Affirmative Action’s Pioneer Generation

By

Sherman N. Miller

Released 7/ 17/ 2003

Some political pundits would have us believe that the battle over Affirmative Action centers around unqualified non-White folks gaining entrance into some of the nation’s finest institutions of higher learning or taking jobs they can’t handle. This narrow view suggests that the learning one gets while he or she is in college or university somehow stops when their tenure ends. Educators know that a college education teaches one how to learn, helps professionals gain life long friends with whom they can share ideas and gain trusted opinions, and allows individuals to become members of powerful alumni associations that are quasi modern day fraternal orders.

The impact of the Affirmative Action mind-set on removing socioeconomic bondage on non-White Americans is seen in the fact that the glass ceiling on African Americans becoming senior executives is gone. In Corporate America, Affirmative Action said it is now okay for White senior managers to become mentors for non-Whites. White senior managers’ own careers depend on how well they develop the next generation of corporate or social leadership, so these powerful mentors will not waste their valuable time developing anyone they deem unfit for senior level jobs. Thus, I wonder if all the ballyhooing over Affirmative Action creating a class of substandard professionals is simply silliness.

What Affirmative Action created is a pioneer generation in many non-White American families who are raising their own children to be fully mainstream competitive persons. Those upwardly mobile minority group persons making it through the finest institutions learn what it takes to be successful at these institutions and they will prepare their children to meet this challenge. These pioneers also gain legacy rights at their alma mater suggesting that these admission points will significantly reduce the need of their offspring to use the vestiges of Affirmative Action to gain admission to the nation’s finest institutions of higher learning. Hence, no one should be surprised to learn that the children of the Black Talented Tenth are going to excellent private and church-affiliated preparatory schools to prepare them for entrance into the nation’s finest colleges and universities.

But if we think about the impact of racial segregation and yesteryear’s Jim Crow laws, we see segregation was a very efficient system for controlling the distribution of the nation’s wealth. Education is the key to upward mobility; therefore, it was limited to Whites-only except for non-White colleges and universities that catered to various racial and ethnic subcultures on the fringes of the economic mainstream. Southern Blacks could not vote, so there was no need to worry about politicians being pressured into seeing that the masses of Southern Blacks gained entrance into the finest institutions. Miscegenation laws guaranteed that family ties across racial lines would never evolve into political power where mainstream Whites started to question the ill-treatment of their own non-White relatives.

A holistic look at the second half of the Twentieth Century shows it was loaded with significant African American socioeconomic progress. The U.S. Supreme Court knocked down the “separate but equal” doctrine that action desegregated public schools. The passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act elevated Blacks from chattel to full citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court knocked down the miscegenation laws which legitimated family ties across racial groups. Finally, the advent of Affirmation Action created a framework for Black American upward mobility in Mainstream America. Thus one can argue that these governmental actions started Black America on an evolutionary path from racial segregation to racial desegregation, to racial integration, to racial amalgamation, and ending at socioeconomic parity.

Affirmative Action has played a major role in fostering integration, amalgamation, and social economic parity. Today’s Mainstream American psyche accepts that African Americans have skills and talents that the nation needs to prosper, so the good receptivity of Black professionals in non-stereotypic roles is rapidly becoming the norm. Interracial marriage and relationships are growing quickly where it is not uncommon to see White grandparents caring for interracial children today. Finally, an African American chap, Richard D. Parsons, has become Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of the media giant AOLTimeWarner which says that the glass ceiling on Black upward mobility has been truly broken in Mainstream America.

As I read of President George Bush siding against University Michigan’s Affirmative Action program, I have concluded that I don’t care what euphemisms or schemes that the Bush Administration desires to employ to replace the goals of Affirmative Action. I only want the Bush Administration to insure that access to quality education remains open to all American citizens. My guess is that after the first generation of less chanced persons, who get the opportunity to go to college, these novo mainstream Americans will have enough savvy to help their own children both with their academic preparation for college work and financial support throughout their children’s college tenure. I am only expecting the Bush Administration to devise an Affirmative Action substitute system that passes judicial review, keeps the hearts of mentors open, and also maintains access to higher education for non-White poor people in America.

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