Racism 101 All Over Again
By Greg
Moses
The spectre of race in Texas higher education was raised inside and outside the
state as soon as the King holiday weekend was over. A campus task force at the University of Texas at
Austin found new reasons to take race seriously. And a long-term study from Princeton dismissed highly
racialized suspicions that have swirled around the Texas “ten percent plan.”
As
quoted by the Houston Chronicle’s Todd Ackerman, the task force at the Austin campus, found that,
“people from various racial and ethnic backgrounds don’t understand each other.”
Therefore, according to the chair of the committee, “Rather than just providing
stopgap measures when issues arise, we hope to integrate racial respect and fairness throughout the UT
community.”
[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/metropolitan/2363406]
The bureaucratic neutrality of the findings, of course, fail to convey the fact that
one must understand white folk as a survival skill in American today (can you say Iowa caucus?), so if
different people are having trouble understanding each other, the problem is more likely to belong on
the side of white folks who still think they have so little to learn about people of color.
The Houston Chronicle report also neglects the stormy history of past attempts to
inaugurate “multiculturalism across the board” at the Austin campus. The English Department, once
upon a time, tried to require a textbook for freshman writing that included critical theory in race and
gender.
Hunter Thompson invented the term shithammer for the kind of politics that
came down during the “Texas Comp. Controversy” of 1990. It is shamefully amusing today to re-read
the complaints of stolid scholars complaining fourteen years ago about that, “highly politicized
faction of radical literary theorists” who dared to make race everybody’s business.
[http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v04/0372.html]
And yet, some of the consequences of ongoing white ignorance about race could be read
between the lines of this week’s Princeton report, which found that careful scientific analysis did
not support popular prejudices, fed by media reports, that the state’s admissions laws were driving
better qualified, white students, out of state.
The prejudicial suspicions were never
quite uttered publicly as racist, but the demographics leave little question about the racialized
nature of the allegations.
The “popular complaint” goes like this: since the
state’s best universities have to admit the top ten percent of high school graduates under the “top
ten plan”, students from the worst high schools are taking places that ought to go to more students
from “better” high schools.
As the complaint continues, many students from the high
quality high schools, or so-called “feeder schools,” are therefore having to leave the state,
contributing to a Texas brain drain.
The racialized nature of the complaint may be found
in the history of the top ten plan, which was explicitly devised to substitute for affirmative action
during the Hopwood period in Texas history. In fact, to illustrate just how racialized the “ten
percent plan” was, professors Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argued at the time that the ten percent
plan illustrated a brand new theory of race.
As the Princeton report points out, if
the ten percent plan works as a sort of semi-substitute for affirmative action, it is because Texas
high schools are still segregated.
In the words of Princeton authors Marta Tienda
and Sunny Niu:
“The Texas school segregation patterns that enabled H.B.588 [the ten
percent law] to restore some diversity at college campuses after 1996 imply disproportionate
representation of blacks and Hispanics at high schools where large shares of students are economically
disadvantaged. In fact, over 30 percent of black seniors and nearly half of Hispanic seniors graduated
from a high school designated as poor, but only 2.5 and 3.9 percent, respectively, attended one of the
“feeder” high schools. By contrast nearly 13 percent of non-Hispanic white students graduated from
feeder high schools, as did 18 percent of Asian-origin students.”
[http://www.texastop10.princeton.edu/publications/tienda011504.pdf]
Between schools that
are “feeders” and schools that are “starved” is a demographic of class and race, where vestiges of
separate and unequal remain.
But as Dallas Morning News reporter Kent Fischer tells us
in his Tuesday report, the results of the ten percent plan have not yielded much in the way of
diversity as far as Texas A&M University is concerned.
Fischer introduced Texas A&M near
the end of his story about the Princeton report, only to forget it precipitously as we shall soon see.
By interviewing thousands of students, the Princeton report is able to show us that
more Texas youth would prefer to leave the state. It’s not the ten percent plan that’s “forcing”
students out, rather it’s the rest of the country that’s attracting students away from the Lone Star
State. If truth be told, more students would have gone out of state for higher education had they been
more successful in meeting their goals.
As for the suspicion that the “poor” high
schools were producing poorly qualified candidates, the Princeton report notes that many of these
students landed some of the most competitive out-of-state offers.
And considering the
number of “feeder” school students who eventually won admission to college, the Princeton report
tells us that they do better than most students in the nation in terms of landing the schools they
want.
Not surprisingly, the Princeton report suggests that black students from Texas
tend to be more likely to set their sights out of state in the first place, and secondly are less
likely to want to go to Texas A&M at all. These are problems well known in College Station, even if
the Aggie solutions look more often like bad jokes.
Tienda and Niu raise questions about
the purpose of public higher education, which still has a sort of populist legacy in Texas. The
question of allocating seats is a serious public question, and they contribute to a tone of seriousness
about it.
And so the Princeton researchers conclude that, “a modified percent plan
combined with a narrowly tailored consideration of race would yield the optimal solution for
Texas.”
“That, in fact, has happened,” reports the Dallas Morning News. Say that
again? What has in fact happened. The Morning News, which had reminded us a few paragraphs back about
the predicament of Texas A&M admissions, now completely moves on.
[http://www.dallasnews.com/latestnews/stories/012004dntextop10percent.5e2c9.html]
Ignoring its own recently published reports about Texas A&M’s decision last month to
abolish its narrowly tailored considerations of race, the Morning News closes only with the example of
the University of Texas at Austin, which will employ a constitutionally refurbished affirmative action
plan. And never mind that the Austin campus still needs a fifteen member committee of presumably non-
radical literary theorists to soberly recommend systematic racial understanding.
In
their consideration of the Texas ten percent plan, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres argued that a new
theory of race was in the making, one that superseded old paradigms of affirmative action. Yet, the
Princeton report and the outcry during the last month from Texas civil rights community indicates that
old lessons may still have legs. Affirmative action by any other name, is, after everything has
been
carefully considered, “the optimal solution.”
In light of these fresh reports, The
Texas Civil Rights Review is especially ea
ger to share with you the documentary evidence that Texas A&M
used to adopt its anti-affirmative action policy… as soon as the Texas Open Records Law is obeyed.
Please stay tuned.
Texas Civil Rights Review 