Racism in the Academy (I)

The most racist op-ed I've seen in recent memory came from a pair of African-American women at Stanford Law School, complaining that

This year, Stanford Law School... was unable to matriculate one African American man in its first-year class.

If any African American applicant had been rejected on the basis of his race that would have been wrong, of course, but that's not what is being alleged here. The writers are blaming the university for an outcome that is probably the result of many factors. It's possible that there weren't enough sufficiently qualified Black men who applied this year, or that those who were accepted chose to go to other, possibly less expensive schools, or that the regrettably underrepresented pool of qualified Black male college graduates is being fought over by other law schools, not to mention business schools, medical schools, academic graduate programs, major corporations and government agencies. And unfortunately, maybe there just aren't enough qualified applicants to go around to fill everybody's unstated color quota. And if there are only so many qualified people of a given type applying to Stanford it's not Stanford's fault for not "reaching out", it's that potential applicants are just not showing enough initiative to try to get in.

And the main concern of these women?

As a group of people whose reasonableness has been consistently questioned and undervalued, black men have intimate knowledge of the reality of the law. Their unique perspective gives them a strong platform from which to respond to statements like "Aren't we all American?" and from which they can succinctly reveal the complexity of legal debate and doctrine. Their absence detracts from the quality of the debate.

Suffice to say that groups of people aren't admitted to law school, individuals are. To assume that a particular individual has a particular life experience, or a particular perspective on their experience, or a particular set of career aspirations primarily on the basis of their "race", is well, as close to the dictionary definition of racism as anything I've read in a newspaper this year.

I agree that diversity in an academic program is a good thing. But let that diversity be defined in ways that matter, such as by experience, opinions, interests and career goals. Not the bogus diversity of fleshtones.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 25, 2002 06:44 AM