Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in our NSO magazine issue on Sept. 22.
When it came in the mail, I looked at it a while before opening it. The packet, white-enveloped and Cardinal red, contained a letter that, on weighted paper, read, “It gives me very great pleasure to invite you into the Stanford family as a member of the Stanford Class of 2020!” Embossed and sleek, the words felt so special. I felt special. I was part of the 4.69 percent, one of the 1,700 students selected from over 40,000. It felt like a blessing; it felt like luck.
When the news got around, some met my acceptance with a sigh and an “Of course you got in.” Friends said that my acceptance made sense — not because of what I did or who I was, but because of the boxes I checked off in the “Family Background” section of the Common App.
I was a half-Mexican, half-Egyptian, low-income student — the first person in her family to go to college. Socioeconomically, I was desirable to the institution. Ethnically, I was almost necessary (how often do Mexican-Egyptians apply?). But all you would need to do would be to change the color of my skin — to make me white — and I wouldn’t be holding the same letter. Add a few extra thousand to my family’s annual income and I would not be afforded the same regard in the admissions office. Or so some insisted.
That certainly wasn’t the first time people have sought to discredit the accomplishments of people from similar backgrounds. Guillermo Camarillo ’20, a close friend and fellow Quest Scholar and Leland Scholar, received considerable attention from the media last year after he wrote a letter to his dentist via Facebook post detailing his dentist’s attempt to credit his admission to Stanford solely to affirmative action. After asking where Guillermo would be attending college and receiving “Stanford” as the answer, the dentist grew cold as he started asking for Guillermo’s ACT score. The dentist insisted that he had gotten accepted because he came from a poorer area; meanwhile, his daughter (presumably from a higher socioeconomic background) applied with a higher ACT score and received a rejection letter.
“You belittled me. You labeled me,” Guillermo wrote in his letter. “Little do you know that I grew up in a house where Spanish was only spoken. I had to learn English on my own. I grew up in a household where at times we couldn’t afford to pay our rent or didn’t have enough food for the whole week… You are neglecting that all odds were against me.”
With over 61,000 “likes” on Facebook, the post garnered national attention, bringing first-generation and low-income students into the headlines, however briefly. It brought up a years-old conversation: Does affirmative action have a place in college admissions? And if so, to what degree?
Let’s start with the basics. What is affirmative action anyway? Most of us have a general idea — it has something to do with the way race plays into admissions to institutions of higher learning and employment in general. It could mean favoring certain groups of people, while necessarily excluding others. Cornell Law School describes it as “a set of procedures designed to eliminate unlawful discrimination between applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination and prevent such discrimination in the future. Applicants may be seeking admission to an educational program or looking for professional employment.”
Prescribed as a means to right past wrongs and aid those disadvantaged in their educational and employment pursuits, affirmative action stands strong in the strides it has made for underrepresented communities. It’s not about discriminating against white applicants — it’s about leveling the playing field. For the first time in history, Harvard admitted a majority-minority class; that is, more people of color and underrepresented backgrounds comprised the class than their white counterparts. But now comes the question, why is this a good thing? Why does it matter that more minorities occupy those coveted roles in undergraduate and graduate institutions?
We need people from every walk of life in every aspect of life. We are so much the product of our environment, shaped indelibly by our experiences, that to deny leadership of that range of diversity is to set it back. Diversity among collaborators creates a web of relation that is equal parts beautiful and strong: a resilient connection between identity-sharers and an opportunity for differences to strike an inclusive chord. To do otherwise would be a disservice to ingenuity, a deprivation, a sprint toward counterproductivity. The collaboration that affirmative action makes room for also makes room for new ideas — a type of learning and innovation unrivaled by ideas coming from a set that is overwhelmingly the same. It gives narrative permission to inform novelty, and it is where life experiences make for breakthroughs.
Moreover, we get to know the narrative of a mass and its identity very well through the individual and their own interactions with that identity. That is not to say that each person bears the burden of representation, that the only Latina in the room has to represent the entire Latina experience. That’s not the point of having her in the room. In his research paper “Intersectionality 101,” Ahir Golpaldas argues that diversity sees “beyond race, class and gender to include age, attractiveness, body type, caste, citizenship, education, ethnicity, height and weight assessments, immigration status, income, marital status, mental health status, nationality, occupation, physical ability, religion, sex, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status and other naturalized — though not necessarily natural — ways of categorizing human populations.”
All of the above are the ways in which she exists and interacts with the world around her, and they’re brought to us by the way in which her race shapes how she forms her own identity — it’s the first thing we see when we look at her, maybe it’s in how she speaks, it’s in her name. It’s how her identities interact and morph and mesh that make her valuable. From a productivity standpoint alone, it makes her useful.
It might appear that considering the narrative of people of color alongside that of others is where the subject gets touchy for some, and it’s where the phrase “reverse racism” gets thrown around. Is favoring diversity in the classroom and workplace a form of discrimination against white applicants? In light of recent policy proposals, Donald Trump certainly seems to think so.
By the nature of how college admissions works, a lucky few are accepted. The rest are denied. The same works with employment; not everyone gets the job. Are all of those people — the vast majority of applicants — who receive a rejection being discriminated against just because they were not accepted? Not at all. It’s discrimination when, in the 1960s, African Americans were denied quality jobs to such a great extent that they lived on average seven years shorter than white Americans and were twice as likely to be unemployed. It’s discrimination when only 15 percent of Hispanics aged 25-29 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 41 percent of whites.
The problem starts when the people who rise to the top are consistently similar: middle-to-upper class, white and male. When there isn’t enough room for people of different backgrounds and identities to thrive in the leadership roles filled by their white counterparts, something has to be done to make sure that no one is taking more space than they should.
Diversity always comes up when the conversation turns to college admissions. It was in the admissions letter I read a year ago: “At Stanford you join a diverse, joyful and collaborative campus community with a shared determination to change the world.” And that’s why it’s so important — it’s a shared effort. If everyone is welcome at the table, everyone needs to be at the table. Otherwise you’ll never know what they could bring to it.
Contact Amanda Rizkalla at arizkalla ‘at’ stanford.edu.