For someone who calls herself "the perfect affirmative action baby," Sonia Sotomayor is having a hard time convincing supporters that she deserves that distinction.
Not unlike the man who nominated her to the Supreme Court, Sotomayor would seem to vindicate the use of affirmative action in higher education. From humble beginnings, Sotomayor arrived at Princeton University barely able to write, but by her senior year, she was awarded the university's most prestigious undergraduate prize. Now that Sotomayor has reached the top, however, proponents of affirmative action are downplaying its importance.
William G. Bowen was the president of Princeton when Sotomayor was a student there, and an early champion of affirmative action. In a recent interview with the New Yorker, when asked if Sotomayor received preferential treatment, Bowen seemed to disavow the role affirmative action played in her achievements. "She was going to succeed and going to thrive wherever she was, in any setting," Bowen told the New Yorker. "And she did. She accomplished what she accomplished because she was good!"
Liberal bloggers, too, have argued that Sotomayor was "not an Affirmative Action student," calling assertions to the contrary "a lie." Confronted with Sotomayor's own admission that she benefited from affirmative action, another blogger said the nominee was "selling herself short."
After Princeton, Sotomayor applied, and was accepted, at Yale Law School. There, as The New York Times has reported, officials similarly dismissed the importance of her race.
Given her standout record at Princeton, said James A. Thomas, a former dean of admissions, Ms. Sotomayor's background had little role in her acceptance to the school.
It's awfully curious for those who champion the policy to disclaim its best student. And it hasn't gone unnoticed by opponents of affirmative action.
"[N]ow that that outcome has been achieved, liberals don't want to take any credit for their success," wrote the Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb. "It's a very odd thing to see a social policy become orphaned at the moment of its greatest triumph."
The problem for advocates of affirmative action is that Sotomayor's story is atypical -- alien, even, to the stories one finds in the nation and at its most prestigious universities. There's a danger here of not seeing the forest for one exceptional tree.
Affirmative action was enacted as a response to President John F. Kennedy's call in the 1960s for the inclusion of minorities in higher education. Typical among these efforts was the desire of a Cornell University administrator in 1978 "to bring minority enrollment up to the same level as the percentage of minorities in the population of New York state."
Yet today, the state of New York is 17 percent black and 16 percent Hispanic; Cornell's Class of 2012 was 5.0 percent black and 5.5 percent Hispanic. Indeed, while in the nation at large, blacks represent 12.8 percent of the population, and Hispanics 15.1 percent, last year's incoming classes at Harvard and Princeton were, respectively, 11.0 and 8.6 percent black, and 9.7 and 7.5 percent Hispanic -- and these from the Ivy League leaders in diverse enrollments.
What scares supporters of affirmative action is that Sotomayor's glossy attainment of the American Dream will eclipse the trend for minorities in America -- a downward spiral in recent years, even after nearly a half-century of affirmative action.
Some of the most sobering evidence comes from the Brookings Institute and the Pew Center. Their findings show that even black parents who get ahead very often have children who fall behind. "Many middle-income black parents have seen their children's income fall below their own," wrote Julia B. Isaacs, "and disturbingly, high numbers of black children have fallen from the middle to the bottom of the income distribution." For black families in the middle class, the story is not one of upward achievement, but of downward mobility.
Hispanics have suffered similar setbacks, according to University of Albany Professor Jose E. Cruz. As Cruz demonstrated last week in the Albany Times Union, even as educational attainment increased among Latinos in New York State between 2000 and 2005, their median income grew by only $2,640, compared to a $6,430 gain among whites. As a percentage of non-Hispanic income, Latino earnings have fallen since 2000.
As minority progress has been forestalled or reversed, the American educational landscape has reverted to the days before school integration. Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out in a decision two years ago that in 2002, one in six black children attended a school that was almost entirely composed of fellow minorities. There was an "evident risk," he said," of a "return to school systems that are in fact (though not in law) resegregated..."
Yet Breyer did not write for the majority in the case in question, which concerned integration in schools in Kentucky and Seattle. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts offered a misguided tautology, and a pernicious turn on the famous words of Martin Luther King, Jr. "The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race," he held, in striking down the integration measures.
It's that kind of facile worldview that allows Pat Buchanan to ridicule Sotomayor as "Miss Affirmative Action, 2009"; Sotomayor's meteoric rise to the top, Buchanan fatuously insists, was "all because she was a Hispanic woman." And it's the same acrimony, backbiting, and ignorance that seems to have made Clarence Thomas what he is today: so alienated at Yale Law School that he dressed like a field hand, that he disowned the "gifted young people" who he said were "sacrificed on the altar of an abstract theory of social justice."
