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An interesting opinion piece from Dr. Tyler Austin Harper, an assistant professor at Bates College who benefitted from affirmative action and still supports it as a kind of reparations. None of that really makes Harper any different from many other progressives who support affirmative action. What’s different about this piece is that Harper admits the system has been gamed for a long time and, arguably worse, it encourages students to think about race first and foremost in their applications.
Harper’s insight began when he was a grad student working as a freelance tutor in Queens.
For my first gig, on a sweltering summer afternoon, I made my way to a cramped apartment where my teenage client told me what she needed: for me to read over her college applications and make sure she didn’t seem too Asian…
Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.
Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school.
Harper goes on to say that he believes affirmative action works and is necessary “to redress the historical evils of chattel slavery.” He also says he believes he’s a beneficiary of it suggesting he might not have gotten into his undergrad college or his PhD program without it. And yet…
I also believe that affirmative action — though necessary — has inadvertently helped create a warped and race-obsessed American university culture.
