Affirmative action must be reconsidered for Pilipinos
Were it not for affirmative action, my mother would not have gone to college. That alone is enough for me to know that government policies created to address institutional discrimination and pervasive racism in society are greatly needed. Once again, my personal has become my political.
Mom grew up very poor in the small town of Tracy, California. My grandparents (who both held bachelor degrees from good universities in the Philippines) were unable to find work besides farm labor and cannery work, and when my mother graduated from her segregated high school in 1966, there was no money for her to attend a four-year college.
When she was at community college, a new government program called the Educational Opportunity Program encouraged her to apply to UC Davis. The program provided early outreach and admissions processing to minority students. Through EOP she was able to get a full scholarship to UC Davis, where she received her bachelor's degree.
Because of programs such as EOP (which still exists today), the nation's once white campuses began to slowly diversify. My mother painfully remembers times when white students would mutter racist comments as she walked by, and how white students would openly humiliate students of color in class with bigoted comments and body language. The general attitude of the mostly white UC Davis campus was that minority students at the university were not up to par, that they were only admitted because of affirmative action and the civil rights movement. Sounds eerily familiar.
Unfortunately, I did not benefit from any such program when I was in high school and college. Because UCLA removed Pilipinos from affirmative action in 1988, there were no special early outreach programs targeting Pilipino students. Despite the fact that Pilipinos have a long history of racial discrimination and occupational downgrading in the United States and that we have one of the highest high school dropout rates in California, we are not given any special consideration in admissions. Our numbers are hurting, especially at UC Berkeley, where the Pilipino freshman class of 1994 numbered only 64.
The university must reconsider dropping Pilipinos from affirmative action. The Pilipino community, especially in California, is in an educational crisis. We have an extremely high high school dropout rate, a low admissions rate to the UCs, and one of the highest attrition rates (up to 50 percent). Because UCLA did not do enough, the Pilipino community at UCLA created their own early outreach and retention programs: PREP (Pilipino Recruitment and Enrichment Project) and SPEAR (Samahang Pilipino Education and Retention), respectively. Currently, the Samahang Pilipino Task Force on affirmative action is studying why Pilipinos need affirmative action.
But the arguments for placing Pilipinos back on affirmative action are moot if affirmative action is eliminated from university admissions policies. It seems so simple that the opposition's arguments seem childlike in their whining. From my understanding, affirmative action was created to attempt to give more opportunities to groups affected by past discrimination. It does not mean that universities or companies must lower standards, nor does it mean it hires or admits based solely on race. It was created when the liberal government of the late '60s came to the realization of institutional and societal barriers against people of color and women.
Those opposing affirmative action would have all of us think that we are all the same, simply because the Constitution made it so. This fallacy of equality must come from those most privileged, because I certainly don't know any people of color, poor people or women who feel they are treated or viewed on the same level as white males.
Sure, we have the capacity to compete with one another on an equal playing field. Unfortunately, very few of us women and people of color are invited to the game. We do not all have the same opportunities, the same histories, experiences or privileges. Despite my grandparents' degrees, their race and accents mired them in poverty because they could not get better jobs. My mother's good grades were not enough to get her into Davis; there was no money for her to go.
The white students who went to their exclusive schools on the north side of town got better teachers, computers, curriculum and clean, new campuses. My high school (which my mother attended) was old, teachers were bitter and tired and one had to search for educational guidance.
I floundered in high school while guidance counselors, puzzled at what to do with a underachieving Pilipino kid (Wow! They're not all math and science whiz kids!), rarely made moves to encourage me to shape up and think about college. I guess they figured I'd do what most Pilipinos did in Stockton: I'd go to the local community college. So many of my friends who once dreamed of college during middle school and their freshman year in high school never even made it that far: they dropped out. So much for the "Model Minority" myth of overachieving Asians.
Therefore, I can't help but take the opposition to affirmative action quite personally. Rising opposition to affirmative action is inevitable, I suppose. The turning political tide is characterized by an ugly conservatism which scapegoats, points fingers, blames, and whines. The passage of Proposition 187 is a prime example of scapegoating immigrants for problems prevalent despite the so-called hordes of brown people pouring over the border. Pointing fingers at minorities who seem to be climbing to the top on the backs of good white people hand over fist because of race-based hiring policies is easy and convenient.
Though I wholeheartedly support affirmative action, I realize that it is a band-aid to pervasive societal ills such as inadequate public schools, poverty, low wages, occupational downgrading, and racism. It does not give more funding to the ramshackle inner city schools where most people of color, like my family, must send their kids. It does not help the masses of poor people, women, and people of color who are stuck in service sector jobs, or the high school dropouts who cannot enter the workforce for lack of practical job skills.
It does not give that much of a better chance to those poor Pilipino kids in LAUSD who don't have the nice computers, well-trained teachers and gleaming campuses of the students in Orange County. It doesn't eradicate racism, discrimination, sexism, or bigotry.
But without it, it presupposes a society in which one's merit decides one's fate. We all know what a fallacy that is. Until we can move toward a solution for the aforementioned societal ills, affirmative action is one step for a white supremacist power structure which has refused to budge for most of American history. And it is one token effort on the part of society to help right the centuries of wrongs committed against people of color and women.
Mabalon, director of Samahang Pilipino Education and Retention Project, graduated in June with a bachelor's degree in history and Asian American studies. Her column appears on alternate Wednesdays.