I didn’t know I was poor until 1976. At the end of that school year students in the “California Scholarship Federation,” a club for students with GPA’s of 3.6 or higher, were treated to a day at Magic Mountain. I rode in a carpool with a friend who was a senior, and on the way home we stopped at a Denny’s with other students. While the others ate burgers or breakfast and sipped Coca Cola, I drank water and ate the onions someone didn’t want on their burger as I had no money.
Six months later I made the sophomore basketball team. The coach decided it would be a good idea for us all to wear dress shirts and ties on game days. I was not opposed to the idea, but I had a problem. I did not own a dress shirt or a tie. My typical school attire consisted of a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt. The coach was kind enough to give me a solid blue necktie but when it came to the shirt I was on my own. The only collared shirt I owned was a brown Pendleton I had been given for Christmas, and though I wore it with a tie for the first game it didn’t look very good. My mother must have said something to her much older boyfriend, because he took pity on me and the next week gave me a short-sleeved light blue dress shirt, which soon became my favorite.
Things changed when I began working during my junior year. I worked several days a week, sometimes more than thirty hours, but I could finally buy the things I wanted. My clothes and my outlook both improved. I continued working regularly for the next nine years, all through high school, community college, and ultimately the University of California, Irvine. Although I knew I was competing against students who did not work at all I never thought of myself as disadvantaged or viewed life as unfair. Until I decided I wanted to be a doctor.
As a product of an abusive home, I lacked self-esteem, and I wasn’t sure I had what it took to get in to medical school. My sense of self-doubt was so well developed that when I transferred to UCI to major in Biology, I felt compelled to promise my wife I would change majors if I did not have at least a 3.6 GPA at the end of my first year I would change majors. I did better than that, and when I submitted my applications two years later, I was in the top 3% of my class and had scored in the top 2.5% of the nation of the MCAT, the standardized admissions test. I thought I had made it.
I had, and I hadn’t. I had performed well enough to easily obtain admission into private medical schools in California such as USC, but when it came to the dramatically less expensive University of California schools I was found lacking. I was dismissed out of hand by UCSF, denied by UC Davis and UCSD after an interview, and put in the limbo of the “waiting lists” of UCI and UCLA. My deficiencies lie not in my grade average or test scores, but in something over which I had no control whatsoever, the amount of melanin in my skin. What I had overcome did not matter. No one cared that I had come from an abusive home or had worked my way through college. I was forced to sit and wait while much less qualified applicants were given spots ahead of me, forced to consider joining the military to pay for private tuition while the schools of my state granted admission to other people based on the spelling of the last name or the color of their skin. The most egregious example was when UCSF gave a spot to a fair-skinned female of Latin descent with a 3.0 GPA and test scores in the 40th percentile. I waited eight months to learn I did not have to force my wife to be a military bride. I did not receive an offer from UCI until six weeks before the first day of school, for UCLA the offer came five weeks later still.
I don’t think about the anguish of those days much, as everything worked out well for me in the end, but those memories came flooding back this morning when I read the news of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students For Fair Admissions v. Harvard. In clear, uncompromising terms, the majority of the court declared that admissions policies like the ones that nearly held me back thirty-seven years ago are unconstitutional.
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, a man who happens to be black and who was abandoned by his father as a child and raised by his grandfather, ended his concurring opinion with these words-
“While I am painfully aware of the social and economic ravages which have befallen my race and all who suffer discrimination, I hold out enduring hope that this country will live up to its principles so clearly enunciated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: that all men are created equal, are equal citizens, and must be treated equally before the law.”
Bart
PS: I never write about politics, as my politics do not define me, and my political beliefs are not all that important. This post was motivated not by politics but emotion. For the first time in memory the Supreme Court addressed something I had personally experienced. The post is not a comment on racism in America (I know it is still a part of our culture!). It is simply a story of something I experienced and how today’s decision impacted me.