Should summer programs go race-blind?

Despite the isolated incidents of racial discrimination and hate crimes that occur even today, one would be hard-pressed, especially in the context of college admissions, to point to an overtly racist conspiracy to keep minorities down in society. How, then, is it that historically underrepresented minorities remain underrepresented in our elite institutions, despite 30 years of remedial efforts like affirmative action? The way we have answered this conundrum may be part of the problem itself.

Instead of facing outright discrimination, minorities today are still struggling to overcome systematic discrimination — failing public schools, poverty, broken families, a rotten social environment — that are a legacy of our country's past wrongs. In light of the Supreme Court's recent ruling overturning the University of Michigan's undergraduate affirmative action program, colleges must now maintain an open gate to disadvantaged minorities without explicitly resorting to race.

Programs like the Princeton University Preparatory Program directly address the systematic deficiencies that minorities face in their secondary schools without the nasty side effect of classifying applicants by skin color (or trying to guess at it based on an ethnic surname). The problem with the college admissions process is not the injustice of holding minorities to the same academic standards, or subjecting them to allegedly racist exams like the SATs, as some have suggested. Disadvantaged applicants are exactly that — they have not had the advantages of ample test preparation, individualized college counseling, and advanced college-level classes that give their more affluent peers a substantial edge.

On the other hand, programs that make race an explicit admissions factor, such as The Daily Princetonian's Class of 2001 Summer Journalism Program, exacerbate the systematic discrimination they seek to negate. These policies, along with the mindless multiculturalism mindset and blind devotion to the nebulous notion of "diversity," conspire to impose a counterproductive attitude with respect to how students view themselves and how they are viewed by others.

There is a very good reason the Supreme Court subjects race-based classification schemes to its highest level of review — the "strict scrutiny" standard. From American slavery to the "one drop rule" under Jim Crow to ethnic cleansing all over the world, racial classification has seldom been used benignly.

In the context of admissions, campus life, and preparatory programs, college administrators should look at students on the basis of their individual character and identity and encourage students to do the same for themselves. But policies that classify students as "black" or "Hispanic" are not only saying something about their skin color, they are also imputing something about their identity based on their color.

When programs like The Daily Princetonian's summer journalism session zero in on an applicant's skin color instead of the entirety of his background, what they are saying to all students is that their individual identity, experiences, and adversities do not matter; rather, the program will assign a group identity and infer characteristics about them on that basis. Such policies discourage minorities from striving to succeed on their own initiative, given that they will forever be recognized as part of a group and never for their individual merits. Conversely, other students will never look to them as individuals, but only as minorities, with all the accompanying baggage that label entails. In the grand scheme of things, this bleak and despairing mindset is a form of systematic discrimination that discourages individual achievement.

Quite aside from the practical effects that flow from policies based on racial classification, there is also the moral problem of imposing an identity on someone based on his skin color. It is one thing for a student, after careful consideration, to come to his own conclusion that his skin color comprises an integral part of his individual identity. It is quite another matter when academic programs impose broad, racial categories on students and presume aspects about their identity that the students themselves may not accept. As the Supreme Court stated in a recent decision, "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe and the mystery of human life."

The Daily Princetonian claims it has abandoned the racial element of its summer program in light of the University of Michigan ruling. For the sake of an otherwise innovative program that, like the University's Preparatory Program, seeks to help students overcome systematic discrimination, let us hope that this represents a genuine change of heart. While poverty and other adversities indicate the systematic discrimination an individual has faced, race by itself can never be a proxy for these specific hardships. Any program or admissions policy that relies exclusively or substantially on an applicant's race is itself part of the problem.

Eric Wang '02 is currently a law student at the University of Virginia and writes frequently about race relations.