Affirmative action must be reconsidered for Pilipinos
Were it not for affirmative action, my mother would not have
gone to college. That alone is enough for me to know that
government policies created to address institutional discrimination
and pervasive racism in society are greatly needed. Once again, my
personal has become my political.
Mom grew up very poor in the small town of Tracy, California. My
grandparents (who both held bachelor degrees from good universities
in the Philippines) were unable to find work besides farm labor and
cannery work, and when my mother graduated from her segregated high
school in 1966, there was no money for her to attend a four-year
college.
When she was at community college, a new government program
called the Educational Opportunity Program encouraged her to apply
to UC Davis. The program provided early outreach and admissions
processing to minority students. Through EOP she was able to get a
full scholarship to UC Davis, where she received her bachelor’s
degree.
Because of programs such as EOP (which still exists today), the
nation’s once white campuses began to slowly diversify. My mother
painfully remembers times when white students would mutter racist
comments as she walked by, and how white students would openly
humiliate students of color in class with bigoted comments and body
language. The general attitude of the mostly white UC Davis campus
was that minority students at the university were not up to par,
that they were only admitted because of affirmative action and the
civil rights movement. Sounds eerily familiar.
Unfortunately, I did not benefit from any such program when I
was in high school and college. Because UCLA removed Pilipinos from
affirmative action in 1988, there were no special early outreach
programs targeting Pilipino students. Despite the fact that
Pilipinos have a long history of racial discrimination and
occupational downgrading in the United States and that we have one
of the highest high school dropout rates in California, we are not
given any special consideration in admissions. Our numbers are
hurting, especially at UC Berkeley, where the Pilipino freshman
class of 1994 numbered only 64.
The university must reconsider dropping Pilipinos from
affirmative action. The Pilipino community, especially in
California, is in an educational crisis. We have an extremely high
high school dropout rate, a low admissions rate to the UCs, and one
of the highest attrition rates (up to 50 percent). Because UCLA did
not do enough, the Pilipino community at UCLA created their own
early outreach and retention programs: PREP (Pilipino Recruitment
and Enrichment Project) and SPEAR (Samahang Pilipino Education and
Retention), respectively. Currently, the Samahang Pilipino Task
Force on affirmative action is studying why Pilipinos need
affirmative action.
But the arguments for placing Pilipinos back on affirmative
action are moot if affirmative action is eliminated from university
admissions policies. It seems so simple that the opposition’s
arguments seem childlike in their whining. From my understanding,
affirmative action was created to attempt to give more
opportunities to groups affected by past discrimination. It does
not mean that universities or companies must lower standards, nor
does it mean it hires or admits based solely on race. It was
created when the liberal government of the late ’60s came to the
realization of institutional and societal barriers against people
of color and women.
Those opposing affirmative action would have all of us think
that we are all the same, simply because the Constitution made it
so. This fallacy of equality must come from those most privileged,
because I certainly don’t know any people of color, poor people or
women who feel they are treated or viewed on the same level as
white males.
Sure, we have the capacity to compete with one another on an
equal playing field. Unfortunately, very few of us women and people
of color are invited to the game. We do not all have the same
opportunities, the same histories, experiences or privileges.
Despite my grandparents’ degrees, their race and accents mired them
in poverty because they could not get better jobs. My mother’s good
grades were not enough to get her into Davis; there was no money
for her to go.
The white students who went to their exclusive schools on the
north side of town got better teachers, computers, curriculum and
clean, new campuses. My high school (which my mother attended) was
old, teachers were bitter and tired and one had to search for
educational guidance.
I floundered in high school while guidance counselors, puzzled
at what to do with a underachieving Pilipino kid (Wow! They’re not
all math and science whiz kids!), rarely made moves to encourage me
to shape up and think about college. I guess they figured I’d do
what most Pilipinos did in Stockton: I’d go to the local community
college. So many of my friends who once dreamed of college during
middle school and their freshman year in high school never even
made it that far: they dropped out. So much for the "Model
Minority" myth of overachieving Asians.
Therefore, I can’t help but take the opposition to affirmative
action quite personally. Rising opposition to affirmative action is
inevitable, I suppose. The turning political tide is characterized
by an ugly conservatism which scapegoats, points fingers, blames,
and whines. The passage of Proposition 187 is a prime example of
scapegoating immigrants for problems prevalent despite the
so-called hordes of brown people pouring over the border. Pointing
fingers at minorities who seem to be climbing to the top on the
backs of good white people hand over fist because of race-based
hiring policies is easy and convenient.
Though I wholeheartedly support affirmative action, I realize
that it is a band-aid to pervasive societal ills such as inadequate
public schools, poverty, low wages, occupational downgrading, and
racism. It does not give more funding to the ramshackle inner city
schools where most people of color, like my family, must send their
kids. It does not help the masses of poor people, women, and people
of color who are stuck in service sector jobs, or the high school
dropouts who cannot enter the workforce for lack of practical job
skills.
It does not give that much of a better chance to those poor
Pilipino kids in LAUSD who don’t have the nice computers,
well-trained teachers and gleaming campuses of the students in
Orange County. It doesn’t eradicate racism, discrimination, sexism,
or bigotry.
But without it, it presupposes a society in which one’s merit
decides one’s fate. We all know what a fallacy that is. Until we
can move toward a solution for the aforementioned societal ills,
affirmative action is one step for a white supremacist power
structure which has refused to budge for most of American history.
And it is one token effort on the part of society to help right the
centuries of wrongs committed against people of color and
women.
Mabalon, director of Samahang Pilipino Education and Retention
Project, graduated in June with a bachelor’s degree in history and
Asian American studies. Her column appears on alternate
Wednesdays.