Getting a Piece of the Pi

At the end of September at the University of California, Berkeley, the Berkeley College Republicans held a bake sale that gained national attention. The bake sale was intended to protest a proposed bill that would allow California universities to consider race, gender, and ethnicity in admissions, more commonly known as affirmative action. The idea was to sell baked goods at varying prices to students based on these same criteria: $2 for white students, $1.50 for Asians, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans, and 25 cents for Native Americans. In addition, women of all races would be given a 25 cent discount. This soon made national headlines and sparked a passionate debate on the protest itself and the idea of affirmative action. Shawn Lewis, the president of the club, claimed, “Treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong, and we wanted people to be upset about that.” This generalized moral argument is the one commonly employed by people who are openly against affirmative action. From personal experience, this view almost always goes hand in hand with the “most qualified should get in” ideology, but also from my experience, every single one of these people are white males.

Yes, treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong, yet for more than 300 years, white society has done so, creating a stratified society with white males at the top. In his quote, Lewis completely ignores today’s reality, and because of his comment concerns skin color along with the topic of our class, I am most interested in discussing affirmative action concerning race. Underlying his claim, Lewis assumes that everyone has an equal opportunity and encouragement to pursue higher education. In terms of assuming equal opportunity, anyone who knows even the slightest amount about African American history can cite statistics and facts about its absurdity ad nauseum . The “encouragement” aspect is the part of affirmative action that I find most appealing because of my own experiences. Having parents that went to college is an enormous influence on a child’s life. I know because I’m the first one to attend in my entire family for as far back as my great grandparents. In Remembering Jim Crow, we saw how difficult it was to get a college degree for African Americans, leaving a huge void in the community for this parental influence. In the past, African Americans have had to focus on surviving and supporting their families after being thrown penniless from slavery into the oppression of Jim Crow. Brown v. Board of Education was 57 years ago, and the time span between then and now is not enough for an entire racial group to recover from their centuries educational and economic oppression enough so that luxuries like liberal arts educations are actually feasible. Therefore, we have generations of young African American students in poor neighborhoods which often imply poor school districts who are not getting the same SAT scores on average as rich white kids from private school. Is this because the white kids in private school are smarter? Absolutely not. When I switched from a public school in Mississippi to a private school in Collierville, did my ACT skyrocket because my brain all of a sudden started working more efficiently? Again, no. It was simply being around college-educated parents of my friends and the encouragement I received from the community. Statistically, if things were actually literally equal, then every ethnicity, race, and gender would have an equal representation in higher education with respect to the size of the group in society. Therefore, I believe the debate with Shawn Lewis would end immediately by asking a very simple question: “Why is the percentage of white people with a college degree nearly double that of African Americans?” From sitting and thinking about it for a while, I do not think that there is a single answer for this question that does not holistically and directly imply the need for affirmative action or that he is an overt racist.

Yet, while the need for affirmative action is completely obvious (at least until situations are statistically equal), I can understand how white males are not overwhelmingly enthusiastic about it. This debate strikes close to home for me as I am in the process of applying to doctoral programs in pure mathematics (one of them being UC Berkeley). The fact that I am a white male means that I am at a notable disadvantage (or, more precisely, a lack of advantage) due to mathematics being arguably the most homogeneous discpline of academia. I do not really know anything about applied math, but the statistics speak for themselves. Each year, approximately 30 percent of doctoral graduates in math are female while only around 8 percent are members of under-represented ethnic and racial minorities. At Caltech, a top 10 math program, their priorities are made clear by adding a “Women, minorities, veterans, disabled persons are encouraged to apply” in bold at the bottom of the department’s website. This encouragement is almost universal among math graduate program websites. Nothing in this world would make me happier than getting into Caltech or Berkeley. Therefore, my subconscious always responds with anxiety when I think of people less qualified than me getting into a top 10 program, yet once I just think about it objectively for a split second and remember the statistics, it becomes indubitably clear that the historical economic and educational injustices aimed at African Americans and women should not be given the time needed to sort themselves out but, instead, removed by direct action.