Without a set of policies conceived to counteract the institutionalized racism and sexism that continues to exist in American society, this discrimination would result in the virtual elimination of blacks and other minorities from higher education and women from many fields of education.

Irrefutable evidence of this comes from the universities where affirmative action has already been eliminated. At the University of California at Berkeley Boalt Law School, there is only one incoming black freshman — who was actually a holdover admit from the year before.

At UC San Diego and Davis Medical Schools, there are no incoming black freshmen. At the University of Texas at Austin, where the Hopwood suit recently eliminated affirmative action, the numbers of black and Latino students in the graduate schools has dropped dramatically.

Last year there were 31 black and 42 Latino students, while this year there are only four black and 25 Latino students out of a graduating class of 475.

No honest person with their eyes open can deny the impact that the national elimination of affirmative action would have on higher education in America — only token numbers of black and other minority students would be admitted to elite public and private universities.

The most compelling reason affirmative action is still necessary in college admissions is the stark and extreme inequality that continues to reign in primary education.

Forty-three years after the Supreme Court ordered in Brown vs. Board of Education that schools must be desegregated “with all deliberate speed,” segregation remains the rule in our country’s elementary and high schools.

Schools that have a majority of black and other minority students are more often poor and located in inner cities.

It is not unusual for an inner-city school to receive as little as one-third of the funding per student as its suburban counterparts.

Affirmative-action programs at universities and colleges are necessary to counteract this social deficiency and inequality in primary education.

It is only through building a new mass, militant, integrated civil rights movement that we will be able to, on the one hand, save affirmative action for those children who have already been through this separate and unequal school system, and on the other to fight for quality and equal primary education for all children.

Jessica Curtin

Senior

University of Michigan

The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary (BAMN)