The Real Victims of Affirmative Action

After being valedictorian of his high school class and the winner of merit scholarships, Xaviaer DuRousseau was accepted to a top university. But all it took was one comment from a fellow student about affirmative action to make him doubt his real worth.

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Script:

During my first week at the University of Illinois, I was having lunch with some new friends. Suddenly, out of the blue, one of them said, “Hey Xaviaer, did you just draw a smiley face on your application to get in here?”

Puzzled, I asked, “What does that mean?”

“You know… You’re black and probably had decent grades. You could have just attached a smiley face, and I’m sure you would have gotten in.”

I stared back at him, dumbfounded. Then I just got angry. I told him about the merit scholarships I’d earned, none of which had anything to do with my race. I was even in the honors program. He got the picture and immediately apologized.

For about an hour, I felt very proud of myself. I’d told this guy where he could stick his bigotry. Then suddenly, a feeling of doubt that I’d never felt before swept over me.

I began to question whether or not I belonged at the university. Was I a diversity selection? How about the black girl across the room? Was she thinking the same thing about me? Do I really deserve to be here?

I had the GPA and ACT scores to prove that I did. I was valedictorian of my high school class—which by the way, was over 95% white. Despite this, barely a week into my freshman year, I was questioning everything.

This was my introduction to affirmative action: its negative effects and what it does to the psyche. It fosters insecurity among minority students—“Did I really earn this?”—as well as skepticism (usually unspoken) from their peers—“Are they really qualified to be here?”

This is what affirmative action does: it undermines self-confidence and creates a rift between racial groups. It’s not hard to see why. A report from the Center for Equal Opportunity found that to have the same chance of getting admitted to prestigious universities, Asian Americans need to score, on average, about 140 points higher on the SAT than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanic students, and 450 points higher than black students.

With data like this, it’s not surprising that students like my aforementioned classmate would question my credentials.

Does that justify his comments? No. But do I understand his point? Unfortunately, I do. I also understand the resentment felt by white and Asian students who are rejected by colleges solely because of these skewed admission policies.

Let’s call it what it is: racial discrimination.

In his book, David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell explains the concept of “Mismatch Theory.” The idea is that students may be better off attending institutions that match their academic abilities. This improves their chances of success, whereas attending an institution for which they are not prepared is likely to ensure their failure.

I saw this firsthand. A classmate of mine was failing our French class, so I offered to help her study. While trying to figure out why she was doing so poorly, I learned that she had a surprisingly low high school GPA and ACT score—lower than anyone else I knew at the university, and much lower than some of my white friends who had been denied admission.

She started the year happy and confident but ended the semester angry, bitter, and on academic probation. She soon dropped out; yet another victim of affirmative action.

Her odds of success could have been higher had she attended a school more suited to her abilities. Instead of having the victory of graduating from a perfectly good university, she suffered the defeat of failing out of one for which she was not suited.

This story is repeated every year at countless campuses across the nation. It’s a phenomenon well documented by academics like Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, Richard Sander at UCLA, and Stuart Taylor, former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

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