Throughline - Affirmative Action

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

This conversation was recorded ahead of the Supreme Court's expected decision on affirmative action. As of publishing, no decision has been issued.The Supreme Court is expected to rule on affirmative action sometime this month. Most of us understand that some colleges use race as a factor in college admissions. But journalist Jay Caspian Kang argues that this focus is too narrow, and that it avoids harder conversations we need to have as a culture. In his view, focusing on the admissions practices of a select few universities creates "a fight for spots in the elite ranks of society" — and blinds us to the bigger problems plaguing American democracy. On today's episode, we talk with Kang about affirmative action's origins in the civil rights era, what it does and doesn't achieve, and what a more equitable education system could look like.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Two far-reaching cases before the U.S. Supreme Court today have the potential to overturn years of precedent. We'll hear argument first this morning in case 21707, students for fair admissions versus the University of North Carolina. This is a suit against UNC, the nation's oldest public university, and Harvard University, the nation's oldest private school. We'll hear argument next in case 2011-99, students for fair admissions versus the president and fellows of Harvard College.

Plaintiffs argue the school's admissions process discriminates against white and Asian American applicants by giving extra preference to black, Latino, and Native American applicants. The question for the justices, whether colleges should be allowed to take race into account when deciding which students to admit. What does diversity mean if it's just a Benetton ad of rich kids? Student body diversity makes our businesses more innovative and globally competitive, our scientists more creative, our medical professionals more effective, and our military more cohesive.

Asians should be getting into Harvard more than whites, but they don't because Harvard gives them significantly lower personal ratings. What are we really talking about here? Like, what do you mean by equality? Just like we saw in the abortion case, this is a court now that is not afraid to overturn things that they think were wrongly decided. The actual solutions have to be much more deep. They have to actually be somewhat destructive.

They have to challenge places like Harvard and say, like, what if you didn't exist? Sometime this month, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on the fate of affirmative action, the practice of using race as a factor in college admissions. We're going to talk about the cases themselves. But before that, there's one thing you should know right away. Originally, affirmative action wasn't about college at all. The idea was that the federal government should use its power to force places into not violating civil rights law. It was thought of as a way to

make sure that employers, colleges, anywhere that had to make a decision between two people were making a fair decision. This is Jay Caspian Kang. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker and a documentary filmmaker who's researched and written extensively on affirmative action. The policy came out of the civil rights era when Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson issued executive orders to ensure equal opportunity in federal employment. That's where the phrase comes from. Federal contractors were directed to take, quote, affirmative action to address obstacles to equality. The idea that it gave people a leg up, right? Like that's something that has been sort of built up over years.

Kang says that affirmative action didn't become a cultural flashpoint until it started affecting college admissions. And he argues this hyper-focus, particularly on elite colleges, has warped our understanding of Affirmative Action's goals. That as a society, we talk less about equity than we do about access to our most rarefied spaces. To him, the conversation we should be having is about class, privilege, and the very American love-hate relationship with its elite. I'm Rana Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arab-Louie. And today on the show, we dig into what exactly affirmative action is,

what it does and doesn't achieve, and what a vision for real equity could look like. Coming up, the Supreme Court case that kicked it all off. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time, mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. How would you define affirmative action, given this writing and research you've done on it? In the context of college admissions, what it is, is that it is, it declares that basically colleges have the right to pick the classes of incoming students that they want. And that one of the considerations that they can give is race. In 1973, when Alan Bakke applied to the medical school of the University of California, Davis, the school had a racial quota system.

It reserved 16 out of 100 seats in its entering class for minorities. At that time, most people in the U.S. didn't go to college. Only 16% of men and fewer than 10% of women had completed four years or more. Ivy League schools had only recently begun admitting women at all. And racial quotas in education were common. They'd actually been around for decades, but it was only recently that they'd started being used to promote diversity rather than limit it. Alan Bakke was white. His application to the UC Davis Med School was rejected once and then again. So he sued, saying that he was denied on the basis of race.

