—Barrington Williams, B1Daily

Affirmative action in the United States grew out of a distinctly American history of racial exclusion. Black Americans had endured slavery, Jim Crow segregation, exclusion from universities and professions, employment discrimination, redlining and generations of government-sanctioned inequality. When institutions began deliberately increasing Black representation during the civil-rights era, the moral argument was not difficult to understand: America was attempting to open doors that America itself had spent centuries keeping closed.

But somewhere along the way, the definition of who benefits from that remedy became much broader than the population whose history originally made the remedy politically urgent.

At selective universities, a Black applicant may be the descendant of American slaves, the child of Nigerian professionals, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants or a recent immigrant who became an American citizen. All can legitimately identify as Black. Yet their families do not necessarily share the same historical relationship with American slavery, Jim Crow, redlining or exclusion from American institutions.

That distinction has largely disappeared inside the broad racial categories universities and employers have traditionally used.

And there is evidence that the consequences are significant.

A major study published in the American Journal of Education examined Black students attending selective American colleges and universities. Among the students studied, 27 percent of Black students were of immigrant origin, and immigrant-origin Black students were disproportionately represented at private and more selective institutions.

That finding deserves far more attention than it receives.

The researchers did not conclude that admissions offices were deliberately preferring immigrants over native-born Black Americans. In fact, they found that immigrant status itself did not appear to be receiving a preference. Instead, immigrant-origin students tended to possess characteristics admissions committees valued.

But that does not eliminate the underlying policy question.

If an institution says it wants Black representation partly because of America’s historic discrimination against Black Americans, who exactly is supposed to benefit from that effort?

A Nigerian immigrant arriving in America in 2005 may encounter racism because he is Black. That discrimination is real and deserves protection under civil-rights law. But his family’s history is not interchangeable with that of a Black American family whose ancestors survived American slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, racial terrorism, redlining and legally enforced exclusion from universities and professions.

Treating those histories as identical turns affirmative action from a remedial policy into little more than a demographic accounting exercise.

From Remedy to “Diversity”

Part of the problem comes from how affirmative action evolved legally.

The original civil-rights push emphasized dismantling discrimination and improving opportunities for populations that had been systematically excluded. Universities increasingly defended race-conscious admissions under the separate concept of creating the educational benefits of a diverse student body.

Those goals overlap, but they are not identical.

Once diversity becomes the objective rather than remedying a particular historical injustice, institutions have much less reason to distinguish between descendants of America’s historically excluded Black population and Black immigrants.

A Black face satisfies the demographic category either way.

Academic literature examining the end of affirmative action has explicitly noted this criticism: opponents of the old system have argued that beneficiaries could include children of immigrants rather than descendants of enslaved Black Americans, as well as relatively affluent members of underrepresented minority groups.

That criticism cannot simply be waved away as hostility toward immigrants.

It raises a legitimate question about what affirmative action was supposed to accomplish.

Black Americans Should Not Become a Diversity Statistic

Immigrants are not doing anything wrong by attending elite universities, competing for scholarships or pursuing professional opportunities. They should pursue every opportunity legally available to them.

The responsibility belongs to the institutions designing the policies.

Universities spent years boasting about percentages of “Black” students while often providing the public with little information about the ancestry, socioeconomic background or immigration history hidden underneath that enormous category.

The result is a statistical sleight of hand.

A university can announce impressive Black enrollment figures without answering the much harder question: Are the Black American communities historically excluded from institutions like this actually gaining meaningful access?

There is another complication. Research using Harvard admissions data found that racial preferences substantially increased admission probabilities for African American applicants, but the same research found that preferences could be larger for applicants from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.

That should make anyone interested in the original egalitarian purpose of affirmative action uncomfortable.

A system supposedly designed to break down entrenched inequality should not become one where institutions can collect affluent minority students, immigrant students and children of highly educated professionals, check the “diversity” box and declare America’s racial debt settled.

The Supreme Court Ended the Old System, Not the Debate

The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard effectively prohibited the traditional use of racial classifications in college admissions. Harvard’s subsequent enrollment numbers demonstrate that the admissions landscape has changed substantially. For the Class of 2029, Harvard reports 11.5 percent of students identifying as African American or Black.

But the collapse of traditional affirmative action does not make the underlying question disappear.

America still has enormous disparities created by its own history. Universities still pursue diversity. Governments still operate programs intended to expand opportunity. Employers still worry about representation.

The lesson should be that race alone is often too crude a measurement for repairing historical inequality.

If policymakers genuinely want programs aimed at communities harmed by specific American policies, they should be willing to identify those communities directly. That could mean considering socioeconomic disadvantage, neighborhood conditions, underfunded schools, family wealth, multigenerational American disadvantage and, where legally permissible, lineage connected to specific government discrimination.

Such an approach would not require attacking immigrants or pretending Black immigrants never experience racism.

It would simply recognize an uncomfortable truth: being Black in America today and descending from the Americans for whom many civil-rights remedies were originally fought are related concepts, but they are not always the same thing.

Black immigrants deserve equal protection and opportunity.

Black Americans descended from the people systematically excluded by this country deserve something more precise than being placed inside an enormous racial category and told that somebody else’s admission represents progress for them.

If affirmative action was supposed to repair an American wound, America should at least have been willing to ask whether the descendants of the people who received that wound were actually receiving the medicine.

—Barrington Williams, B1Daily