IT’S A WASP’S WORLD
Affirmative Action exists because the US educational system was built for white kids
I was recruited to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, one of the top private schools in the United States, as a black-Korean kid from Ohio. The group A Better Chance (ABC) brought me there in 1986. I still had to apply, however, though I got in and matriculated because of their massive needs-based financial aid package. Andover had taken it upon themselves to affirmatively act upon a desire to have diversity in its student body.
I was a pretty smart kid, but no prodigy. I got all As in everything throughout my three years at a public middle school, but still struggled a bit when I started at Andover. I maintained a B+ average there while being an orchestra nerd who played the cello on an instrument lent to me by the school—a veritable Stradivarius compared to what I had had at home.
But I learned I wasn’t any slower than most of my white classmates, many of whom had been in good schools since they were in kindergarten. Frankly, I was actually a good deal quicker than a lot of them—not so much with numbers, but with words and ideas. So I got fed into the same fast track of privilege that basically only WASPs had been enjoying for generations, and got into Brown University in 1990 pretty easily.
Was I an affirmative action checkbox for them? Probably. Did I need the leg up? Probably not. But it was the ‘90s and that’s the way it worked back then.
But I never bought into the idea of being a so-called “Affirmative Action baby.” And that’s the one thing Stephen Carter got right in his book by same name. The accusation of being at Andover or Brown because of AA was a particularly niggling one, something that was always there in the back of my mind, attempting to undermine my intellectual confidence. I connected with that element of the book, but never bought that as a reason to remove Affirmative Action exists because the US educational system was built for white kids - Quartz:
