I have recounted my personal struggles in the essays that I have written about my life. I suppose that if my father had not died in a car accident at the age of thirty three my story might have been very different from the one I have described. Daddy was an engineer who garnered a good salary that allowed my family to enjoy advantages that even my other cousins did not experience. When he was alive we always had a home in a nicer area of town that was filled with books and music and the kinds of accoutrements that well educated middle class families often take for granted. We rode around in a car that was a bit more luxurious than the norm. 

My father was the only person in the extended family who had earned a college degree save for my Uncle Bob who was his best friend. Even as a small child I sensed that I had advantages that provided me with a head start in life. I saw the disparities between myself and some of my relatives. I witnessed the segregation of Blacks and whites. I understood that even my mother had experienced cruel taunts because she was a poor child of immigrant parents. I was acutely aware that while our nation was founded on a claim that all people are created equal, the realities of life made it much more difficult for some in our society to fully enjoy the American dream. 

My own world was transformed on a dark road in the early morning hours of Memorial Day 1957. When my father’s heart stopped beating as his car slammed into an unmarked ditch at the end of a road, everything that I had known until then abruptly changed. There would be no more fancy houses or cars or vacations for me and my family. I would have to learn how to sacrifice and work a bit harder than I had been accustomed to doing. A glorious middle class ride was no longer available to me in pursuit of the so called American Dream. I would have to use the genetic tools with which I had been blessed to keep pace with the demands of living. Luckily my mother and father had already given me the combined nature of their intellect when i was born. It would be my mother who would provide the nurturing environment in which I would learn how to fully use my gifts to become an educated and competent woman. 

When it came time to apply to colleges I had no idea how to proceed. I had no knowledge of the vast network of higher education that was available nor did my mother. When universities like Notre Dame and Georgetown attempted to recruit me I did not understand that degrees from such places were more highly valued than others. All that I really knew was that traveling out of town was out of the question. I barely had the wherewithal to get to the University of Houston which was not that far from my home. I might have aimed higher, but I was ignorant of the head start that prestigious universities may have given me. 

I mention these things not to bemoan my own reality. I am in fact quite proud of my degree from the University of Houston which was a great school. I do not regret passing on the opportunities to attend big name colleges. What I have learned from my experience as a student and as a teacher is that while we boast of being equal humans in our country, the reality is not quite so simple. If I missed that equality from being poor, I can’t imagine what it must have been like for my Black peers of the time to be poor and from a race that was not even allowed to mingle with the rest of us. The fact that we had to create laws to tear down the prejudices that had hobbled their freedoms was a sure sign that we might have talked about the ideal of equality but it was surely not a fact for the descendants of slaves even a hundred years after they had been freed. 

As President Lyndon Johnson said in a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” If I was having difficulties keeping pace with a forward march of progress, I could only imagine how much more difficult it had been even for people who had been unfairly reviled and segregated. It not only seemed logical but incredibly fair to to provide young Blacks with opportunities to prove their mettle at universities that might otherwise have been closed to them. Affirmative Action was a necessity to level the playing field. 

As with most good intentions, Affirmative Action programs did not always work as well as they might have been expected to do. There is very little in this life that is perfect, so there were problems here and there. For the most part, however, the program provided bright hard working people of color with opportunities to receive highly regarded college degrees and then enter the workplace with the same kind of connections that wealthy legacy students have known for years. It was a boost up that helped them to be noticed, not just because they were minorities, but because they were as brilliant as their peers. They were recognized as being worthy of a chance to prove themselves and so many of them did just that. 

There have been unspoken and unofficial affirmative action programs in decades for all time. Wealthy white families have always had the ability to pay for the best colleges in the country. They send their children to high schools with connections to those universities as well. Their young are groomed to be stand outs when the time comes to apply for college. They know people who can help their children to score higher on tests, choose the right subjects to study, write essays that catch the attention of admission officers. They more often than not have attended the more prestigious universities themselves, creating legacies that make it easier for their youngsters to get a shot at being accepted. Rarely does anyone note their advantages or point out that they get to start many meters ahead of the less fortunate in the race. 

Anyone who thinks that racism is gone has been living in a bubble. Anyone who cannot see the advantage of identifying qualified young men and women of color and providing them with educational opportunities that might otherwise be closed to them does not understand how important such programs are for all of us. Making a concerted effort to find these students and boost their likelihood of being leaders in our society is one of the grandest ideas ever conceived. Affirmative Action is not watering down our colleges. It is actually making them more attuned to the idea of equality. Nobody gets into Harvard only because of the color of their skin. Those who do have already been identified as the brightest among their peers. Such students enrich campuses across the nation and often work harder than their fellow students to prove their mettle. 

Mine is only an opinion, but my own experiences as a fatherless child and later as a teacher of students of color has convinced me that the trope of insisting that we are all equal simply because the preamble of the Constitution says it is so is absurd. We should all be equal, but from the inception of our nation that is an ideal that we have yet to fully embrace. Racism continues to raise its heavy hand even as there is a current drive to turn away and pretend that racism is gone. Anyone who lives outside of a middle class white bubble knows that this is true. Pretending to make ourselves feel better will taint our society, not make it stronger and more fair. We have incredibly bright young people of all colors. Helping those who have no connections is a great idea, not a bad one. Making our universities more inclusive and representative of society is good for everyone. Sadly a conservative court has bowed to an unreasonable decision that implies that if we say everyone is equal, then they are. 

George Washington once said something to the effect that it’s our democracy if we can keep it. Even he seemed to realize the journey that still lay ahead for our country. It would be almost a hundred years before we did the right thing and freed the slaves. It would be another hundred years before we outlawed the segregation of the descendants of those former slaves. We still have work to do to make our democracy as equal for all as it always should have been. It is admittedly not an easy task because there will always be those who believe in the superiority of one race over another. We will have to do our best to move in the direction of equality by elevating those who are still far from the starting line and sending them on a pathway to leadership. It is the only way that the dream will finally come true.