The Supreme Court ultimately agreed with him. They said that racial quotas were unacceptable and that the school had to admit him. But it was an unusual decision. Because in a separate opinion, some of the justices also said that schools could consider race as a factor in admissions. It just couldn't be the only factor. You know, there's a very famous opinion that was written by Justice Powell at the time, where he uses Harvard as an example. And he basically says, look, these schools should be able to not just pick the same person over and over again because it benefits the students on campus to have people from different backgrounds there. Now, that might be a racial background, right? But it also could be, as he says, I think,

in the piece, you know, like a farmer's kid from Idaho, for example, also should be given special consideration. And it's not a question. And the thing that it is not, it is not a question of being like, well, that farmer's kid from Idaho had a harder time than the banker's son from Boston or something like that, right? And therefore, their test scores should be given a little bit bump up because we're doing a mental adjustment on our heads of how we can create an equilibrium based on privilege

and the actual raw test scores or something like that. I think a lot of people think that's what affirmative action is. It's not, right? It is essentially that when things are basically equal, and this has been litigated out through decades of court cases, that you can put a little thumb on the scale for students who would improve the diversity of your campus. And that's about it. You can make judgment calls based on race.

And, you know, I think that basically what happened was that, like, all the schools heard that and they just said, okay, we'll just keep doing a quota system and we'll use the same process, but we'll just kind of obfuscate it a little bit, right? And, like, that leads to all sorts of problems, right? Even though I understand why the schools would do it, because legally it's the only way that they can kind of create the diversity that they want on campus. But from a legal standpoint and from a clarity standpoint,

it just creates all these messes. To me, that's one of the great ironies about all this, which is that I think that if all the things that affirmative action could possibly have some sort of effect on, college admission seems to be pretty low on the list. You're only in college for four years, right? And also, a lot of people don't go to college. A lot of people don't go to college.

Nobody goes to Harvard, right? And the number of schools that actually practice affirmative action is very low. The vast majority of colleges, university, community colleges certainly, they just let in almost everybody who applies, right? And so with affirmative action where it's like, oh, we only have 10 spots for this, we need to hit 10%, it is the most elite of the most elite schools. And it is strange to me that, and it is sad to me in a lot of ways, that the question of how we think about hiring, the way in which race might have an impact on who gets hired and who does not, and whether the federal government has a responsibility given civil rights law

to intervene when it can. Like the idea that that is going to be decided by Harvard was very sad to me. You know, it seems like that there should be a better case or a better test of this question, but there never will be because, you know, the obsession is always just over these Ivy League schools and the unfairness question is always encapsulated and wrapped up in this. And it's making me think about the current cases from the Supreme Court. Can you describe a little bit about what those cases are, who's bringing them, and what do you think the outcome of the case is going to be?

There's an organization that is called Students for Fair Admission. It's one of those very generically named things. Yeah. It's either— Yeah. Americans for Justice. Right. It's either run by a religious group or it's run by the UN and you can't tell.

Anyone could be behind it and you're't tell, you know, like, like anyone could be behind it. And you're just like, I don't know. But student for fair admissions is the latest outgrowth of sort of one man legal advocacy of Edward Bloom, who is a longtime conservative legal activist, very effective. You know, like he was behind Holder versus Shelby County, which gutted a lot of the voting rights act. Right. He was behind Abigail Fisher one and 2, right? And those

are the previous Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action with the woman who applied to the University of Texas. Abigail Fisher is a white woman who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin and sued the school, claiming racial discrimination. The court ruled against her, narrowly. She and Edward Bloom co-founded Students for Fair Admission. And he's now behind Students for Fair Admission versus Harvard, which is the, you know, I think like informally, I always just call it the Asian affirmative action case, but you know, I don't know, maybe I can say that because I'm actually Asian. That's what I'm going to call it. Now, what he did was, you know, much like in

Fisher, much like in Holder v. Shelby County, right? Like he brings a test case and he strategizes with a lot of very smart lawyers, you know, about what this test case should be, what the strategy should be, right? And I think that with Abigail Fisher, like one of the problems that they had was that Abigail Fisher was not eminently qualified to get into the University of Texas, right? She's kind of like a fringe case. And that like, in a lot of ways, she was not the most sympathetic plaintiff for this. And so the way that you change that is that you don't really name the plaintiffs. You just say, this is about Asian people, right? You have a much broader scope around it.

And then you have really good data that you can get, which they did get through the Harvard admissions process that shows that it is much harder for Asian applicants to get into Harvard. And the reason why, and this is the stroke of sort of legal genius, which is that you focus on this, what was called a personal rating. And this is a score that Harvard admissions people give to every applicant at Harvard.

