By Ben Silverman

Race is still America’s greatest internal problem. But for many 17-year-old high school students facing intense pressure and stress for the first time in their lives as they apply to colleges, concern for working on this problem takes a back seat to their own immediate objective of gaining admissions to their first choice school.

For three decades, college admissions offices have given preference to black and Latino teenagers as a means of creating diversity on campus. This has resulted in about twice as many students of color enrolled at the nation’s most prestigious schools. To advocates of the Affirmative Action, its good work is only partially done. America still suffers from great racial disparities. The legacies of slavery, segregation and brutally violent racism have left their mark on black American families and education. Many argue that Affirmative Action’s ultimate goal is to rectify these past wrongs - paving the way for equal opportunities for everyone to be able to succeed in America, starting with a school system that reflects America’s demographics.

But increasingly vocal opponents of Affirmative Action, such as noted author and former Harvard Constitutional Law professor Abigail Thernstrom denounce the system of Affirmative Action as racist. “Racial classification is suspect in America,” she said, “and that is because we have had a terrible history of sorting people on the basis of the color of their skin. Programs, like Affirmative Action deliver the message that the most important thing about you is the color of your skin.”

Thernstrom argues that in sum, Affirmative Action hurts blacks especially and additionally it violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, which provides equal protection for all citizens and which has been continually violated since its post-Civil War enactment, most famously with segregation - including segregated schools.

Affirmative Action does not do individual students any good, explained Thernstrom. “Obviously students that get preferentially admitted and have academic qualifications that are not as strong as the average student in the school are going to struggle and are more likely to get discouraged and drop out,” she said. “Let’s say you have a combined SAT score of 800,” she said. “Does it do you any good to bring you into the University of Texas, Austin where you are going to be in a remedial program where you can’t possibly keep up with the students who came in needing no preferences, some of whom are black and Hispanic and the rest of whom are white and Asian? I mean, why does that do you a favor?”

While on the surface this appears to be a sound argument, Thernstrom seems to overlook the fact that employers will always look kinder upon Ivy League graduates regardless of their GPAs or SATs. Still, examples such as the once sterling Hunter College in New York City which now teaches remedial English offer proof of Ms. Thernstrom’s warnings about the dangers of lowering standards for admission or eliminating them entirely.

While white teenagers feel most adversely affected by Affirmative Action, Thernstrom argues that Asians lose out by far the most. “The biggest losers in the racial preferences game, of course, are not whites, they are Asians,” she said. “They have the most academically strong profile of any group. The white-Asian gap in math SATs for example is almost as large as the black-white gap.” In trying to create schools that reflect society, the groups who are most disproportionately represented will suffer.

Thernstrom also decries the message that she feels Affirmative Action sends to blacks. “I would say that looking at black students and saying, ‘Well of course since you’ve got some black blood, you may have a white mother, of course, or a white father, we really can’t expect much from you academically or we can’t expect half as much from you academically as the Asian kid who just got off the boat three years ago from Cambodia and learned to speak English in a Cambodian refugee camp,” she said. “We cannot expect that much from you….because what? We can’t expect that much from blacks? That’s so demeaning and patronizing. There are right things to do and wrong things to do!”

Thernstrom also makes the argument that Affirmative Action does nothing to achieve its ultimate goal: to create diversity on campus. “The [Supreme] Court signed onto diversity, they want a critical mass of black and Hispanic kids,” she said. “What’s a critical mass? It’s enough students to create separate dorms, separate eating tables, separate clubs, separate graduation ceremonies, separate freshman orientations - these schools do everything possible to run a tribal system once the kids get there.”

Thernstrom absolutely recognizes that our most serious problem having to do with race lies in the disparity of academic achievements. “It is our most serious educational and civil rights problem,” she said. “And it’s one that we have been paying almost no attention to until recently and it is appalling and morally shameful in a country with a long history of inequality.”

She remarks that the academic gap is not a question of money, “Shaker Heights has all the money in the world,” she said. “Cambridge Mass. spends $17,000 per pupil and has got one of the lowest teacher to student ratios in the nation and $17,000 is probably the highest amount paid per student in the nation. They are not teaching the kids. I’m all for money if it’s spent well.” The instigation of racial double standards grew out of the huge racial gaps in our K-12 educational system. “If you have got half of black students graduating from high school with only eighth grade reading skills and seventh grade science skills, then you have to have racial double standards in order to get critical mass into colleges.”

Thernstrom believes there will be no racial equality in this country unless we make radical changes in the whole system of public school education and close the gap. Everything depends upon this fact - equal skills and equal pay depend upon it. “We have to get these kids to the point where they have a level playing field,” Thernstrom said.

The remedy? Thernstrom suggests that we turn every urban school into a charter school. “That means that principals would have control over their budgets, control over their hiring, control over firing, control over their curriculum, control over the hours,” she said. “The best inner city schools have kids very long hours, long weeks, Saturday mornings, long years, parts of the summer, much more instructional time.” Why? “Because these are kids who come in who don’t have a school at home.” These are kids who typically don’t come home to parents who “teach” over the dinner table with the use of their vocabulary, with discussions of books, politics, or intellectual ideas, etc.

While we have come a long way and racial attitudes have changed as has the size of the black middle class there’s still a lot to be done. Thernstrom has just co-authored No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning with her husband Stephan Thernstrom and hopes that her voice will be heard and that valuable changes can be made. Few can dispute Ms. Thernstrom’s point that Affirmative Action violates the American Constitution, which calls for equal treatment under the law, and as such, “There are right things to do and there are wrong things to do. This [Affirmative Action] is a wrong thing to do.”