poor black kids and that would disappear without the sanction, the reality is for the black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is. no different than before. joining me now is the author of the failure of affirmative action, bertrand cooper. thank you for coming on. first up, your reaction to today s ruling? well, this is what everyone was expecting. tast it s a big part of why i wanted to print this piece in the first place. we look from 1978 to today and say what did this policy accomplish over 45 years, so i have been preparing for this for a few months, and now i m just taking in everything, looking forward to reading the dissent, and seeing what schools decide to do next. explain why you didn t think affirmative action entirely worked in the first place? sure. i m coming from a black poor, black foster and transient experience.
administrators and they re very, very worried. the reason why is at least six of the justices seem very skeptical about using race even though since 1978, the court has said you can race in a limited way as a plus factor. essentially as one part of many different aspects of somebody s life. the court says if you want to create a diverse student body, you can take that into account. but now the court may completely reverse course and say you cannot use race at all when it comes to someone, you know, potentially applicant for you can t consider it at all. if they go that far, the schools have pointed to places that have already banned affirmative action like california and what you see in those places is the rates of students of black and hispanic drop right away by 50%. i was reading a piece in the atlantic by a man named bertrand who said he went to harvard. he s a black man, and he found that when he got there the
diversity was certainly diverse on race, but it wasn t diverse on income and background. while there was a lot of diversity, he didn t see a lot of people like him, poor, black kids making their way up to harvard. that s an argument that pushes back against the affirmative action process to say it helped, but it didn t help up and down the way it promised it would. it s one of the arguments you heard made by the lawyers who brought this case who sued harvard and north carolina saying essentially you can still use socioeconomic factors, you can use someone s zip code. you can even have an essay talking about all of the ways that things have sort of impacted your life and maybe class and race is all mixed up into that. you just can t use race alone. the author was bertrand cooper. so when they go forward is there a plan to start talking about using income or using yes. you know, zip code to try
About three months after I was born, my father was incarcerated. As a toddler, I was poor but housed. Mum and I stayed with a paraplegic meth dealer named ..