And it basically says, are you a curious person? Do you have good moral background? Why Harvard would rate people based on this, not knowing who the kids are, is beyond me. But the argument that Ed Bloom and SFFA's lawyers made was basically that across the board, and this was also true, that Asian applicants got lower scores than everybody else. And that in fact, what the personal rating was, it was one of two things.

And basically, they allowed people to choose. One is that Harvard admissions actually thinks that all Asian applicants across the board are less interesting and dynamic and thoughtful people than every other race, right? Or they're using this personal rating as a way to sort of informally dock Asian applicants so that they can let in less of them, right? Those are the two possible explanations, right? Yes. Yeah, it's like it's a measure they created

in order to justify not letting someone with a really high GPA or really high grades in. Right, right, right. And the way in which they describe this stuff was, it's very, you know, like, I don't know. It's like, it is offensive in the way that they think about it, right? And so when you heard Harvard discuss it,

they would be like, well, it applies to everything. Like, would the person be good at late night up in a dorm room having a conversation with somebody, you know? And you're just like, how would you know? Like, you're looking at three sheets of paper. So like, how do you make that assessment? And why is it so personal? And of course, this really offends, you know, I think a lot of people, not just Asian Americans, I think anybody, right? Like, it's just like kind of blatantly racist type of thinking. And so it put Harvard over a real barrel here, right? Like, how do you defend it if those are your only two choices? Either all your admissions officers are racist or they're not,

and you're just doing this to not let in as many Asian students as possible. Harvard never, during the entire trial, they didn't provide any good explanation for this. I went to every day of that trial pretty much, and I read all the transcripts. I spent a year reading up on it. And I went in as somebody who is very, very supportive of affirmative action. And by the middle of it, it just became clear, right, that like whatever practices

that are being done to uphold the vision of affirmative action that Harvard specifically wants, like they are problematic in a way that is almost impossible to support. And I think that's where a lot of people came out at the end of this trial. You casually slipped in there that, you know, you went into the trial as like a big believer in affirmative action, and you kind of came out the other side deeply skeptical.

Can you walk me through, like on a personal level, how your thinking was changing and why i mean you know nowadays it's very rare to hear people say they change their minds on anything right yeah i mean i think that before when i didn't know that much about it right but when i started my reporting i agreed with a lot of the people that you might find who are you know know, liberals and good liberals in America who really do support affirmative action because they really do see the burden of racism. They see the historical imprint of racism and what this country has done to black Americans specifically. And they feel that that requires some form of remediation and that focusing just on test scores, just on GPA,

right? And saying like, oh, these students, like it just seems silly, right? Like there are measures of why a student would be successful or do well that go well beyond, you know, a 20, 30 point difference in these test scores or even a hundred point difference in these test scores, right? Like you should admire young people and you should reward young people for overcoming obstacles in their lives. And that should be celebrated. And if what they want is they want to go to the most exclusive college in America, then the most exclusive college in America should also hold those values. I think that that's basically what a lot of people think.

I would argue that's probably what most people think. Even a lot of Republicans, I think, think that. They might say race shouldn't be the determinative. Struggling white kids should also get that advantage, right? But they would at least understand the idea of disadvantage versus results, right? But, you know, it just becomes so clear that when you understand at some point that this does not affect the vast majority of college students, that it is just the elite schools that really, that this applies to, there comes a point when you realize that that kid who you're always thinking about, who you want to help, basically doesn't exist on

these campuses. You know, there was a great article in the Harvard Crimson written, and the question was like, well, who are Harvard's black students? And the type of student that I think that a lot of people think is the beneficiary of affirmative action, which like we said, is like somebody who went through family and themselves have been through the history of oppression all the way from slavery down. Like, you know, the quote I think in the piece was like, they're just not here, right? They're so rare on campus that it almost feels like they're not here. That, I think, sort of triggers a secondary question of like, okay, so then what are we talking about here, right? What are we talking about in terms of privilege? Now, if we ask a question like, there's a kid who grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn,

from a working class Chinese American family. His parents do not speak English, right? He grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, from a working class Chinese American family. His parents do not speak English, right? He grew up in poverty. He went to like Statham High School or any of these sort of test in public schools, and that he shows up and he applies to Harvard, right? And that he is placed next to a kid whose parents are from, let's say, Peru or Chile and worked for Milton Friedman and worked to deregulate the entire country and are billionaires. And this kid went to Phillips Exeter, but he is Latino. Who is privileged in that scenario? What are we talking about when we say, oh, the Asian kid is privileged and the scenario? You know, like, what are we talking about

