Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2019
ISSN
1943-4278
Publisher
University of California Berkeley School of Law
Language
en-US
Abstract
There are consistent messages to people of color about their proper place in
/="/">society, which has always been a really important tool for maintaining and
/="/">advancing white supremacy. Referring back to what Professor Haney-Lopez
/="/">asserted earlier today, in today’s post-civil rights society, few people would
/="/">argue in favor of segregation in racial terms explicitly so. And few people would
/="/">assert that Blacks, for example, do not belong in certain places. However,
/="/">opponents of affirmative action have begun to articulate a form of these
/="/">arguments as an add-on to the mismatch theory. In the minds of these scholars,
/="/">affirmative action should not be employed—or, rather, it should be utilized much
/="/">less—because African American, Latinx, and American Indian students simply
/="/">do not belong at elite institutions of higher education, pointing to what they refer
/="/">to as a mismatch between elite schools and the standardized test scores of many
/="/">underrepresented minority students. Scholars like Peter Arcidiacono and Richard
/="/">Sander assert that affirmative action tends to harm underrepresented minority
/="/">students more than it helps them because it places them at schools where they’re
/="/">simply “outmatched,” or where they cannot compete with their white peers. And for this reason, they argue what should matter most is whether underrepresented
/="/">minority students actually go to college or graduate school, not where they go to
/="/">college or graduate school. They highlight that affirmative action determines
/="/">where, not whether, individuals attend college.
Recommended Citation
David Oppenheimer, Angela Onwuachi-Willig & Nancy Leong,
Affirmative Action
,
20
Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy
1
(2019).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/2761
