To the Editor:
Nicholas Lemann’s recent piece, “How Affirmative Action Really Works” (The Chronicle Review, November 30), makes a cogent case for why the United States still very much needs race-based affirmative action in college admissions. American history in general, and slavery in particular, helps explain why. The past isn’t past — it is inescapably present. Lemann writes: “The argument for affirmative action has to rest on the idea that for historical reasons that have a very long tail, race deserves a special status. Race was not just, as W.E.B. DuBois put it, ‘the problem of the 20th century,’ but also the problem of the 19th century. To a lesser but still distinct extent, it is the problem of the 21st century.”
Race isn’t real, as biologists and sociologists have long noted, but racism certainly is. Affirmative action is an acknowledgment of, and attempt to mitigate, this unfortunate fact.
Lemann’s otherwise convincing case is marred by a misleading statement, however. In noting the immense influence that elite universities continue to have on American society, he writes: “every current member of the Supreme Court went to either Harvard or Yale Law School.” This is technically true, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg attended Harvard Law School for two years until she relocated to New York City, where her husband had been hired by a major law firm. But it is imprecise, as RBG has no Harvard degree; rather, she transferred to and graduated, in 1959, from Columbia Law School.
Justin Snider
Assistant dean, student advising
Columbia University