when we say, oh, the Asian kid is privileged and the Latino kid is not privileged, right? Those are the types of judgment calls that are made a lot in places like Harvard, right? It is actually between, like, billionaire kids or wealthy kids who went to exclusive high schools. And then these Asian kids who are seen as grinds who grew up, I think, in my opinion, much less privileged situations. And so when the only thing that you're really

doing to determine who is privileged is their racial background, I do not think that that's a vision of privilege or of advantage that anyone really can ascribe to. Especially, I think, people on the left should not ascribe to it, right? Because I think people on the left should be very aware of the way in which class interacts with all of this and the way that, you know, one's like sort of financial background, the comforts that you had growing up interact with this and that we shouldn't just think about race in this sort of way. And so for that reason, you know, like you almost lose any type of footing to find a defense, right? Like, where do you dig your heels in if this is the terrain? It's very hard to find a place at this point, I think. And I think that honestly, that's why a lot of this is going quite quietly,

right? You would think that the end of affirmative action done by this court would trigger a huge response amongst liberals and the left, right? But it hasn't, right? And I think it's fair to ask why, right? I think it's because a lot of people have determined that perhaps what we're talking about here is not actually that defensible. Coming up, what we don't talk about when we talk about affirmative action. Hey, this is Nathan Palsch from Goshen, Indiana, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. We just want to take a moment to shout out our ThruLine Plus subscribers. Thank you so much for your support.

If you don't already know, subscribing to ThruLine Plus means you get to listen to our show without any sponsor breaks. And you also get access to special bonus episodes where we take you behind the scenes, introduce you to our amazing producers, and tell you about how we make the show. To get these awesome benefits and support our work here at NPR, head over to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine. Many people see affirmative action as a way to right historical wrongs, and there's no question that it has helped a historical wrongs. And there's no question that it has helped a lot of people. But there's another argument that exists alongside that reality, which is that affirmative action in higher education only applies to a tiny slice of America's elite. Writer J. Caspian Kang argues that in this way, the policy can actually perpetuate inequality rather than leveling things

out. We pick up our conversation about the history of affirmative action and whether or not the policy fulfills its big promises. What we're talking about here on some extent is that, you know, you get a class advantage from being associated with Harvard or any other Ivy League school that you immediately are ushered into an elite, not perhaps ushered into an elite class of the country. And if all we're doing is switching who's sitting at those seats, is that actually helping? Like if we're just switching like, okay, you have more people of color sitting in this elite class that's separated in a lot of ways in terms of the way they live, where they live,

et cetera, from the rest of the people. Is that actually at all getting at the initial purpose of more equality, more equity? And doesn't that get at a deeper problem here with class? Right. I mean, I think that that is a broader question that should be asked around that and sort of the center of the critique of affirmative action that i've been developing over the past few years which is that um like what are we i think what people need to ask themselves is like what are we talking about here you know like what is the vision that you have for the world when you're arguing for one side or the other right and one side is very clear. It's that we should all just be judged on our merit, right? Race should not enter into it. And a 1500 on the

SAT is a 1500 on the SAT. Now, a lot of those people would say, look, if you're poor and you grew up in poverty, then yeah, maybe we'll give you a little bit of a bump. But race should not be that determining factor, right? It should be poverty, right? It should be something like that. I think that is the fair way to sort of characterize the right-wing argument on this, right? Like if you look at the Harvard, the people who sued Harvard, one thing that they argue for is ending legacy admissions, right? Like if your parents went to Harvard, it's easier for you to get into Harvard. And sort of shockingly large percentage of Harvard's class, their parents went to Harvard, right? The right, in this case, right, the people who are suing Harvard and hoping

to end affirmative action, they also argue against athletes getting advantages, right? They say donor children should not get advantages, right? They say that children should not get advantages, right? They say that we should use class-based affirmative action instead of race-based affirmative action because they point out, and I think they are correct in this, that a lot of the people who are at Harvard and who are Black or Latino are from very wealthy families, right? Or attended very exclusive private schools and they say, well, why would you give these kids a leg up? You know? Like, what does diversity mean

