ABSTRACT
Many today assert that the United States has become a “post-racial” society, one in which race no longer plays a significant role in shaping opportunities in education and beyond. In questions of college admissions, this “post-racial” assertion often works together with longstanding beliefs about American meritocracy to shape how we understand why some students attend college and others don’t, who ends up in which educational institutions, and who succeeds once enrolled. These “race doesn’t matter, what matters is who is smart, motivated, works hard and values education” narratives take many forms, are deeply entrenched, and often persist even in the face of contradictory evidence. One example of how this plays out comes from within college classrooms. For well over a decade Amanda Lewis (the first author) has taught an undergraduate Racial and Ethnic Relations course. Before discussing contemporary issues, the first half of the semester focuses primarily on the history of racialization of different groups in the U.S. One reason for this sequencing is so that when the class gets to the discussion about the present, students have theory and data with which to evaluate common sense, “post-racial,” ahistorical narratives that suggest that even the very recent past it not relevant to what is happening now. After some early false starts, students generally hit their “sociological” stride, grasping race as a socio-historical construct with vast effects on different groups’ histories and experiences. Then we get to the inevitable discussion of affirmative action and fairness in college admissions. Most students entered the class imagining themselves as abstract individuals who did or did not work hard, do or do not have innate capacities for learning calculus or mastering grammatically correct prose, and therefore who did or did not deserve admissions into relatively select institutions. Having, for the most part, bought whole-sale into the ideology of meritocracy they temporarily lose track of the history we’ve been studying when we get to this most pressing personal issue for all of them—college admissions.
