not taboo related but interesting...
Just thought that you might find this interesting. There is a HUGE predjudice among Africans and Caribbeans-- I can say it b/c I'm one of them and grew up hearing this stuff all my life-- that African Americans are shiftless, lazy, underachievers, etc. In fact, there is defintely a stigma in my family, and many people I know against -- not marrying outside of the race-- but marrying an African American. The first thing everyone asks is "Where is your fiancee from?" Trinidad is a good answer, although his dad is from Virginia. So I thought that it was interesting that no less than FIVE West Indian and African folks that I know emailed me this today saying-- look, the Times finally figured out what we've always known.
Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?
June 24, 2004
By SARA RIMER and KAREN W. ARENSON
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - At the most recent reunion of Harvard
University's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk
about the increase in the number of black students at
Harvard.
But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some
speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those
black students were.
While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's
undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law
professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of
Harvard's African and African-American studies department,
pointed out that the majority of them - perhaps as many as
two-thirds - were West Indian and African immigrants or
their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial
couples.
They said that only about a third of the students were from
families in which all four grandparents were born in this
country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was
students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim
Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and
inferior schools, who were intended as principal
beneficiaries of affirmative action in university
admissions.
What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in
the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective
colleges - and with it, entry into the country's inner
circles of power, wealth and influence - African-American
students whose families have been in America for
generations were being left behind.
"I just want people to be honest enough to talk about it,"
Professor Gates, the Yale-educated son of a West Virginia
paper-mill worker, said recently, reiterating the questions
he has been raising since the black alumni weekend last
fall. "What are the implications of this?"
Both Professor Gates and Professor Guinier emphasize that
this is not about excluding immigrants, whom sociologists
describe as a highly motivated, self-selected group.
Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the United States
population, are still underrepresented at Harvard and other
selective colleges, they said.
The conversation that bubbled up that weekend has continued
across campus here and beyond as these professors and
others publicly raise painful and complicated questions
about race and class and how they play out in elite
university admissions, issues that some educators and black
admissions officers have privately talked about for some
time.
There is no consensus on the answers, and since most
institutions say they do not look into the origins of their
black students, the absence of hard data makes the
discussion even more difficult.
Some educators, including the president of Harvard,
Lawrence H. Summers, declined to comment on the issue;
others are divided.
The president of Amherst College, Anthony W. Marx, says
that colleges should care about the ethnicity of black
students because in overlooking those with predominantly
American roots, colleges are missing an "opportunity to
correct a past injustice" and depriving their campuses "of
voices that are particular to being African-American, with
all the historical disadvantages that that entails."
But others say there is no reason to take the ancestry of
black students into account.
"I don't think it should matter for purposes of admissions
in higher education," said Lee C. Bollinger, the president
of Columbia University, who as president of the University
of Michigan fiercely defended its use of affirmative
action. "The issue is not origin, but social practices. It
matters in American society whether you grow up black or
white. It's that differential effect that really is the
basis for affirmative action."
Professors Gates and Guinier cite various sources for their
figures about Harvard's black students, including
conversations with administrators and students, a recent
Harvard undergraduate honors thesis based on extensive
student interviews, and the "Black Guide to Life at
Harvard," which surveyed 70 percent of the black
undergraduates and was published last year by the Harvard
Black Students Association.
Researchers at Princeton University and the University of
Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of
minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities
(including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the
University of California at Berkeley), found that 41
percent of the black students identified themselves as
immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race.
Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton sociology professor who was
one of the researchers, said the black students from
immigrant families and the mixed-race students represented
a larger proportion of the black students than that in the
black population in the United States generally. Andrew A.
Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, says that among
18- to 25-year-old blacks nationwide, about 9 percent
describe themselves as of African or West Indian ancestry.
Like the Gates and Guinier numbers, these tallies do not
include foreign students.
In the 40 or so years since affirmative action began in
higher education, the focus has been on increasing the
numbers of black students at selective colleges, not on
their family background. Professor Massey said that the
admissions officials he talked to at these colleges seemed
surprised by the findings about the black students. "They
really didn't have a good idea of what they're getting," he
said.
But few black students are surprised. Sheila Adams, a
Harvard senior, was born in the South Bronx to a school
security officer and a subway token seller, and her family
has been in this country for generations. Ms. Adams said
there were so few black students like her at Harvard that
they had taken to referring to themselves as "the
descendants."