if it's just a Benetton ad of rich kids, right? And so these are all arguments that I think a large portion of Americans, regardless of their political affiliations, would actually agree with. And I think they need to be taken somewhat seriously, right? And what it demanded for me was a secondary question, which is, okay, well, what does the other side want, right? Like,

what do the proponents of affirmative action want? And so if that, like, is what you really want at Harvard is you want like more rich, extremely high academic achieving kids whose parents might have gone to Harvard who might be good crew rowers or whatever. And you want that to be slightly more diverse so that you don't look bad. And so that the students there, you know, can like live in this fantasy that they're on a diverse campus. Like, is that what you want? Now, that is a very harsh way to put it. I don't think it's very far off, right? And so if that is what Harvard in this case wants, if that is what the advocates of affirmative action on college campuses want, like I said, again,

like if you extend and say, well, what about, like, you know, large state schools, right? Like those schools don't really practice affirmative action in the same way, like, cause they don't have to, because they let in most of the applicants. Is that really a vision that is a good vision? You know, is that a robust vision? Is that a vision that you can state unequivocally and defend unequivocally without going into all sorts of like, you know, like weird doublespeak and subterfuge or whatever, you know, like obfuscation of what you're actually talking about. And I would argue it's not, you know, I do not think that that is something that

a lot of people would agree with. I think when people defend affirmative action, they say, well, they sort of picture a kid, right? And let's say, you know, I think like it's pretty stereotypical what their vision is, but they think of like, hey, there's a kid in East New York, right? Or there's a kid in Canarsie, there's a kid in Detroit. And that kid has really had a difficult life because of the legacy of Jim Crow, slavery, redlining, whatever. And that that kid, descendant of slaves, right, got 40 points less on the SAT than this rich white kid who went to Phillips Exeter, right? And why would you not want that kid? He is much more exceptional than the Phillips Exeter kid. I agree with that. Everyone agrees

with that assessment, right? That's not what affirmative action is, right? Affirmative action is basically both the kids go to Philips Exeter, right? It is not about ameliorating the past. It is not, it is explicitly not allowed to be about a sort of rep, you know, some sort of de facto reparations program, right? Like that's very clear in the law. And so then what are we talking about? Like, what is it, right? And I think that that's a question that I think, at least right for now, the proponents of affirmative action have not been able to answer in any sort of satisfying way. I'm assuming you think this court case is going to mark the end of affirmative action, at least at Harvard.

Yeah, the question is just how broadly they will write this decision. Now, if it just says, hey, this personal rating stuff, knock that off, that's just one thing, and that's pretty easy to comply with, right? If it is all colleges cannot consider race in their applications, that's a kind of middling version of it, you know? Now, the real problem is if it is a, you cannot consider race in anything, right? And that is within the realm of possibility. And certainly the way the court has written some of its more controversial opinions in the recent past might suggest that. I wonder what you see those potential ripples being more broadly, beyond even academia, out in society.

If you basically get rid of affirmative action, what happens? Yeah, I mean, it's going to create a lot of really strange policy if basically what it is that you can never consider race about anything in terms of federal policy, right? Like, it won't just be like, oh, does the National Park Service have to hire black rangers or not, right? Like, it's going to basically be

that a lot of programs that are predicated or that even ask about the race of, or even are specifically tailored to help people, right, for like around race, right, all those are going to be eliminated. And what we're going to have is sort of this legal nightmare, I think, in which like all those programs will base, a lot of which I think that a lot of people would agree with, are going to just have to figure out some other way to talk about themselves or just cease to exist. And I think that the fallout for that

is not quite yet known. And yet I just think that like, if I'm worried about anything, I'm just worried about stuff like that. I'm worried about benefits for like black farmers, for example, right? I'm worried about entitlement programs that might exist, right? I'm worried about much

more along those lines of government ways in which the government is actively helping people right now and how those programs will be gutted. I think those are possible. And yet I also think that there is a way in which perhaps like, you know, the court will rule and just limit it to college admissions. But I don't know. I'm not a court watcher. I'm not like somebody who's in the business of making Supreme Court decision rul, you know, the ceiling for what you think might happen is like pretty high these days. Pretty high these days, you know? Yeah, we can be sure to not be sure. Right, there's not like a, oh, they'll probably pragmatically do this. You're just like, I don't know, you know, they do some crazy stuff before. So like, maybe they'll just do it again. Coming up, the possibility of a country without affirmative action

