By Samantha Ho
On December 3, 2012, California State Senator Edward Hernandez introduced the Senate Constitutional Amendment No. 5, a piece of legislation intended to revoke the specific sections of California Prop. 209 that prohibited state public schools from basing their admissions, recruitment, and retention rates on race, sex, or ethnicity, whether it be preferential or discriminatory treatment.”The bill, which was passed through the California Senate on January 30, was sent back to the Senate on March 17 by Assembly Speaker John Perez.
Supporters of the amendment view it as an attempt to diversify the population of colleges, specifically to rectify the supposed drop in percentages of Latino, African-American, and Native American students in California’s public universities, even, as Hernandez points out, as “those same groups have seen steady increases in their percentages of college-eligible high school graduates.”
The bill has garnered an equal, if not greater, amount of negative backlash, most significantly from the Asian-American community (three Asian-American senators, Ted Lieu, Carol Liu, and Leland Yee, initially voted in favor of the bill but later requested it be overturned after hearing the cries of protest from Asian-American advocacy groups).
Statistically, Asian Americans score higher on exams than other ethnic groups, and this bill would undoubtedly be detrimental to them: empirically, affirmative action has excluded Asian-Americans, meaning the chances of an Asian-American gaining admission to a college compared to, for example, an African-American with a similar resume would be hurt. Affirmative action doesn’t take into consideration other disadvantages, such as low socioeconomic status, only race– this may lead to (and has in the past) granting advantages to those who are not in need of them. In theory, affirmative action is supposed to give disadvantaged minorities an extra boost to overcome the gap between them and the traditionally advantaged racial majority. In practice, this may not be the case. One popular argument used in opposition to affirmative action, called the mismatch, argues that even if affirmative action does take the intended effect, the chance of unprepared students being accepted into prestigious universities will increase. The highly competitive atmosphere of certain universities often proves to be a “mismatch” for the student’s qualifications. According to Richard Sanders and Stuart Taylor Jr. for the Los Angeles Times, “the evidence is overwhelming that mismatches often harm those they are trying to help.” But beyond the broad, decades-long debate over affirmative action, the justification Hernandez uses for his bill is false. As publicly available data suggests, what Hernandez perceives to be a “precipitous drop” in the aforementioned minority groups in the years after the passing of Proposition 209 was actually quite the contrary: black admissions increased from 4 percent to 4.3 percent, while Latinos increased from 14.3 percent to 27.8 and Asians increased from 32 to 35.9 percent. Native Americans did experience a slight drop in percentage, but an increase in the number of admitted students.
This bill in particular doesn’t just affect the white majority. It also targets another traditionally oppressed minority group. As an Asian-American, I am naturally inclined to agree with the opposition. Putting aside my ethnic background, however, affirmative action, while undoubtedly well-intentioned, ultimately undermines the American ideal of a merit-based society–that regardless of the circumstances you were born in, whether it be the color of your skin or your gender or the amount of money in your bank account, working hard pays off.