What to know about affirmative action today.
Affirmative action can’t stay out of the headlines. In October the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on two cases against race-conscious college admissions — at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill .
Here’s a primer on what affirmative action is and why it has so much staying power in the cultural zeitgeist.
What is affirmative action?
Rooted in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, affirmative action began in 1961 with an executive order requiring government contractors to give equal opportunities to applicants and employees, regardless of their race, color, or national origin. In 1965, an executive order from President Lyndon B. Johnson went a step further and prohibited employment discrimination based on race, religion, color, or national origin by organizations getting federal contracts or subcontracts. The order also required contractors to give equal opportunities to women and minorities.
In the 1960s and 1970s, colleges started developing affirmative-action policies for racial minorities. This change was also motivated by student protests and the civil-rights movement. In 1969, Columbia University, for example, nearly doubled the number of Black students it admitted compared with the year before, The New York Times reported.
Today, we largely understand affirmative action for colleges to be when institutions consider whether an applicant is part of an underrepresented group during the admissions process, said Natasha Warikoo, a professor of sociology at Tufts University and the author of the book Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools. It’s also known as race-conscious admissions.
Do most colleges use affirmative action in admissions?
No. Nine states have banned race-conscious admissions policies for their public colleges.
In 1996, California became the first state to ban the policy. Even before this change, and the others that followed, affirmative action was debated nationally. Your stance on affirmative action sometimes became a measure of your politics, Warikoo said.
However, she added, a majority of colleges don’t practice affirmative action because they don’t have selective admissions.
Hasn’t the Supreme Court ruled on affirmative action before?
Yes. In 1978, the country heard the first of many court cases against affirmative action in higher education, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Allan Bakke, a 35-year-old white man, argued that he was unfairly denied admission twice to the University of California at Davis School of Medicine. He said that his qualifications exceeded those of minority students. At the time, the institution reserved 16 spots for minority students in its affirmative-action program.
The court ruled that race could be considered as one factor in college admissions, but the medical school had to admit Bakke on the grounds that its special admissions program illegally excluded him from one of the reserved 16 seats.
Since the Bakke ruling, the Supreme Court has taken up other cases arguing against the use of affirmative action, and each time it has ruled that race-conscious admissions policies should be allowed to remain in place. The most recent were two cases, titled Fisher v. University of Texas, in 2013 and 2016, when an applicant questioned whether the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment allows the consideration of race in undergraduate admissions.
What’s different about the cases coming before the Supreme Court this fall?
The two cases were brought by Students for Fair Admissions, which alleges that Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill discriminated against Asian American applicants in their admissions processes. The court will hear oral arguments on October 31.
The outcomes of these cases could have major implications for race conscious-admissions at public and private institutions. Students for Fair Admissions will argue these cases before a Supreme Court with a conservative supermajority in hopes that the justices will strike down affirmative action entirely.
“It’s interesting because the Supreme Court has affirmed affirmative action multiple times.” Warikoo said. “The Bakke case and then multiple after that. And yet, this new court has taken up this case.”
Why has affirmative action been such a hot-button issue?
Affirmative action is an issue that can gauge people’s racial attitudes, Warikoo said, and their ideas about fairness. When people debate affirmative action, they may question whether it is fair to use race — something a person can’t control — as one part of the evaluation for admission to college.
And unlike other racial issues, like reparations and police reform, affirmative action can be easier to picture. For many, the policy appears as simple as one student getting into college over another.
Affirmative action as carried out by many colleges, however, is not that simple. History shows that many selective colleges have benefited from African American slavery in some way — whether from economic profit from the slave trade or the use of slave labor to build the campus, Warikoo said. And for years, these institutions also systematically excluded the descendants of slaves and other racial and religious groups. It took until 1951 for UNC-Chapel Hill to enroll its first Black students.
