Wednesday, May 15, 1996
Demise of affirmative action appraochesBy Saul Sarabia
This Sunday, UCLA’s School of Law will "celebrate" its last
graduation before affirmative action is eliminated at the school. I
had planned to join my peers in the graduating class, primarily as
a way of sharing the accomplishment with my parents, who never
completed the sixth grade, and to promote the success of a program
that took a boy from poor Mexican-American neighborhoods and
under-funded public schools to the ranks of professionalism.
Instead, I am boycotting the law school’s ceremony as a
demonstration of the fragility and inadequacy of the terms whites
have constructed for nonwhite participation in the American
mainstream.
In 1988, I became the first person in my extended family to
attend college. Not only was I an affirmative action admit to UCLA,
my scores were well below the average for all applicants. When I
graduated Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude in 1993, I became
living proof of the promise and the result of affirmative action’s
implementation in a city where most Chicanos who manage to graduate
from public schools are lucky to find a job.
After being given the opportunity to attend a major university,
I won "merit-based" national scholarships, completed an honors
curriculum in my undergraduate coursework and turned down
admissions offers to prestigious law schools. But I do not see my
accomplishments as a vindication of the mythical American Dream.
Instead, it illustrates the perversity of the debate over a program
that benefits a tiny percentage of people of color. (Currently, out
of 100 Mexican American students 45 drop out of high school, 22 go
on to college and two complete a professional or graduate
program.)
A conversation with the dean at the UCLA’s School of Law
captures the fact that the rise and fall of affirmative action
represents the radically different investments of communities of
color and those who might support, and even implement, such
policies. When a group of law students at UCLA began to organize to
preserve affirmative action, the dean spoke of the fact that the
"enemies of affirmative action" were the Ward Connerlys and the
Pete Wilsons, not the UCLA law community which had embraced
"diversity" to a degree unmatched across the country.
In that conversation, she gave me a stern reminder that UCLA law
professors had voluntarily adopted the law school’s first
affirmative action program in the late 1960s, well before students
like me were there to press for it. It was curious to me how, in
that one sentence, the dean could reduce the moral force of the
Civil Rights Movement to white reaction to that struggle, the
arrogance with which she could attribute diversity at UCLA’s law
school to a group of well-intentioned elites, as opposed to the
fires in Watts which inspired their action.
When the law school faculty began the work of rewriting its race
conscious admissions policy this year, the dean’s position was
reiterated on an institutional level. Professors rejected a student
proposal that recommended an arguably effective race-neutral
solution to the exclusion of students of color in major law
schools: weakening the reliance on LSAT scores. Despite evidence of
class and racial bias in the test, a majority of professors took
the position that the cost of destabilizing the school’s prestige
(measured partly by U.S. News and World Reports’ reliance on LSAT
scores of entering students), was higher than the cost of excluding
minority applicants.
When one faculty member pointed to the sobering fact that the
professors could preserve and strengthen the prestige of the
school’s standing by publishing more often and in more prestigious
journals, the suggestion was not contested. In the eyes of the
professioriat, minority applicants have more responsibility for the
school’s national ranking than the professors’ performance relative
to scholars across the country. Mediocrity, just like merit, it
seems, is socially constructed.
The ultimate obscenity came late in the year, when students of
color learned that the law school turned down an offer by the
now-deceased Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown, to be the
commencement speaker. After the top 10 choices for speaker turned
down an invitation to speak, the graduation committee and the dean
invited an anti-affirmative action judge.
The irony of inviting an anti-affirmative action judge to speak
at a UC graduation on the year of its demise is surpassed only by
the indignity that some of the graduates will suffer by sharing the
stage with a man whose position suggests that they don’t have the
same claim to the degree as their peers. Moreover, the only voices
of color to speak at the graduation will be the members of a black
gospel choir. Hallelujah.
Many of my closest friends have assured me of the fallacy of
boycotting the law school graduation, arguing that I accomplish
nothing by my absence. They had originally planned to assert their
belongingness at the ceremony by convincing the graduation
committee to distribute multi-colored ribbons along with an
official statement taken from the School of Law’s own catalogue
regarding support for diversity. Students of color prepared the
ribbons, designed the flyer to be distributed (in between finals)
only to have the dean insist that the flyer come from the class of
1996 and not under the law school’s seal and letterhead.
The dean’s retreat from the pro-diversity statement embodies the
abandonment of affirmative action in favor of cheery-images of
naturally-occurring diversity. I refuse to politely applaud the
christening of the colorblind era at UCLA, which is obviously being
embraced both in substance and in form.
The travesty at UCLA’s law school demonstrates that people of
color, despite shared intentions with the dominant group, must
negotiate their oppression on a day to day basis to maintain their
dignity. It also demonstrates that the days of overt discrimination
have been replaced by something akin to what Subcomandante Marcos
has described as a "genocide without bullets," where law school
professors participate quietly in the slow suffocation of
communities of color by invoking "universal" notions of merit (such
as high LSAT scores), ignoring their own role in promoting racial
inequality because they have no intent to discriminate.
In June, I will join other Latino graduates in the yearly
bilingual graduation ceremony which we call Raza Graduation, where
families like my own will be able to celebrate, without hesitation,
the uncommon feat of Latino youth surviving what one Latino
researcher calls the toxic environment of the schools in this
country.
By participating in Raza Grad, we are constantly questioned
regarding our need for a "separate" ceremony, the divisiveness of
ethnic-specific celebrations, and the tendency to transform
individual accomplishments into a cause for community solidarity.
Of course, our intent is not to exclude anybody, these exercises in
cultural survival simply reflect our understanding that the terms
of participating in the American mainstream can disintegrate our
humanity, slowly; softly, and no less violently, than a bullet.
Sarabia is a third-year law student.