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Page 12 March 27, 2019 O PINION Opinion articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Portland Observer. We welcome reader essays, photos and story ideas. Submit to news@portlandobserver.com. The Real College Admissions Scandal: Blaming affirmative action J essiCah p ierre In what’s being called the largest college admissions scam ever, a num- ber of wealthy par- ents, celebrities, and college prep coaches have been accused of offering large bribes to get rich students into Ivy League schools, regardless of their credentials. The parents facing charges al- legedly paid up to $6.5 million to get their kids into college. Shocking as it is, this is hardly a new phenomenon in higher ed- ucation. Wealthy and privileged students have always had an upper hand in being accepted to presti- by gious universities. They’re called “legacy prefer- ences.” “Many U.S. colleges admit ‘legacies,’ or students with a family connection to the university, at dramatical- ly higher rates than other applicants,” The Guardian explains, because “they are widely seen as a reli- able source of alumni do- nations.” Some of our countries most prominent figures have benefited from legacy preferences. When applying to Harvard, future pres- ident John F. Kennedy noted that his father was an alumnus. And although his academic record was unspectacular, he was admitted into the Ivy League school. The same can be said for George W. Bush, whose father and grandfa- ther graduated from Yale. Despite his “lackluster grades,” The Guard- ian reported, Bush was accepted. This overt — and legal — pref- erence for the wealthy and power- ful goes back at least a century. Yet when the children of middle class families are denied admission, some families have laid the blame on affirmative action programs for students of color, who’ve histori- cally faced discrimination. As the college admissions pro- cess becomes more competitive, campaigns against affirmative ac- tion have revved up immensely. In 2016, Abigail Fisher challenged the University of Texas at Aus- tin’s race-conscious admissions program after being rejected when she applied for a university pro- gram designed for the top 10 per- cent of her class. Despite not having the creden- tials to get into the program, Fisher cited affirmative action as the rea- son why she was denied. In other words, she claimed she was being discriminated against because she was white. Her case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that affirmative action is in fact constitutional and doesn’t hurt white students. In fact, even with programs like affirmative action, according to the National Center for Edu- cational Statistics, racial divides at universities still remain. While college enrollment is increasing across the board, it found that enrollment rates for college-aged white students (42 percent) re- main higher than for both black students (36 percent) and Hispan- ic students (39 percent.) Meanwhile, a 2018 analysis of Harvard’s admissions process found that legacy applicants were accept- ed at a rate of nearly 34 percent from 2009 to 2015. That’s more than five times higher than the rate for non-legacies over the same six- year period: just 5.9 percent. It’s clear that students like Ab- igail Fisher are picking the wrong fight when it comes to discrimi- nation in the college admissions process. The high-level of corruption of legacy admissions hurts the ma- jority of students, regardless of race. So too do the parents spend- ing millions on bribes. But that’s how inequality thrives. Today’s college admissions scandal is just another illustration of the rich encouraging working- and middle-class people to turn against each other — and blame people of color — while they qui- etly rig the game for themselves. Instead of pointing the finger at each other, the victims of these manipulations should come to- gether to take the monster of eco- nomic privilege down. Jessicah Pierre is the inequality media specialist at the Institute for Policy Studies. Prosecutors Discriminate in Jury Selection This is a case Supreme Court should take up C assanDra s tubbs It has long been set- tled that prosecutors may not dismiss cit- izens from a jury be- cause they are black. But can they dismiss them because they sup- ported the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case? That’s a question the U.S. Su- preme Court may soon take up af- ter the California Supreme Court treated a prosecutor’s invocation of a juror’s views on the Simpson verdict as a “race-neutral” reason that justified the dismissal of a black juror. If the rule forbidding race dis- by crimination in the selection of jurors is to have any real effect, such reasons cannot be accepted as race-neutral without further in- quiry. As everyone knows, opinions about the verdict in O.J. Simpson’s trial in the late 1990s di- vided overwhelming along racial lines. A CNN poll following the verdict showed that just 41 percent of white respondents agreed with the ver- dict, compared with 88 percent of black respondents. In several capital murder trials in the wake of the Simpson verdict, California prosecutors exploited this racial divide by questioning prospective jurors about their opin- ions of the trial. Then they cited black jurors’ acceptance of the Simpson verdict as a “neutral” ba- sis for striking them from the jury, often resulting in trials of black de- fendants by all-white juries. Now the U.S Supreme Court will have a chance this spring to decide whether this practice can be squared with the Constitution’s protection against racial discrimi- nation in jury selection. The question arises in the case of Floyd Smith, a black California death row prisoner who was con- victed and sentenced to death in 1997 for murdering a white teen- ager in San Bernardino County. Smith was arrested in Fontana, a town that had an active KKK presence. He was represented by two black defense attorneys, and the defense team was subjected to vandalism and racial threats over the course of the trial. The prosecution struck all four prospective black jurors from Smith’s jury. When the defense objected to this pattern as racial- ly biased, the prosecutor offered a laundry list of justifications that he said were proof that his objections had nothing to do with the jurors’ race. Prominent on his list was the fact that the jurors accepted the O.J. Simpson verdict, even though he had accepted multiple white jurors who also agreed with the Simpson verdict. Under settled case law, if there is sufficient evidence suggesting that a prosecution’s strike of a juror is racially biased, the prose- cution must offer a “race-neutral” explanation. The judge in Smith’s case ruled that the jurors’ approval of the O.J. Simpson verdict was a sufficiently race-neutral explana- tion to uphold the removal of the black jurors. After his trial and conviction, Smith appealed, and the California Supreme Court, too, accepted the prosecution’s reliance on views about the O.J. Simpson verdict as a “race-neu- tral” explanation. The California Supreme Court did not question whether the pros- ecutor’s use of views about the O.J. Simpson verdict was a proxy for race discrimination. What’s more, this is the fourth time that the court has rubber-stamped the prosecution’s practice of striking black jurors based on their opin- ions of the Simpson trial. This is not the only instance of prosecutors removing black jurors in capital cases based on suspect explanations that are closely cor- related to race. Lower courts are also divid- ed about whether residence in a racially identified neighborhood is a “race-neutral” justification. One federal court rejected a California prosecutor’s argu- ment that living in Compton is a race-neutral justification, but another accepted a prosecutor’s objection to a juror’s residence in Newark, which the prosecu- tor called a “drug trafficking” neighborhood. The Washington Supreme Court recently adopted a rule declaring a prosecutor’s reliance on a prospective juror’s neighborhood presumptive proof of discrimination. The U.S. Supreme Court is now considering whether it should take Smith’s case. It should. The Supreme Court has insisted that it is committed to jury selection free from discrimination. But that commitment is paper-thin if the court permits prosecutors to cover over racially discriminato- ry strikes of jurors by pointing to such factors as their residence in a black neighborhood or their ap- proval of the verdict in O.J. Simp- son’s case. Cassy Stubbs is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Proj- ect.
