One Black Family, One Affirmative Action Ruling, and Lots of Thoughts

Kofi, the eldest son, who graduated from Rhodes College in May with an English degree, has a sensibility closer to his mother’s. He first began following the issue in high school after learning about a white student in Texas who sued the University of Texas at Austin for its use of race in admission decisions.

He sees last week’s ruling as both out of touch with the pervasiveness of modern racism and a blow to future generations of Black students looking to attend elite schools. And he chafes at the argument that college academic standards are lowered to create diverse campuses.

“Affirmative action is about opening the door to diverse backgrounds because that is what education and higher learning is about,” Kofi said. “It’s not about having 5,000 of the same kids in two-parent households and white picket fences who all come in and do the same thing. No. College and higher education is about bringing in different people so you can learn from each other.”

His younger brother Amir, who is a member of Lafayette College’s fencing team, sees it differently. A college sophomore who is studying economics, he began developing his political and socially conservative views as a middle school student during the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.

While he and his mother’s views are the farthest apart, she said he was raised “to be an independent thinker.”

He agrees with the other members of his family that race, and the nation’s history of enslavement of Black people, undeniably affects the present day. But, he said he believed that affirmative action undermined the concept of earning admission based on qualifications rather than race.

“Affirmative action being taken away is not so much a bad thing, because I don’t think that anyone who is not qualified for something should get that purely based off their skin color,” said Amir, who noted that he included his race on his college application but did not include the subject in his personal essay.

“I am not saying the bar has been lowered,” he said. “I just feel as though sometimes, cases come down to race. I think that goes back to us, as a country, where everything is focused on race.”