recent overturning of Roe v. Wade.

As a Black parent, I’m not delighted that affirmative action might end, but I was never that satisfied with it anyway. For one thing, It reaches too few children who need help. It tends to help the high-performing students who are the most likely to succeed anyway. And as a step toward racial equality, affirmative action is constantly at war with fundamental American principles of fairness.

Certainly, after centuries of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and systemic discrimination, we needed radical steps to move our country closer to true equality of rights and opportunity.

But the end of affirmative action would not mean the end of opportunity. Rather, it should be the beginning of a new movement to take better advantage of the opportunities that already have been won.

Which brings me back to the subject of Black American immigrants. Conservatives often argue that the academic performance of immigrants from Asia, in particular, and their offspring has been so successful without affirmative action that it has produced a new — and misleading — stereotype: the “model minority.”

In fact, in America’s ethnic mixing bowl, immigrants and their children often have excelled more, regardless of race, than native-born children.

The same spirit of relentless optimism that has driven countless immigrants to seek and find opportunity in this land shows up among Black immigrants too.

Overall, Black immigrants earn college degrees at a similar rate to U.S. immigrants overall. Some 31% of Black immigrants ages 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree or higher, almost as high as the 33% share of the overall immigrant population in the U.S. with a college degree, according to the Pew Research Center.

In fact, Pew reports, the number of Black immigrant bachelor’s degree holders has grown faster between 2000 and 2019 than that of the Black U.S.-born population, the entire U.S.-born population and the overall immigration population.

I don’t view that as a reason to declare that we Americans don’t need some sort of action to help equalize opportunity for children of color.

Quite the contrary, I think the success of immigrants of color offers excellent examples of how and why we need to help more young African Americans take advantage of the opportunities that we already have.