Affirmative Action for All Disadvantaged

Whenever I encounter debates on affirmative action, as I did on Nov. 3, I always ask myself the same question: why doesn't anyone discuss the minorities who are doing very well without it? Certainly there exists racism against Asians, probably of as strong a variety as any prejudice toward Hispanics or Native Americans (two minority groups who, with African-Americans, benefit most often from affirmative-action policies). Many Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants arrive in America from societies just as violent, environments just as depressed, as any Hispanic or African-American does. Surely, it is harder to learn English as a first-or second-generation Asian-American than a native Spanish speaker. If the SATs are culturally biased, such tests should appear doubly opaque to Asian-Americans. And yet, the University of California at Berkeley sets quotas to keep the Asian student body below 30 percent, while Asian-Americans make up more than 20 percent of Harvard's own student population.

When Central and Eastern European Jews arrived in the late 19th century, speaking no English, possessing a very different culture, and faced with widespread anti-Semitism, they succeeded nonetheless, representing, within one or two generations, a disproportionate percentage of America's professional and cultural elite. Indians and Pakistanis have also done remarkably well in America.

I do not question the existence of racism. Yet many Americans of color do extraordinarily well. I do not, in addition, question affirmative action in principle--if it aims at giving all those of socio-economically deprived, underprivileged, or educationally less rigorous backgrounds the equal opportunity to succeed. That goes for poor African-Americans from Watts or Brownsville; but it should also apply to destitute whites from bankrupt mining communties in rural West Virginia; Vietnamese boat people; inner-city Koreans; Chinese political refugees and any other group whose social and economic backgrounds deprive them of the same opportunities as the sons and daughters of Exeter or Andover.

Why should a minority citizen of middle-or upper-middle class background, of a similar education and acculturation as any caucasian, be given a priori an advantage? To make up for the centuries of discrimination preceding 1863? Or, for that matter, 1963? We no longer live in that world, thank God. Should we pretend we still do?

At what point in deciding an individual's qualifications do we sacrifice academic or professional merit to some much harder to quantify measure of diversity? Isn't it better to seek stricter and more comprehensive laws against discrimination of any kind than to focus so much attention on tipping the scales in a wholly vague and unsystematic fashion? I ask these questions here, in the forum of The Crimson, because they were not answered at the affirmative-action debate last week. I ask them because they need to be answered. --Eric A. Kurlander, GSAS