and a radical proposal for change. Hi, my name is Madeline. I'm from Omaha, Nebraska, and I'm a high school vocal music teacher. ThruLine is awesome. Thanks for all of your hard work listening to ThruLine from NPR. Bye. If the Supreme Court does strike down affirmative action, it could potentially have ripple effects far outside academia. So we wanted to think about what access means more broadly and what our goals for our society really are. We pick up the conversation with writer Jay Caspian Kang. If, you know, affirmative action at the university level is over, and let's just say it's limited to that,

what are we left with in terms of alternatives? What could be an effective strategy to kind of achieve the same goal of a more egalitarian sort of society when it comes to education? So one of the ways in which the University of California system puts socioeconomic diversity in their student class is that they have a pretty robust community college transfer system right now. And so in California, if you go to a community college, you do pretty well. It's not like you have to be the most exceptional student. You have to do pretty well. Then you can go to a UC school, right?

And I think that there needs to be a broad expansion of that type of program across the country in state university systems across the country. I think that Jill Biden was right in her focus on community colleges, right? It didn't get that much popular support, but I think that community colleges are really the key to everything here. They are cheap, right? I think that they should all be free. I don't think it would be that expensive to make them all free. But if we provide like a two-year way for a lot of students of many different types of means to do two years of education, stay around their homes, save money, right? And that we have most of those kids entering the state college system of

where they live, right? I think that that is the best way forward. And that I think that these elite private institutions, like I think that there needs to best way forward and that i think that these elite private institutions like i think that there needs to be extreme taxes placed on their gigantic endowments right i think that it is in the state's best interest or the country's best interest to basically tax them out of existence and that a lot of that money should be given down to community colleges and that if what we're talking about right this this goes back to the question of, like, well, what are we really talking about here? Like, what do you mean by equality, right? If what we mean by educational equality

is a place where, like, kids do not have to destroy themselves to get test scores and grades to get in these exclusive colleges, if families don't have to mortgage their entire financial future to get their kid to pay for their kids' colleges, right? If we want to break this addiction that people have to exclusivity that is put out through these types of test scores and everything that everyone hates, everyone finds to be meaningless, then we just have to make it so that college is not that exclusive anymore and that college is broadly inclusive. And that if people feel like this is a revolutionary idea right like it's basically what they do in canada you know that exotic foreign country that's

so far away right like a lot of students go to for example the university of toronto or the university of british columbia right yeah and that yeah having a massive state community college type of system i think should be the goal for everybody. And that students can still distinguish themselves within those environments, right? The idea is that you could be around a bunch of different types of people. You could learn from them. You could learn from people who came up with different class backgrounds. You could learn from people who came from different racial backgrounds.

All of that takes place in that type of system. It will never take place in an exclusive Ivy League college. I don't care what the racial background of the students are. And so I have great hope in that system eventually happening. Now, will it happen by the time my six-year-old daughter applies to college? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. But could it happen by the time her kid applies to college? Hopefully. And so I have a lot of hope for that type of system coming through. I just think that we need to sort of avoid getting too bogged down in the questions that don't matter. And for me, at least, the question of affirmative action at Harvard is not a question that matters very much to me. To me, it sounds kind of like what's on trial,

you know, beyond affirmative action is actually like the idea, the principle of having the elite class in the first place and repopulating it. Like even if you repopulated an elite sphere of very small number of people who go to, you know, even if it looks more diverse, let's say, that's still, you still have that fundamental issue that you've created this very elitist structure and reinforced it now just to look a little bit more palatable. Right, right. It gives it cover when it is more racially diverse, right? It actually is much easier to criticize than when it's all white dudes. It will draw the ire of a whole lot of people, but if it looks kind of diverse

and you don't tell people how rich everyone is, then it can sort of almost stand in as being progressive. And I don't know, I just, I don't think that we need to live in a world where anybody is suckered in by believing that any Ivy League institution is progressive in any sort of way. It's almost like, you know, Isabel Wilkerson's notion of caste and her, we talked to her last year in a recent book. It's like, you're almost switching just the people who are entering a particular class.

Right. You're switching the racial diversity of that class but keeping it intact and in fact perhaps making the making it even more elite and even a smaller group in a lot of ways which is kind of i don't know it's it's mind-blowing that that would be considered like the solution yeah yeah it's very i don't know i just find i find it so weird i can't really i never understand what anyone's talking about with this stuff and i think it's like it's made me somewhat of a okay i don't know i sometimes feel like i'm very irritating when i write or talk about this issue because i don't i sometimes elide the actual

central question that people are asking me which is, what do you think about this specific case? Because my answer really is just like, I don't, like who cares, right? If Harvard has 10% black students or 15% black students, like why is that a question about, a central question of the way in which we think about equality in this country, right? Like why do we talk about it so much? See, that's, but the thing that trips me up is I'm like, I'm with you. But then, and then I'm like, but what if there's these unforeseen consequences,

like a domino effect? And if it, that potentially is the thing that then does come back to like affect, you know, more of the average American. Well, I think that we should also think of the unforeseen consequences of having a more sort of progressive-seeming elite that is more diverse, but it still does all the exact same things as the old elite. In the trial before the Supreme Court, in the hearing before the Supreme Court, one of the defenses of affirmative action that was put forth by the

lawyer was that diversity is important because, and the example he gave was that studies show that if you have diverse people picking stocks, right, that they'll do better than a non-diverse group of people picking stocks. And in your head, you're just like, that's how we're framing this question? You're framing the question wrong to begin with. Right. Yes. Right. You're just like, oh, we should have more diverse stock pickers,

not because it's moral or good to have good. But actually, just don't make more money for whoever their boss is you know it's like oh great i'm glad that this is the how we like it maintains the system that's what yeah right right the part of the conversation that i wonder about that does affect a lot more people is what's happened like the fact that for for example, at, you know, a state college level, there might be, you know, recruitment programs or scholarship programs or things like that, where affirmative action is factoring in. So if you take it away from kind of the elite Ivies, which, you know, yeah, there's a lot of kind of, I think, masquerading of diversity happening at that level.

But does that have trickle effects that do go all the way down then to people who really need that kind of extra opportunity given to them? I don't know the answer to that question or how deep it would be, except that my sense would be that it would be pretty shallow, honestly. Let's take a state like California. Now, California, very famously, there's a state ban on affirmative action. There has been for decades. Now, after that took place, UCLA and UC Berkeley, which are the two flagship campuses of the UC system, they did have plummeting black enrollment for a couple years or for a few years.

And that they were able to address that with the type of recruitment programs that you were talking about, they just had to get clever with it. I do not think that at a lot of these colleges that those types of things will end after the Supreme Court makes its decision, right? Like to say that there is no affirmative action or there's no sort of focus on diversity at UC Berkeley or UCLA is like not true, you know? They just do it in a way that does not violate the law and that they're very open about it. Right. They they they put out press conferences about the number of like underrepresented minority students that they let in every single year. Right. Like this is not like a thing that they're ashamed about or they feel like they don't have to talk about. I think that as long as the academy and these elite institutions are committed to diversity, that they will be able to practice diversity.

Now, the question is if everyone's just going to start suing them all over the place, right? But that has been somewhat true in California, but it hasn't deterred them from trying to create diverse campuses. And if you go a little bit downstream from UC Berkeley, UCLA, you go to, for example, Riverside, or if you go to Merced, or if you go to these other campuses, all those campuses are majority-minority campuses. They do not have a diversity problem at all. And that's because they let in most of the people who apply. The paradox here or the irony here is that the reason why you need affirmative action or the reason why these schools feel so much of a pressure is because the schools also want to be extremely exclusive academically, right?

UCLA definitely seems to want to be seen as an Ivy. And I think the question you should ask ucla at that point is you're a state university in the second biggest college i second biggest city in the united states a wildly diverse city by the way why are you behaving in this way right why are you proud of the fact that you're turning away so many students who are applying. Why are you so exclusive? And you are creating the conditions to make diversity difficult, right? Yet also blaming everybody else for why you can't do the diversity, right? Like if you want diversity, just relax your standards, expand the size of the school, and then you'll have like whatever

diversity you want. You can pick whatever student student you want if what you need is everybody who applies to your school to have 1550 sat perfect scores and like start like six fake non-profits while you're a junior in high school that don't they are always fake i have to say when you get into it none of these people i know then you can get a bunch of rich kids you you know? And so, yeah, I don't know. I have so little sympathy for these schools, you know, that maybe perhaps I am an outlier on this question. But like, I don't know. I just don't, I don't care at some level about how they're going to practice diversity because I imagine they'll do it anyway.

