Op-Ed
From Race to Riches
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Don’t Kill the Messenger
Far away from my physical habitat (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) this summer, I found my metaphysical home marching down 5th Avenue as part of New York City’s Annual National Puerto Rican Day Parade.
OK. You got me. I’m not exactly Puerto Rican. And I may have used the verb “march” rather loosely. I actually found myself at 53rd and 5th because, like any good pseudo-intellectual summer intern, I was trying to cross over to the Museum of Modern Art.
Still, while I was more the awed spectator than active partaker, I found the experience to be unexpectedly illuminating. Or, maybe it was the lead-up to it.
For days leading up to the parade, friends had been preparing me for Armageddon. Colleagues who rank high on my politically correct scale had plans to stock up on food and water, triple-bolt their doors, and wait for the storm to pass. It was like Y2K … but instead of a computer glitch, we were awaiting the day when our neighbors decided to throw a party.
Granted, in recent years, gangs have emerged, provoking incidents of violence around the festivities. But when I got out of the subway and realized what I had run into, I was expecting World War III — not upbeat music and pelvic thrusting.
As I strolled through the Warhols and pretended to understand pop art, I kept thinking about how open people I knew had been about voicing their fears. I wondered if they would have exercised the same liberty if it had been, say, an African American pageant … or a celebration of Asian heritage? In other words, how much panic was provoked by the “Puerto Rican?”
Some minorities are just more in vogue than others.
We don’t have to look far to see who has been in style these last few seasons. Last week, an article in The Sun pointed out that while African American students remain underrepresented on campus, Hispanic students fare significantly worse.
Sure, if you sport black skin, or boast breasts, or bow to Buddha, or have a hankerin’ for hunks with the same kind of genitalia as you, then you can go on ahead and join the minority club.
But admission doesn’t guarantee equal status. And in the midst of it all, there stands a lone minority who remains woefully ignored: the poor kid.
Yes. Institutions of higher learning are disproportionately void of low-income students. In a lot of cases, the better the school, the richer the student body. So why it is that affirmative action continues to focus solely on rough definitions of ethnicity?
On a scale of one to minority, how “disadvantaged” are you?
Last May, speaking on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, my dear friend Sen. Barack Obama said, “I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”
A radical view?
In the past, clarion calls for class-based affirmative action policies, which rely on measures like income, have been issued by diverse figures. The idea is that education is a vehicle for social mobility, and that ensuring access for those on the lowest rungs of the income ladder will help remedy the national malady that is income inequality.
Do we really think the white girl on food stamps in Flint, Michigan can fend for herself better than a half-Latino guy growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y.?
Granted, the founding goal of affirmative action was different. “Affirmative action” was never synonymous with “financial aid.” Instead it sought to right the wrongs of American history — a kind of grand apology for our national past. But that original goal shouldn’t make us afraid to adjust to the present.
Because at an individual level, it isn’t skin color that makes you disadvantaged with respect to college admissions. You’re not illiterate because you have black skin; but you may not read real good because you go to a bad school and your teacher is a moron. Your college application didn’t suffer because your parents hail from Guadalajara. It might have instead fallen short because the school in your low-income district didn’t have APs to inflate your GPA.
On a systemic level, we aim to help entire racial groups, great swaths of our population. But on an individual level, we’re letting that little white lass from Flint down. The point is this: an admissions policy that aims to adjust for “disadvantage” in today’s educational marketplace must be based in large part on socio-economic status. Because more often than race or nationality, it’s $$$ that determines level of success.
Importantly, the people who are justly benefiting from today’s system won’t be left alone. Minorities are still grossly over-represented in low-income groups. Financial assistance for those students wouldn’t stop. But it just might stop for a student from the same minority group who, growing up in affluence, was never denied opportunity. And I think we’re at a stage where we can say that’s OK.
Is this my plea on behalf of poor white kids? Maybe. But it’s my plea on behalf of poor black kids too. I think instead this is a round-about way of questioning whether the term “minority” needs to be removed from our lexicon … or at least changed substantially
It may take me a while to finish up on that thought. So in the meantime, I’m going to put on some fiesta songs and play make-believe, forever en solidaridad with my Puerto Rican amigos.
Katie Engelhart is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. Contact her at kengelhart@cornellsun.com. Don’t Kill the Messenger appears alternate Thursdays.
Race does not equal class.
I agree on a lot of points on how lower class people are overlooked and how the government should reach out to them. I think that's a great point and thumbs up to that.
But, I do want to point out that you are definitely wrong on a lot of points on race.
Now, first of all, there's no "minority scale". I personally take it offensive that you have hinted on rating minorites and I'd go as far as to say, your statement, "some minorities are in vogue" is racist.
The reason I believe so, is because you have completely written your article without doing any kind of research on why affirmative action is necessary, the problems faced by ethnic minorities, and the fact that the US is full of institutionalized racism.
1. Minorities cannot be rated on a scale simply because you cannot group them together. Asians are different from blacks, and so are puerto ricans. It is not in vogue to be any of them, in fact the most privileged race in this country is caucasian white. For more information on white privilege,http://www.timwise.org/
2. Affirmative action is necessary based on race (and like you said, based on class). That article on the Daily Sun that you quoted had all its facts wrong. Hispanics are not underrepresented in Cornell, in fact blacks are. The reason why affirmative action is necessary is because ethnic minorities are at a disadvantage with respect to white counterparts. For instance, simply having a black name (Bertrand & Mulainathan, 2002) or hispanic name (Corss, 1990; Kenney and Wissoker, 1994) means you'll be less likely to be called back for an interview. There are hundreds of such studies citing examples of institutionalized racism and that means, even if your gpa is equivalent to your black classmate's, he/she is definitely less likely to get a job that's as good as yours.
3. Barack Obama is right in that his daughters are more privileged than a lot of homeless or lower class white kids. But you cannot quote a personal anecdote and extrapolate it to make policies on the scale of affirmative action. In fact in sociology, personal anecdotes don't count much.