GUEST COLUMNIST: Our ideas about the underprivileged

In isolated "communities" across the country, students race home from school with fear and insecurity. Their eyes rapidly lose their innocence in a broken world of poverty, lawlessness, and ignorance from which there is little chance of escape. They return to what they know as home -- a place where they are trapped in a world of indifference and little hope. Most of them quickly succumb to a culture in which education is considered a "white thing," -- creating a system in which teachers are too scared to encourage students, are afraid to use scarce resources and are hesitant to deal with unconcerned parents whose idea of good teacher-parent relations resembles something similar to "leave me alone." But a few of these students do not succumb. They grasp a feeling of hope when they are young and they know it is real and never let go. Their hope is fragile, but it is their only potential and they know it all too painfully. These are the students who need the help that frequently comes too late. It comes after they have scored relatively poorly on standardized tests. They do well in schools that do not provide their students with the right resources to succeed. The inevitable gap which grows in their education explains their inability to initially succeed on tests and other standards of success associated with the "outside." But these students eventually find their opportunities in college programs that seek to extend a helping hand to "disadvantaged" students. Collectively known as affirmative action, these programs recognize the sins of the past and their lingering effects on a present-day American culture which has not yet achieved the promises of the '60s. Those promises of full equality, fairness and justice have yet to be achieved and perhaps never will in an imperfect world. America is not to blame. It is like any culture whose history consists of a nonlinear continuum of change in which things string together only after a long enough time has elapsed. America is trying to rectify the sins of the past. But it is a society consisting of humans with misleading preconceptions. People conceive of justice and fairness too abstractly, as something carved permanently in their minds, and which they "know" to be true, recognizable and unchanging. The problem with this conception is it elevates the "idea" of justice or fairness to an existence of its own. The link between the idea and the human manifestation of the idea is lost as people forget that an idea exists only as a consequence of human activity. The idea of justice or fairness describes a process by which humans act to their collective benefit. Justice and fairness are not concepts human beings seek to find; rather, they are concepts human beings create as expedient, beneficial ideas that improve social harmony and drive human progress. Affirmative action was an idea originated by people wanting to end a long period of injustice and unfairness. It sought to provide justice and fairness to human beings who had been confined to a separate existence for centuries in which they were deprived of the basic human rights enjoyed by a larger population in control -- a social system justified solely on the basis of skin color. Today the fight for equality and justice lives on, still striving to achieve its goal. America has made noble strides in the right direction. Economic inequality and political representation has reduced significantly. Racist remarks are not only unacceptable, but deplorable and a mark of viciousness and evil. The doors of opportunity have been opened to all. But the application of justice and fairness still escapes completion. No one knows what is said in closed circles, or is thought in silent minds. Most important, living manifestations of inequality continue to go unnoticed. The newspapers are full of articles about the prevalence of poverty, crime and other depressing urban facts. But people are desensitized by the profusion of so much information and so many stories. We do not know how to empathize with the people who live these stories. We do not know how it feels to be trapped by unexplainable social forces beyond our control, unable to identify an undefeatable enemy. But these students know how it feels. And affirmative action is one of the few remaining attempts to explicitly recognize this hard-hitting feeling and to salvage some of the hope these few students still hold. Seeking to extend society's reach, affirmative action attempts to bring them out of poverty and destruction and into prosperity and productivity by facilitating their transition to college. But they are far behind the students who become their college peers. And they become victims once again. They become victims of polemical debates discussing equality in a society that is supposedly a meritocracy. Beneficiaries of affirmative action become targets once again, not by their underclass peers sneering at them for doing well, but by policy wonks who sneer at them for not doing well enough. The students I have described come from the underclass, which economist Paul Krugman defines as "that largely non-white hard core of people caught in a vicious circle of poverty and social collapse." They are indeed almost always minority students coming from isolated communities that are understood by most Americans only in the most stereotypical ways. They ceased to be human beings in the eyes of society the minute they were born. All their lives they have been victims of the human inability to see each person in the world as a human being with their own individuality rather than as just another person or face in the crowd. Justice as a metaphysical idea does not apply to these desperate few. Would it make a difference if they were white? I don't know. But I can say this for sure: Race would have made a difference as recently as a half-century ago. And it is worth noting cultural change is an organic growth with no concrete demarcation dividing point A from point B. Think about that the next time you think about affirmative action.

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