The subject, however, remains taboo among some college
administrators. Anthony Carnevale, a former vice president
at the Educational Testing Service, which develops SAT
tests, said colleges were happy to the take high-performing
black students from immigrant families.
"They've found an easy way out," Mr. Carnevale said. "The
truth is, the higher-education community is no longer
connected to the civil rights movement. These immigrants
represent Horatio Alger, not Brown v. Board of Education
and America's race history."
Almost from its inception, following the civil rights
struggles of the 1960's, affirmative action has been
attacked and redefined. In its 1978 Bakke decision, the
Supreme Court shifted the rationale away from issues of
social justice to the educational value of diversity.
One black admissions official at a highly selective college
said the reluctance of college officials to discuss these
issues has helped obscure the scarcity of black students
whose families have been in this country for generations.
"If somebody does not start paying attention to those who
are not able to make it in, they're going to start drifting
farther and farther behind," said the official, who
declined to be identified because the subject is so
charged. "You've got to say that the long-term blacks were
either dealt a crooked hand, or something is innately wrong
with them. And I simply won't accept that there is
something wrong with them."
Mary C. Waters, the chairman of the sociology department at
Harvard, who has studied West Indian immigrants, says they
are initially more successful than many African-Americans
for a number of reasons. Since they come from
majority-black countries, they are less psychologically
handicapped by the stigma of race. In addition, many arrive
with higher levels of education and professional
experience. And at first, they encounter less
discrimination.
"You need a philosophical discussion about what are the
aims of affirmative action,'' Professor Waters said. "If
it's about getting black faces at Harvard, then you're
doing fine. If it's about making up for 200 to 500 years of
slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you're not
doing well. And if it's about having diversity that
includes African-Americans from the South or from
inner-city high schools, then you're not doing well,
either."
Even among black scholars there is disagreement on whether
a discussion about the origins of black students is
helpful. Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist and West
Indian native, said he wished others would "let sleeping
dogs lie."
"The doors are wide open - as wide open as they ever will
be - for native-born black middle-class kids to enter elite
colleges," he wrote in an e-mail message.
There is also wide disagreement about what, if anything,
should be done about the underrepresentation of
African-American students whose families have been here for
generations. Even Professor Gates, who can trace his
ancestry back to slaves, and Professor Guinier, whose
mother is white and whose father immigrated from Jamaica,
emphasize different ideas.
"This is about the kids of recent arrivals beating out the
black indigenous middle-class kids," said Professor Gates,
who plans to assemble a study group on the subject. "We
need to learn what the immigrants' kids have so we can
bottle it and sell it, because many members of the
African-American community, particularly among the
chronically poor, have lost that sense of purpose and
values which produced our generation."
In Professor Guinier's view, there are plenty of other
blacks who could also succeed at elite colleges, but the
institutions are not doing enough to find them. She said
they were overly reliant on measures like SAT scores, which
correlate strongly with family wealth and parental
education.
"Colleges and universities are defaulting on their
obligation to train and educate a representative group of
future leaders," said Professor Guinier, a Harvard graduate
herself who has been studying college admissions practices
for more than a decade. "And they are excluding poor and
working-class whites, not just descendants of slaves."
Harvard admissions officials say that they, too, are
concerned about attracting more lower-income students of
all races. They plan to spend an additional $300,000 to
$375,000 a year to recruit more low-income students and
provide more financial aid to these students.
"This increases the chances that we will be able to reach
into the communities that have not been reached," said
William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial
aid.
While Harvard officials ignore the ethnic distinctions
among their black students, Harvard's black undergraduates
are developing a body of literature in the form of student
research papers.
Aisha Haynie, the undergraduate whose senior thesis
Professor Guinier cited, said her research was prompted by
the reaction from her black classmates when she told them
that she was not from the West Indies or Africa, but from
the Carolinas. "They would say, 'No, where are you really
from?' " said Ms. Haynie, 26, who earned a master's degree
in public policy at Princeton and is now in medical school.
Marques J. Redd, a 20-year-old from Macon, Ga., who
graduated in June and was one of the editors of Harvard's
black student guide, said that Harvard officials had
discouraged them from collecting the data on who the black
students were.
