Affirmative action may not be a perfect policy, but an open and honest dialogue about the policy’s future would be an important and welcome exercise. However, such a dialogue must be framed within a contextual historic backdrop. We must avoid being swayed by hastily manufactured ahistorical and acontexutal arguments that have come to condemn affirmative action as simply a “preference” for the “unmeritorious.”
As we stand on the brink of making history, reclaiming affirmative action’s origins and reframing the popular narrative that has come to stereotype the policy will allow us to appreciate the fruits it has borne in four short decades. To the contrary, we may be left to forever wonder what could have happened, if we had not cut out the root just as the tree began to bloom. —
Dr. María Ledesma is a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity at Berkeley Law School at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former UC student regent.
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