Beyond the Minority Myth

Abstract

now after Bakke a careful appraisal of affirmative action remains to be made. There was less to learn from the recent debate than we needed to learn. The ludicrous, confused assumptions about the uses of education and the predicament of the socially disadvantaged those assumptions which shaped affirmative action and which may continue to influence public policy were never identified or finally tried. Only one question gathered attention. Just one: Were white students treated unfairly by schools which had special programs for minority students? It was an important concern, but it might have become a much more important question if it had forced a wide review of affirmative action. Instead, social activists and academics and politicians and, finally, judges voiced one opinion or another about the rights of a certain white applicant for medical school and they said little more. They didn't attempt to determine if affirmative action had ever worked. They didn't wonder if it had ever been possible to make higher education accessible to minorities. Nor did they wonder how programs that benefited a few nonwhite Americans had served the best interests of the majority of nonwhite Americans. With only the single question to concern them, they never were bothered by that peculiar expression the question contained minority students. students. Even persons staunchly opposed to affirmative action used the expression with ease. Minority student was the label I bore until three years ago, in graduate school. My Mexican ancestry permitted the designation and, as a result, a kind of success. (On applications for admission to schools and financial aid and college teaching jobs, my Spanish surname or the notation that, yes, I am Hispanic nearly always got me whatever I asked for.) Guilt forces me now to confess that I was grossly mislabeled and unjustly rewarded during those last years of my schooling. I was not someone who should have been termed a minority student, because I enjoyed the huge benefit of excellent schooling. With such an admission, I know, I challenge a basic assumption of those persons who support affirmative action. They have argued (doubtless many still would assert) that because few other MexicanAmericans have received higher educations, I became with my matriculation in college and graduate school an exception a minority student. But they were wrong. Their deduction was facile. And, worse, dangerous. By labeling me, they made it possible for others (even themselves?) to mistake me for someone seriously disadvantaged. Those persons who should be named minority Americans are very different from me. They are people profoundly alienated from public (majority) society. Most often they are poor and uneducated. Always they live without great expectations, for they do not assume equality with others in public or access to institutional life. Though in recent years, influenced by the black civil rights movement, we have RICHARD RODRIGUEZ is a writer who lives in San Francisco. His book Toward Words will be published next year by Knopf.