And also like, you know, like you created these conditions. And so like, what are we even talking about at this point? It feels like all of this conversation at the college level is just putting a bandaid on a deeper education issue we have in the country. It just feels like this typical American tactic of instead of dealing with the root cause of this problem of inequality and outcomes, they're just putting a bandaid on it by saying, let's let people into elite institutions or whatever.

Some part of me gets frustrated with the fact that so much energy is put into this conversation versus actually solving this earlier up the chain of education for people in this country. Right. That's why the fundamental question behind all of this is, what do you want, right? Do you want an actually egalitarian society where places like Harvard and Princeton do not have as much power over the world as they might have in the past, right? Or do you want the same society and you just want it a little bit more racially diverse than it used to be, right? And that's the fundamental question here. I think for a lot

of defenders of affirmative action, that if you ask them that question seriously, they will say the latter, right, if they're being honest, right? Like, we just want a seat at the table or whatever the phrase may be, right? And so I do not think that this type of debate is how one reaches an actual egalitarian politics around education. Like, the actual solutions have to be much more deep. You know, they have to actually be somewhat destructive they have to challenge places like Harvard and say, hey, even if you do let's say have 20% black students at your school which would be a huge increase from what they have right now

what if you didn't exist? What would the world look like then? What if you didn't have so much power over everything? What if it wasn't all of your graduates that go on to all these elite schools run for president? You know, like if you go to Stanford, you say, what if you didn't exist? You know, like what if, what if, what if there was a much more egalitarian way to get into a places where you can just get out of college and get a job at a,

like a venture capital firm and then just become wildly rich and have a lot of influence in these places, right? Those are actual questions that are being asked. But I don't think those are the questions that are being asked by a lot of defenders of affirmative action, right? They're saying, well, how do we get more kids into Stanford? Because what Stanford does is actually good, but we're just shut out of that good thing. I think that to actually address the things that you're talking about, you have to basically

ask a much deeper question than that. And I don't think that that is a question that's being asked right now. I think you're getting at something that is like a really tricky issue here, which is that the what if, yeah, what if Harvard and all these Ivy Leagues had less influence? What if they had less cultural capital and society and the workforce placed less emphasis on them? But but then if we think about how American society is structured right now, it does give you a leg up. That is the sad truth. Right. And so that's that's a reality that exists. And so long as that reality exists, how do we de-emphasize, right, the power of these, you know, elite institutions when you have this broader cultural acceptance of their power dominating every sector? Yeah, it's a difficult question.

It would require something that is like borderline revolutionary in terms of its scope and its change because, like you said, it's just very difficult to extract out, right? But I do think the first thing that is required is that people should be very honest about the actual privileges that these schools confer onto people, right? I think that there's a sort of way in which minimizing response out there in which people say, it doesn't really matter if you get into Princeton, Stanford, Harvard, right?

You can do just as well at, let's say, the University of Delaware or the University of Rhode Island or something like that or UMass. That's just like if for kids, for people who are at the elite echelons of whatever industry that they're in, who are making a lot of money, who have a lot of influence, it's just not true. That's not true. People need to be honest about that. Going to Stanford and going to UC Riverside are very, very, very different if what you want to do is go work

in the tech sector. And we should be honest about that, right? You have to be so exceptional. You have to do so much more to get a foot in the door. And we should admit that. You can't make a left egalitarian critique of this stuff without being honest about the advantages that it confers. And then once you're honest about it, then I think that more people will understand how rigged this system is right now, right? Like how much it benefits the wealthy, how much it benefits the well-connected. And like that's the start of it. But the fact that like people on the left even are unwilling to say that type of stuff,

right, in any sort of way that is actually pointed. Like, they might gesture at it, but they won't say, like, you know, this institution is all just, like, privileged kids from X, and, like, maybe it shouldn't exist, right? And, like, if you can't make that argument, then, like, we are far, far, far from any sort of actual change from anything. That was Jay Caspian Kang. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker and a documentary filmmaker. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui.

And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Yolanda Sanguini. Casey Miner.

Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Sasha Crawford-Holland. Amir Marashi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. Also, thanks to Johannes Durge and Anja Gretmund. This episode was mixed by Maggie Luther. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes...

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