Ask the Scholars

This is a familiar question: "Why am I responsible for the sins of the past?" In terms of slavery, we need to recognize slavery as an important institution upon which America's wealth was built. If we take this view, it's not important whether a white family, or a black family for that matter, arrived in 1700 or in 1965. If we wear cotton blue jeans, if we took out an insurance policy from Aetna, if we buy anything from anyone who has a connection to the industries that were built on sla...

What has largely disappeared from the popular discussions of inequality in this country is the history of discrimination from 1865 to the present. Blacks know about the history of Jim Crow. Non-blacks often have a general understanding of it, largely mediated through these mass media images of the Jim Crow South. But outside of that, I don't think that the inequality that was sustained and perpetuated through Jim Crow is really calculated into the racial inequalities that exist today. Ad...

Let's try this inversion of the question: there are people who are in their late teens who have never been slaves, and yet they suffer as individuals because of the disadvantages from the legacy of slavery and white supremacy. Is that right, and is that fair? The legacy of slavery and white supremacy is still with us. I'll give you an example that is very tied to affirmative action admissions. Many students of color do not have access to honors courses or AP courses in schools that are m...

In a way, this question illustrates how many people bring their assumptions and conflate a lot of different issues all at once. Nobody today owns slaves, so what's the relevance of this to college admissions? It's really the product of a lot of rhetoric that's been thrown out there by people who oppose affirmative action.

Opponents of affirmative action often say that people should be judged as individuals. In terms of college admissions, what actually does it mean to be judged a...