"But we thought it was one aspect of the black experience
at Harvard that should be documented," he said. "The
knowledge had power. It was something that needed to be out
in the open instead of something that people whispered
about."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/education/24AFFI.final.html?ex=1089075665&ei=1&en=6f7aef38c0f51f7b
Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?
June 24, 2004
By SARA RIMER and KAREN W. ARENSON
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - At the most recent reunion of Harvard
University's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk
about the increase in the number of black students at
Harvard.
But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some
speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those
black students were.
While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's
undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law
professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of
Harvard's African and African-American studies department,
pointed out that the majority of them - perhaps as many as
two-thirds - were West Indian and African immigrants or
their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial
couples.
They said that only about a third of the students were from
families in which all four grandparents were born in this
country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was
students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim
Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and
inferior schools, who were intended as principal
beneficiaries of affirmative action in university
admissions.
What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in
the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective
colleges - and with it, entry into the country's inner
circles of power, wealth and influence - African-American
students whose families have been in America for
generations were being left behind.
"I just want people to be honest enough to talk about it,"
Professor Gates, the Yale-educated son of a West Virginia
paper-mill worker, said recently, reiterating the questions
he has been raising since the black alumni weekend last
fall. "What are the implications of this?"
Both Professor Gates and Professor Guinier emphasize that
this is not about excluding immigrants, whom sociologists
describe as a highly motivated, self-selected group.
Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the United States
population, are still underrepresented at Harvard and other
selective colleges, they said.
The conversation that bubbled up that weekend has continued
across campus here and beyond as these professors and
others publicly raise painful and complicated questions
about race and class and how they play out in elite
university admissions, issues that some educators and black
admissions officers have privately talked about for some
time.
There is no consensus on the answers, and since most
institutions say they do not look into the origins of their
black students, the absence of hard data makes the
discussion even more difficult.
Some educators, including the president of Harvard,
Lawrence H. Summers, declined to comment on the issue;
others are divided.
The president of Amherst College, Anthony W. Marx, says
that colleges should care about the ethnicity of black
students because in overlooking those with predominantly
American roots, colleges are missing an "opportunity to
correct a past injustice" and depriving their campuses "of
voices that are particular to being African-American, with
all the historical disadvantages that that entails."
But others say there is no reason to take the ancestry of
black students into account.
"I don't think it should matter for purposes of admissions
in higher education," said Lee C. Bollinger, the president
of Columbia University, who as president of the University
of Michigan fiercely defended its use of affirmative
action. "The issue is not origin, but social practices. It
matters in American society whether you grow up black or
white. It's that differential effect that really is the
basis for affirmative action."
Professors Gates and Guinier cite various sources for their
figures about Harvard's black students, including
conversations with administrators and students, a recent
Harvard undergraduate honors thesis based on extensive
student interviews, and the "Black Guide to Life at
Harvard," which surveyed 70 percent of the black
undergraduates and was published last year by the Harvard
Black Students Association.
Researchers at Princeton University and the University of
Pennsylvania who have been studying the achievement of
minority students at 28 selective colleges and universities
(including theirs, as well as Yale, Columbia, Duke and the
University of California at Berkeley), found that 41
percent of the black students identified themselves as
immigrants, as children of immigrants or as mixed race.
Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton sociology professor who was
one of the researchers, said the black students from
immigrant families and the mixed-race students represented
a larger proportion of the black students than that in the
black population in the United States generally. Andrew A.
Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, says that among
18- to 25-year-old blacks nationwide, about 9 percent
describe themselves as of African or West Indian ancestry.
Like the Gates and Guinier numbers, these tallies do not
include foreign students.
In the 40 or so years since affirmative action began in
higher education, the focus has been on increasing the
numbers of black students at selective colleges, not on
their family background. Professor Massey said that the
admissions officials he talked to at these colleges seemed
surprised by the findings about the black students. "They
really didn't have a good idea of what they're getting," he
said.
But few black students are surprised. Sheila Adams, a
Harvard senior, was born in the South Bronx to a school
security officer and a subway token seller, and her family
has been in this country for generations. Ms. Adams said
there were so few black students like her at Harvard that
they had taken to referring to themselves as "the
descendants."
The subject, however, remains taboo among some college
administrators. Anthony Carnevale, a former vice president
at the Educational Testing Service, which develops SAT
tests, said colleges were happy to the take high-performing
black students from immigrant families.
