70.012 - Toward Collective Action to Reclaim Public Narratives for Justice: Ameliorating an Impoverished Cultural Discourse on Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Since Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), affirmative action has been on tenuous footing. With each new legal challenge affirmative action advocates have sought to develop new ways of defending race-conscious admissions policies. In the wake of the University of Michigan’s affirmative action Supreme Court cases, Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), social scientists undertook the task of producing an empirically rigorous defense of affirmative action. The collective research efforts of a generation of higher education scholars produced a robust body of scholarship aligned with the tradition of publicly engaged and applied research, which in concert, also resulted in the entrenchment of the diversity rationale. The purpose of affirmative action has shifted from addressing historical and persistent systemic inequalities (i.e., the remedial or moral rationale) to broadly enhancing educational environments (i.e., the diversity rationale) (Yosso, Parker, Solórzano, & Lynn, 2004). The downfall being what Colorlines, a popular news website focused on race, has called the “rhetorical (de)evolution of affirmative action” (Lee, 2012).

As a whole the debates over affirmative action have suffered from an impoverished cultural discourse that has allowed a color-blind racist agenda and ideologies to take root. Boyer (1996) defines an impoverished cultural discourse as one in which “the nation’s most pressing social, economic, and civic issues are endlessly discussed primarily by politicians and self-proclaimed pundits, while university scholars rarely are invited to join the conversation” (p. 15). Rather than waiting for an invitation, this symposium calls on equity and justice minded scholars, armed with a plentiful body of scholarship and empirical evidence, to collectively and strategically engage in a reinvigoration of public discourse on affirmative action. In line with this year’s conference theme “Toward Justice: Culture, Language, and Heritage in Education Research and Praxis,” we posit that the time is ripe to interrogate and (re)frame the normative narratives relied upon to shape the debate over the future of affirmative action.

The battle over affirmative action hinges significantly on effective collective action in public discourse – the court of public opinion. Since the 1960s, affirmative action policies have been critical to advancing a civil rights agenda in higher education, opening doors of opportunity for women and racially marginalized populations historically shut-out of pursuing postsecondary education. Despite documented successes of these policies (Bowen & Bok, 1998), opponents of affirmative action have successfully rolled back advances in racial equity through the development and expansion of what Bonilla-Silva (2006) has called colorblind-racist ideology (Yosso et al., 2004). While affirmative action opponents have consistently worked to reverse these critical policies through a unified and proactive campaign of color-blind rhetoric, proponents have defensively asserted multiple justifications for affirmative action.

Though some may believe that the sunsetting of affirmative action policies has begun, the civic battles over how higher education can and will affirmatively address inequalities in college access are still in progress and in flux, particularly in how racial discrimination is understood. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s most recent ruling in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014) it is very likely that state leaders at odds with affirmative action will seek to take advantage of state sovereignty (Garces, 2013) to outlaw the use of race in public contracting, public employment, and public higher education. In addition, given the recent debate over the potential partial repeal of Proposition 209 (see California Senate Constitutional Amendment 5 [SCA 5], 2013), which discursively pitted Latinos against Asian Americans, and Edward Blum’s social media campaign to identify Asian Americans as prospective plaintiffs in affirmative action lawsuits (Hing, 2014), the next wave of attacks on affirmative action is likely to invoke the Asian American “model minority” as victim of race-conscious policies trope, wholly co-opting civil rights arguments through color-blind ideology. Ironically, as several national polls have found, the majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action, with some studies finding that a significant majority of Asian Americans support affirmative action (Park, 2009; National Asian American Survey, 2013).
In light of these continuing debates, this symposium will convene multiple generations of scholars interested in a renewal of proactive, strategic, and collective efforts to ameliorate the impoverished cultural discourse on affirmative action in higher education. The ongoing discursive battles over affirmative action and racial equity in higher education access require a scholarship of engagement that embraces an application of knowledge to influence practice and practice to influence theory (Boyer, 1996). As such, this symposium presents an opportunity for generations of scholars – emergent and established – to engage in a critical and strategic dialogue about the next era of a scholarship of engagement on affirmative action. The symposium is guided by several key questions that focus on reclaiming and reframing public narratives on affirmative action in higher education. They include, but are not limited to the following questions:

1. How are racial terrains and terms of the debate over affirmative action shifting and what are the legal and practical implications of these shifts?
2. Has the time come to move the defense of the affirmative action beyond the diversity rationale? If so, what are the implications of reclaiming and retooling the moral or remedial rationale?
3. How might we reconsider the (re)framing of who benefits from affirmative action?
4. How can scholars take collective actions to defend and advance affirmative action through a strategic effort that targets media and cross-group collaborations?

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Papers

• Opening Commentary - Daniel Gilbert Solorzano, University of California - Los Angeles

• Assessing the Current State of Affirmative Action and Responding to "Race-Neutral" Alternatives - Nolan L. Cabrera, The University of Arizona; Liliana M. Garces, The Pennsylvania State University - University Park; Uma Madhure Jayakumar, University of San Francisco; Julie J. Park, University of Maryland - College Park

• Moving Beyond the Diversity Rationale - Nicholas A. Bowman, University of Iowa; Kimberly Griffin, University of Maryland; Stephen John Quaye, Miami University

• Advancing a Remedial Rationale - Julianne Hing, Colorlines; Maria C. Ledesma, University of Utah; OiYan A. Poon, Loyola University Chicago