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Eddie proves affirmative action based on class works By Samuel G. Freedman One morning 11 Septembers ago, Eddie Paulino, newly transported from a housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side to a university campus in the verdant Hudson Valley, sat in freshman composition class, feeling like an impostor. He listened to the sentences and paragraphs unspool effortlessly, as the other students, mostly products of the middle-class suburbs, read aloud their introductory essays. He shivered when the professor spoke of dangling participles and split infinitives, grammatical concepts Eddie had never heard of before. When his turn arrived, Eddie recited a composition about a teen-age girl in his neighborhood who jumped to her death from the roof of a 17-story project and how her body exploded like an M-80 firecracker when it hit a wooden bench. Eddie hadn't intended to shock his classmates. He had simply written about the one world he knew, a world he had never been certain of escaping. As another academic year unfolds, Eddie packs his suitcases for the Dominican Republic, where he will conduct research for his Ph.D. He is writing his dissertation about a 1937 massacre of Haitians ordered by the Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo. Eddie uses words such as "xenophobia" and makes knowing comparisons of the Dominican incident to Kristallnacht. The portal between then and now for Eddie Paulino was a New York state program that provides college admission based on affirmative action -- not by race, not by ethnicity, but by economic class. In 29 years, the program has produced 70,000 graduates from young people who probably would not otherwise have attended college. Most importantly, this program offers a proved, if imperfect, model for how America can resolve its seemingly intractable debate about affirmative action. The key is focusing on class, the social fault line that our nation pretends does not exist. For years, the national debate about affirmative action has offered only two unsatisfying absolutes. On one side are proponents who insist on privileging pigment now to compensate for how it was punished in the past. Former Harvard president Derek Bok makes this contention in his new book (italic)The Shape of the River(/italic). Such an approach had both logic and morality on its side when President Lyndon Johnson first framed affirmative action in his famous 1965 speech at Howard University. Segregation was the practice, if no longer the law, of the South. So tiny and stunted was the black middle class that teachers, insurance agents and undertakers qualified by default as members of the elite. But in the decades since then, as Bok's book demonstrates, the very success of race-based affirmative action has created a sizable black middle class that can afford the private or suburban schools that will prepare their children for college. As the number of racially mixed marriages has soared, so has the population of multiracial children. Their very genes defy the categorization on which race-conscious affirmative action depends. On the opposite extreme, foes of affirmative action, few of whom ever showed much idealism during the civil rights movement, hypocritically seize on Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a colorblind America in which all citizens are judged "not by the color of their skin but the content of their character." They conveniently overlook King's outspoken support for affirmative action. And more to the point, they ignore the fact that income inequality is more severe now than at any time in the past 70 years. The bitter joke about the current economic boom goes, "A rising tide lifts all yachts." One might consider college admissions as one supposed arbiter of merit. Is it merit that lets some children attend elite private academies or the finest suburban public schools? Is it merit that pays for their $1,000 Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) preparation classes? Is it merit that puts out $2,500 for a college-admission consultant to craft their ideal applications? Of course not. In every case, family money purchased the advantages that were mistaken for merit. New York state's lawmakers recognized class for the divisive force it is when in 1968 they created three affirmative-action programs based on economic class. Each varied slightly -- Seek/College Discovery tying into the City University of New York system, the Educational Opportunity Program linked to the State University of New York system, and the Higher Education Opportunity Program linked to private colleges and universities in the state. But all operated from the same premise. A poor child is likely to attend poor schools; a poor child is likely to start working as a teen-ager; a poor child may possess talent that eludes the SAT or GPA. Race has no place in the equation. Fifteen percent of the affirmative-action students in New York's private colleges, for instance, are white. Any high school senior who falls below a certain income level, currently $23,600 for a family of four, can be admitted to college and provided with all or part of a scholarship despite a substandard transcript. Admissions officers look for applicants' potential in interviews, letters of recommendation and screening tests. Most colleges put enrollees through a summer boot camp of remedial class work and study skills, often augmented with personal tutoring. Eddie Paulino fit the profile. He is the oldest of four children born to Dominican immigrants, a factory-worker father and a mother who never graduated from elementary school. Consigned to the neighborhood schools on the Lower East Side, he did not learn English fluently until age 10. The day in high school when he opened the envelope containing his SAT scores, he recalls, "I just laughed -- and it wasn't arrogance." Under the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP), however, Eddie won admission to the state university's New Paltz campus. He graduated in 1991 with a degree in history and a 3.2 grade-point average. From there he went on to earn a master's degree in history from Arizona State University and to complete the coursework for his doctorate at Michigan State University. Along the way, Eddie learned to distrust race as the basis of identity. The misery he saw in Arizona's trailer parks put an Anglo face on poverty. In his dissertation, he is exploring the way a demagogue like Trujillo could manipulate notions of race and nationality to inspire mass murder. "It was the most transformative experience of my life," Eddie says of the EOP program. "It gave me an opportunity to study. It took me out of the projects. Without it, I don't know what I'd be doing. There are times I'll be with diplomats at a reception and start thinking, 'In a week, I'll be home, in an elevator with urine and feces on the floor.' I ask myself, what has allowed me to bridge this? EOP was the vehicle." Admittedly, Eddie Paulino's story is an extreme one. The graduation rate for students in the New York program ranges from 18% in the city system to 32% in the state system to 54% in the private institutions. Those numbers fall below the 61% graduation rate for all students in the state system. The City University system has come under withering attack from Mayor Rudolph Giuliani for its preponderance of remedial classes. But the New York model, flaws and all, beckons with a solution to a national dilemma. How does America rectify inequality without playing the race card? "If you want to talk about class," Eddie Paulino says, "you can be very democratic."
Samuel G. Freedman, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors. To comment If you would like to comment on editorials, columns or other topics in USA TODAY, or on any subjects important to you: Send e-mail for letters to the editor only to editor@usatoday.com. Please include address and daytime phone numbers so letters may be verified. Letters and articles submitted to USA TODAY may be published or distributed in print, electronic or other forms. ![]() ![]() ©COPYRIGHT 1998 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. |