"They've found an easy way out," Mr. Carnevale said. "The
truth is, the higher-education community is no longer
connected to the civil rights movement. These immigrants
represent Horatio Alger, not Brown v. Board of Education
and America's race history."
Almost from its inception, following the civil rights
struggles of the 1960's, affirmative action has been
attacked and redefined. In its 1978 Bakke decision, the
Supreme Court shifted the rationale away from issues of
social justice to the educational value of diversity.
One black admissions official at a highly selective college
said the reluctance of college officials to discuss these
issues has helped obscure the scarcity of black students
whose families have been in this country for generations.
"If somebody does not start paying attention to those who
are not able to make it in, they're going to start drifting
farther and farther behind," said the official, who
declined to be identified because the subject is so
charged. "You've got to say that the long-term blacks were
either dealt a crooked hand, or something is innately wrong
with them. And I simply won't accept that there is
something wrong with them."
Mary C. Waters, the chairman of the sociology department at
Harvard, who has studied West Indian immigrants, says they
are initially more successful than many African-Americans
for a number of reasons. Since they come from
majority-black countries, they are less psychologically
handicapped by the stigma of race. In addition, many arrive
with higher levels of education and professional
experience. And at first, they encounter less
discrimination.
"You need a philosophical discussion about what are the
aims of affirmative action,'' Professor Waters said. "If
it's about getting black faces at Harvard, then you're
doing fine. If it's about making up for 200 to 500 years of
slavery in this country and its aftermath, then you're not
doing well. And if it's about having diversity that
includes African-Americans from the South or from
inner-city high schools, then you're not doing well,
either."
Even among black scholars there is disagreement on whether
a discussion about the origins of black students is
helpful. Orlando Patterson, a Harvard sociologist and West
Indian native, said he wished others would "let sleeping
dogs lie."
"The doors are wide open - as wide open as they ever will
be - for native-born black middle-class kids to enter elite
colleges," he wrote in an e-mail message.
There is also wide disagreement about what, if anything,
should be done about the underrepresentation of
African-American students whose families have been here for
generations. Even Professor Gates, who can trace his
ancestry back to slaves, and Professor Guinier, whose
mother is white and whose father immigrated from Jamaica,
emphasize different ideas.
"This is about the kids of recent arrivals beating out the
black indigenous middle-class kids," said Professor Gates,
who plans to assemble a study group on the subject. "We
need to learn what the immigrants' kids have so we can
bottle it and sell it, because many members of the
African-American community, particularly among the
chronically poor, have lost that sense of purpose and
values which produced our generation."
In Professor Guinier's view, there are plenty of other
blacks who could also succeed at elite colleges, but the
institutions are not doing enough to find them. She said
they were overly reliant on measures like SAT scores, which
correlate strongly with family wealth and parental
education.
"Colleges and universities are defaulting on their
obligation to train and educate a representative group of
future leaders," said Professor Guinier, a Harvard graduate
herself who has been studying college admissions practices
for more than a decade. "And they are excluding poor and
working-class whites, not just descendants of slaves."
Harvard admissions officials say that they, too, are
concerned about attracting more lower-income students of
all races. They plan to spend an additional $300,000 to
$375,000 a year to recruit more low-income students and
provide more financial aid to these students.
"This increases the chances that we will be able to reach
into the communities that have not been reached," said
William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial
aid.
While Harvard officials ignore the ethnic distinctions
among their black students, Harvard's black undergraduates
are developing a body of literature in the form of student
research papers.
Aisha Haynie, the undergraduate whose senior thesis
Professor Guinier cited, said her research was prompted by
the reaction from her black classmates when she told them
that she was not from the West Indies or Africa, but from
the Carolinas. "They would say, 'No, where are you really
from?' " said Ms. Haynie, 26, who earned a master's degree
in public policy at Princeton and is now in medical school.
Marques J. Redd, a 20-year-old from Macon, Ga., who
graduated in June and was one of the editors of Harvard's
black student guide, said that Harvard officials had
discouraged them from collecting the data on who the black
students were.
"But we thought it was one aspect of the black experience
at Harvard that should be documented," he said. "The
knowledge had power. It was something that needed to be out
in the open instead of something that people whispered
about."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/education/24AFFI.final.html?ex=1089075665&ei=1&en=6f7aef38c0f51f7b
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