In the Gladwellian sense, Sotomayor is an outlier. With innate talent, ambition, and moxie, she put in her requisite 10,000 hours at Princeton and Yale, studying children's classics over the summer, reaching out for help from professors, and learning to write analytically. Yet as racial disparities widen, and the Roberts Court further curtails the promise of Brown v. Board of Education, there will be fewer mothers of color who purchase the Encyclopedia Britannica for their young children.
Defenders of affirmative action cannot allow its opponents to hold Sotomayor up as a straw woman; one Justice does not diversity make. Today, exceptional minorities are hailed as outliers. Tomorrow, they may be outdated.
Economic status as one selection criterion makes sense. Race, ethnicity, or gender do not.
Sonia belongs to a WOMEN-ONLY CLUB. Which is v. the federal judges code that says they can't discriminate by race, sex, religion, or nationally........Myself, I don't care. But many of you progressives who always scream about country clubs, fraternal organizations, etc. I say please, no double-standard.....BTW, she belongs to the Belizean Grove, a group of prominent professional women.
Great the Sotomayor learned and excelled!
She graduated with highest honors from Princeton.
Brava. That's called AFFIRMATIVE W-O-R-K.
Notwithstanding the pronouncements of the sainted Louis B. Powell or the tortured decision rendered by former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor in Gruter v. Bollinger, affirmative action, while originally well intended, is fundamentally flawed. The mechanism of the program requires that someone be rejected because he/she is the wrong race/gender/ethnicity. It doesn't matter how many other factors ostensibly entered the decision or what the "diversity goal" of the institution is. The affirmative action selectee's success does not vindicate the decision to select him or her. All it means is that some other candidates were denied the opportunity to succeed because they were born "wrong."
Judge Sotomayor's status as affirmative action beneficiary is irrelevant. Barring some scandal or reveleation of impropriety on her part, I know of no reason why Sotomayor should not be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. But first let's hear her own candid and frank responses in her confirmation hearings and then trust our elected representatives to base their final judgment without consideration of her ethnicity or gender or "affirmative action" status.
If affirmative action is just, why should it be "phased out?" Proponents use the "temporary" argument as a hedge and to make the measure appear palatable.
Don't hate the player. Hate the game.
There is no panacea for the constant indignities that one encounters daily. The First Lady is likened to a gorilla. All you who stand on the sides shaking your fingers, do you have even an inkling of how deep that sh*t hurts? At the same time, the expectations of this Black man in office to be some kind of miracle worker after all the years when all sat back and watched the destruction, demanding nothing? If the act does not change the thinking of those who question the accomplishment because the accomplished is Black or Latino, then it is kind of worthless.
Could it be that we expect wonderful things from him because he inspired us to do so and isn't that a good thing?
I don't think it's 100% fair to say that "all sat back..." Some would argue that the circumstances surrounding his first election were questionable and that our shock and fear after 9/11 helped him get re-elected.
Mandate doesn't chage a bigot, you're right about that...but what about the bigot's child or grandchild? Isn't your mind more open than your grandfather's?
Why would this be so hard to believe? Admission to grad school (or law school) is based almost entirely on where you got your degree, and how you did. Since no one except wingnuts disputes that Judge Sotomayor performed exceptionally well at Princeton, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that her acceptance to YLC did not involve Affirmative Action (although I'm sure the admission committee was happy to accept an ethnic minority female).
The whole premise of Affirmative Action in higher education is that it is a leg up for talented people who are deficient in some of the traditional "qualifications" for admission. It is not, and was never intended to be, some kind of permanent bus pass to success. You get a chance (a chance that we white males take for granted), and then it is up to you. In the case of success stories like Sotomayor (or even Clarence Thomas), the individual reaches a point where he or she can be evaluated on his or her own merits and performance, and Affirmative Action should become a historical footnote -- as far as judging that particular individual is concerned.
Sotomayor's supporters quite properly want her to be evaluated on her own merits, as she is NOW. This is a Supreme Court confirmation, not a debate on the efficacy of Affirmative Action.
In any case, Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke (1978) became the touchstone for race-based considerations in higher education after Sotomayor was already admitted. After 1978, the single justification colleges and universities could use in acting affirmatively was diversity, which, in practice, meant affording minorities "plus" factors in their applications. So today, affirmative action is not understood as a "leg up" for talented but disadvantaged applicants, but as a diversity-building tool for schools.
The larger point is that race need not be divorced from merit; that overcoming difficult circumstances is meritorious in itself, and can add diversity to an institution. To evaluate Sotomayor on her own merits does not preclude a discussion of her gender, race or background---these are characteristics that infused diversity in the Ivy League, and will add diversity to the Supreme Court.