This is in response to Jeff Oliver’s May 29 column entitled “Judging people by the color of their skin.” Oliver’s letter is a well-intentioned, though desperately uninformed, attempt to discredit the notion of racial/ethnic diversity in favor of universal acceptance. While I have many issues with the views Oliver expresses, let me start with three things I think he gets right:
* “Diversity” is a university “buzzword.” Agreed. It has become a mantra we in campus settings have repeated so often that we increasingly fail to engage its true meaning and purpose.
* You “can’t judge people on the color of their skin and expect to succeed.” Right again. In a deeply racialized society, all of us must constantly strive to break free from our essentialist understanding of “race.”
* White Americans are all too often assumed to be monolithic (i.e., “non-diverse”) simply because they’re white. Bingo. Bigotry and prejudice have no color (though I might remind Oliver that the tendency to prejudge on the basis of skin color is a crucial element of racial oppression that has served Anglos extremely well).
That being said, I must express extreme disappointment with Oliver’s woefully under-researched views on affirmative action in college admissions, especially as applied by the University of Michigan. I worked for Michigan’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions for two years, and never once did I deny admission to a student because they were white, nor did I ever say anything like, “Great, this kid’s black. The heck with his GPA.” The fact is, Mr. Oliver, that affirmative action in admissions — the policy which seeks to increase racial and ethnic diversity on college campuses — isn’t just for students of color. Look around your next class and witness what affirmative action has done for white women. Forty years ago, women were a novelty in American universities; now they constitute better than 53 percent of the University student body. You tell me if affirmative action has not worked for white women.
Moving to the issue of geographical diversity, Oliver smugly states that his background as a middle-class Midwesterner who grew up on a cul-de-sac brings an element of diversity to the University, thereby showing that we cannot define diversity and its benefits solely on the basis of skin color. Guess what: He’s right, and affirmative action policies at Michigan and elsewhere are designed to benefit students from underrepresented recruitment territories. As a Michigan recruiter, it gave me great pleasure to visit students at some of the “whitest,” most rural high schools you could imagine and inform them that, in the interest of campus diversity, I could use affirmative action policies to help them get into one the country’s most competitive universities. Think any of these farm kids complained about racial injustice when I sent them an admit letter? Not once.
Jeff Oliver’s central theme — that we cannot judge people by the color of their skin — is laudable. Nevertheless, the oft-repeated “skin color doesn’t matter” axiom falls flat when students of color are burdened every day by subtle and not-so-subtle messages of alienation and exclusion. If Oliver believes that students of color on campus have been granted admission due to the color of their skin, then one can not help but wonder if he thinks we belong here at all.
Incidentally, I can assure you, Mr. Oliver, that if you applied to Michigan I would never have denied you for being white. Ignorant, yes. White, no.