My brother was one of the first African-Americans accepted when Harvard began affirmative-action back in the day. He graduated high school in 1971, in Oakland, two years ahead of me in L.A. It’s not clear that desegregation entered into the great university’s decision—my big bro was always a good student—but that was the era. In his case, however he came to be admitted as a black student on the world’s foremost white campus—it was an experiment that did not turn out well. He floundered over the next few years, poor grades, in and out of school until he was invited not to return. This is the kind of anecdote that’s supposed to give credence to the idea that has been proposed recently—by a lot of Jewish academics and Asian would-be Harvard graduates who feel they’ve been denied their rightful place in the Ivy League—that African Americans should content ourselves with public state-sponsored universities, and perhaps the second rank of those. This is an idea that is actually familiar to black people from history, separate but unequal, and seems unlikely to be accepted today, despite whatever ruling soon emerges from the Supreme Court.
My brother failed in Cambridge not because he was African-American but because he was an idiot. That is said with unconditional love and affection. He was equal parts pompous ass and shrinking violet, depending on the hour and season, believe me, this is coming from someone who knows. Any of his five siblings could have told the admissions committee but we were not consulted. He applied in secret and failed to note on his application that he had poor social skills (black nerd, actually, in an era before that was even a concept) in an environment, of reluctant integration on The Yard in Boston, or wherever, that despite the university’s best intentions still required the ability to dance and weave socially.
And sometimes shuck and jive, one assumes.
My own education at UCLA also came to a sudden end, not because of bad grades but after the racist Los Angeles police arrested me, a black undergraduate trying to better myself, coming out of someone’s house with property not my own. Oh well. However, it’s more instructive to look at what Harvard did to my brother, without granting a degree. “I shall be home for summer,” he wrote from his dorm room one year. It wasn’t completely his fault, he got puffed up on the East Coast and deflated back home. He was also, as un-PC as this term may seem today, a momma’s boy, like me—we all were, me and both my older brothers. We lived in a fatherless household. Our mother was a single mom who wanted the men at home (the oldest had left years before, to attend a historically black college in the South, and never returned) and contributing in some capacity to the household. Any idea of the possible benefits of a diploma from what might be the best university in the world—doors that might open—was overshadowed by Mother’s always more pressing needs. But we digress. My choice for college was easy because UCLA, which was then considered merely a commuter school, without the international reputation it now enjoys, was cheap. My preferred way of viewing higher education is practical, like a bus that takes you where you want to go. The idea that black people are suddenly going to give up our seats, or get off entirely, as is being suggested, doesn’t seem likely. But that the effort to re-segregate is being made at all is still instructive about race in America.
This most recent challenge of affirmative action began with a Jewish guy named Blum, a former unsuccessful candidate for Congress from Houston who previously challenged affirmative action at the University of Texas’ flagship campus, across the street from my crib in Austin (where my master’s in Information Studies was awarded last year, actually, although my dean, Eric Meyer, said that he and the Asian and white instructors were not much impressed by my analytic skills, something that white instructors have told me before.) So, like, this cat Blum was unsuccessful in court in Texas just as he was unsuccessful at the polling place. His latest gamble at Harvard—with Asian plaintiffs substituted for the white one in Texas—and a private university instead of a public one—has better luck. Better, based upon a very persuasive argument: everyone knows what good students Asian kids are. And because, when the suit was filed Mr. Blum’s principal ally was the Office of Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education, under a Jewish assistant secretary, Kenneth Marcus. To deal with the former argument first, just how good Chinese students are cannot even be measured. Even a bad student in mainland China can make a good white or black American kid look lame. That is coming from someone who has lived and worked among the Chinese. There are, potentially, a few bad Asian-American kids out there, but they haven’t spent enough time around black people, frankly, to know what they’re doing. So, like, it’s a fair argument. Awesome students. The OCR connection isn't so convincing. Still, on the affirmative action front, it seems like a good time for black people to move on. We need to up our game.
