Juhyoung Lee Pd 7, 3/10/2023

 Juhyoung Lee

Socio-political Consciousness

• What are your thoughts and feelings about issues of inequity, oppression, and/or power?

• How do you reflect critically on your own beliefs, assumptions, values, and experiences, and how these can influence your perception of self and others?

In AP gov we recently covered the harvard supreme court case on affirmative action. I thought that this was seomthing that had directly affected me and my classmates since we are all seniors and applying to colleges that use affirmative action. Although I dont benefit from race based affirmative action, I do think that it is somewhat fair and balances out the differences in resources available within different groups. There was a time where I believed that affirmative action wasn’t fair but by meeting more people I began to change my view on affirmative action. Originally, it felt unfair that I had to have more on my resume then others because of my race and I still sort of feel that its not completely fair as all things in our world are. However, I think that there is a need to give disadvantaged groups a proper chance to get into these top schools and there is no perfect way to do this. 

What stood out to me in the case was that it wasn’t exactly clear how exactly students were given some advantages due to race and socio-economic standings. There were a few things that was sketchy about the deans list that gave students advantages in the admissions process. It turned out that most students on the list were had made either sizable donations to the school, sports related, or legacy, not minority or low socio-economic groups. Since the criteria for choosing their students weren’t firmly set on a race or background factor, its possible that Harvard will win the court case. The precendent for affirmative action for public universities is that race is allowed to be used as long as it is not the determining factor in admitting students. Since the weight of being on the deans list isn’t clear, harvard will most likely win. I felt that this was unfair and that the opposite of the purpose of affirmative action was occurring. Already advantaged groups were getting a greater advantage through legacy and large donations. This sort of changed my view of these top institutions from epicenters of education to a mere business, relying on its prestigious reputation to get students to pay their high tuitions and parents to make sizable donations. 

I think in the end there will always be unfairness, both unavoidable and avoidable like in the general case of affirmative action (unavoidable) and the specific harvard case (avoidable). When I used to think that affirmative action should be removed completely I had a victim mindset which I felt trapped me and gave me an excuse as to why I wasn’t going to success so why bother try. I think that its good to seek change in unfairness that can be avoided but I think that we should also just ignore it to some extent in order to avoid a victim mindset.