Affirmative Reaction: Students, Faculty Cite Personal Experience To Rebut DOJ Discrimination Claim

Yale’s black student leaders have fired back against a Department of Justice investigation that accused Yale of illegally discriminating against white and Asian American applicants in its undergraduate admissions process.

Student activists and faculty argued in interviews with the Independent that Black, brown, Indigenous and other disadvantaged students face much greater challenges getting into college than the average white or Asian American applicant and that race-conscious applications are necessary in a society with a long history of racial injustice that continues until today.

“It really is nothing more than a thinly veiled ploy to dismantle affirmative action,” said JT Mullins, the solidarity chair of the Yale Black Men’s Union.

Nina Todd, co-president of the Black Student Alliance at Yale, said that affirmative action ​“absolutely” should be a policy in college admissions. ​“Though education is the great equalizer, the context in which we seek it differs greatly,” she wrote in an email to the Independent. The Black Student Alliance penned an open letter to Attorney General William Barr and the DOJ Friday afternoon.

“Black students are systematically disadvantaged — the context we seek higher education in is marked by Black students being more likely to attend underfunded schools, with less qualified teachers, and experiencing bigotry and bias while we do it. This affects other ​“meritocratic” markers of success — grades, test scores, and the like,” Todd said.

Todd grew up in suburban Maryland. She said that applying to college for her was difficult. Like many Black students in similar positions, she said she felt underestimated by her peers and some instructors. ​“By taking race out of the equation, one discredits and diminishes the very real challenges that characterize the reality of education for Black students,” she argue.

She is from a low-income family. She identified early on that she wanted to attend an Ivy League school. ​“I spent all of middle and high school working to make this dream a reality. I attended magnet schools from 6th grade on, which tended to be predominantly white,” she said.

The DOJ investigation demanded that Yale not consider an applicant’s race or national origin in its upcoming admissions cycle. Yale President Peter Salovey wrote in response that Yale College will not change its admissions processes and that the DOJ is ​“seeking to impose a standard that is inconsistent with existing law.”

“To engage in college admissions racelessly when we don’t live in a raceless society is pretty outrageous,” said Tiya Proctor-Floyd, president of BlackOut, a resident group at the Yale Afro-American Cultural Center. Proctor-Floyd is half-black and half-Cambodian. ​“The current administration is using Asian Americans who feel cheated to rip affirmative action out from under the feet of millions of black and native Americans who are benefited by affirmative action,” Proctor-Floyd argued.

Mullins said that the investigation creates a narrative that black applicants are stealing spots from Asian American and white students, even though at schools like Yale, Black students are underrepresented.

Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, made up only 7.4 percent of the University’s non-International student population in 2018 – 2019. Meanwhile, Asian Americans made up 18.8 percent and whites made up 54.6 percent. International students representing 123 countries made up 21 percent.

Mullins also pointed out how many more legacy students, who are given a preference in admissions for having parents or grandparents who attended Yale, are white than non-white. ​“Same thing goes for children of faculty and major donors,” he said.

Todd said that injustices in the education system, including the achievement gap in standardized testing and the underfunding of predominantly Black schools, make it significantly harder for a Black applicant to achieve the same qualifications as their more privileged peers.

“The SAT, for example, was developed by a eugenicist, and it’s been shown that it disproportionately favors whites and Asian American applicants,” said Mullins. ​“If you’re using just an SAT score, using the test for admissions, of course those demographics will be drastically overrepresented in your application pool and your admissions class.”

The SAT was created by Carl Brigham, who wrote in 1923 that the test would demonstrate the racial superiority of white Americans and that the decline of American education ​“will proceed with an accelerating rate as the racial mixture becomes more and more extensive.”

Without race-conscious admissions that take into account the background of every applicant, Mullins predicted, ​“you’ll end up with white American applicants and East Asian applicants heavily favored.”

“Deeply Confused”

Yale University has a race-conscious admissions policy, in which admissions officers can see the race or ethnicity of student applicants. It is widely-practiced by colleges and has long been allowed by the Supreme Court, which has also directed that race not be the only criterion for admission. Some states, like California and Florida, ban affirmative action.

Moral philosopher Stephen Darwall, who teaches at Yale, said that the Department of Justice’s claim that Yale’s admissions policy counts as ​“racial discrimination” is ​“deeply confused”.

The DOJ letter to Yale claims that ​“Yale discriminates based on race and national origin in its undergraduate admissions process, and that race is the determinative factor in hundreds of admissions decisions each year.”

“‘Racial discrimination’ can have either a morally neutral sense that simply means taking account of race in any way, using race in making any distinction at all. But this is different from the term’s usual implicitly moral sense, as in ​“discriminating against” someone, where discrimination is implicitly taken to be wrong by definition, at least, other things being equal,” Darwell argued.

“If I am dividing red and green jelly beans into two piles then I am clearly discriminating between red and green jelly beans, but no moral question arises, and I am clearly not discriminating against one color or the other.”

Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division wrote in reference to Yale’s policies: ​“There is no such thing as a nice form of race discrimination.” The question is whether Yale’s race-conscious admissions policy counts as objectionable racial discrimination, or if it is more like sorting jelly beans into two piles.

“The real question is whether people are being treated as moral equals and accorded equal treatment ‚” where that doesn’t mean the same treatment, but are rather being treated as equals, said Darwall.

He said that affirmative action considers “‘fair equality of opportunity,’ which takes account also of whether applicants have had the opportunity to develop their talents because of current injustice and the residue of past injustice.”

“Black people in this country don’t have generational wealth or resources, on par with many other races, to lean on during the college admissions process — I certainly didn’t,” said Todd. ​“Thus, getting into college is made exponentially more important, and we must do it with less. This week, the DOJ has seemingly ignored all this, by contributing to a narrative that Black students are less successful than our peers because of our own shortcomings, rather than the generations of oppression that have relegated us to this position.”

“As I see it, public universities should not only be permitted to use race-based affirmative action, they should be required to do so as a matter of justice,” said Darwall.

What About Vietnamese? Hmong? Khmer-Americans?

Proctor-Floyd said she saw a deeper problem with the DOJ investigation and that is the way it assumes a ​“pan-Asian identity” exists, when in actuality, different Asian-American sub-groups experience vastly different levels of educational and economic opportunity.

“There is no singular Asian experience. We all came here at different times and had different treatment,” she said.

She is from a working-class household in a predominantly Cambodian and Laotian community in Seattle, Washington.

“Attending high school, where almost all the other Asians were Korean, I definitely felt that exclusion. They grew up in spaces where they could afford SAT tutoring, and they’d been playing club sports since they were 5, 6 years old.”

Her parents did not graduate from college and could not help her with college applications. Her mother was a refugee who grew up in a neighborhood fraught with gang violence. Her grandfather fought against the genocidal Khmer Rogue regime in Cambodia.

Proctor-Floyd said members of sub-groups, including Southeast Asian Americans like her, face significant disadvantage but do not benefit from systems of affirmative action which exclude them. She pointed to Vietnamese, Hmong, or Khmer-American students who ​“don’t see the same success as East Asian-American populations,” and low-income students of all races whose parents did not go to college.

But she said the solution is not to target affirmative action for race. ​“Low income students across the board should be included in affirmative action policy,” she said. ​“There should be more groups included in affirmative action policies rather than removing it.”

“I think there’s such a degree of performative action within white and Asian communities, especially those that have money and resources to get into college, that I’m not sympathetic to you not getting chosen over a black or Latinx student with similar qualifications,” said Proctor-Floyd. ​“Because you as a group did not have to make those strides to catch up, socio-economic-wise, to other groups.”