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Here's how people are marking the commemoration of the last enslaved black American being freed.

Most of my colleagues are college-educated. I am often the only product of felons, addicts, and foster care whom my peers have encountered outside of time spent volunteering in homeless shelters and group homes. Over the years, whenever affirmative action in higher education has come under threat, these folks have offered their sympathies. They believe that I—a child of a Black father and white mother who grew up in poverty and instability—feel the attacks more acutely. Most Americans seem to think affirmative action sits at the foundation of some beneficent suite of education policies that do something significant for poor Black kids, and that would disappear without the sanction of affirmative action. But the reality is that for the Black poor, a world without affirmative action is just the world as it is—no different than before.

In 2012, 6 percent of Harvard’s freshmen identified as Black. At the time, Black Americans made up 14 percent of the population and 15 percent of the country’s young adults. Harvard was then a far cry from racial parity. But in just three years, the university increased the number of Black freshmen by 50 percent. By 2020, The Harvard Crimson was reporting that more than 15 percent of incoming freshmen were Black, which meant the university had acquired perfect representation. This progress—Black progress—appears poised to recede with the expected loss of affirmative action due to the Supreme Court’s coming decisions on the Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina cases. But to endure a loss, one must have first enjoyed a gain. Diversity at Harvard was not the result of some intricate system for sourcing talent from the whole of Black America. With the permissions granted in 1978’s Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Harvard used race-conscious admissions to saturate itself with students drawn from the highest-earning segments of Black America.

[From the September 2021 issue: This is the end of affirmative action]

The same year that Harvard achieved perfect Black representation, a group of celebrated economists published a study examining income segregation across America’s colleges.

From 1999 to 2004, the years examined by the study, about 16 to 18 percent of American children were living below the federal poverty line. Families living below the FPL struggle to afford enough food, clothing, or shelter to stave off biological decline. In the absence of income segregation, children from poverty would make up a proportional 16 to 18 percent of college students. But according to the study, only 3 percent of the students at Harvard in that time period came from families in the bottom 20 percent. (The researchers later found that the percentage had increased to about 5 percent for a cohort of students at Harvard from 2008 to 2013.)

In October of 2020, Harvard reported 154 Black first-year students. Given that the child-poverty rate in Black America hovers north of 30 percent, in an equitable society, some 40 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The income segregation study did not disaggregate income brackets by race, and neither does Harvard, but the university does disclose that about a quarter of its latest freshman class comes from families with incomes below $85,000, its threshold for full financial aid. This is far above the federal poverty line and therefore not a good indicator of how many poor students attend Harvard. But if we extrapolate the study's findings, only seven or eight of said 154 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The other 140 or so Black students at Harvard were likely raised outside of poverty and probably as far from the bottom as any Black child can hope to be.

Writing in the American Journal of Education in 2007, the Princeton sociology professor Douglas Massey observed that 40 percent of Black students in the Ivy League were first- or second-generation immigrants. Black immigrants are the highest-earning and best-educated subset of Black America.

The Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., a director of the university’s African American–studies center, once estimated that as many as two-thirds of Harvard’s Black students in the early 2000s were the fortunate sons and daughters of Black immigrants or, to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples. A Black woman who was a Harvard senior at the time told The New York Times in 2004 that there were so few other Black students whose grandparents had been born in the U.S. that they had begun calling themselves “the descendants.”

The Supreme Court affirmed race to be an acceptable criterion within a holistic admissions framework in 1978. The regime described here persisted for 45 years without manifesting any progress of note for the Black poor, and it strains faith to imagine that the trickle-down was on its way in year 46. The coming eulogies for affirmative action should acknowledge this history. No policy that hesitates to say class prioritizes the impoverished, and the people we do nothing for should at least enjoy public acknowledgment of their abandonment.

When I was in elementary school, my grandmother told me that I would go to college for free because I was Native American. I’m not Native. Rather, my father is from a light-skinned Black family, and for a long time, families like these presented sharp cheekbones and aquiline noses as evidence of Native roots. In nearly every case, it was plain white ancestry, but Black folks had been denied the supposed dignity of whiteness for so long that even those who had it did not want it. My dad told the Native fiction to my mom, and she told my grandmother, who was white working poor, and her fictions met with my father’s. Like many in her class, she believed that the government was in the business of giving gifts to everyone but poor whites. In her view, the world worked like this: Asian Americans received loans to start businesses. Hospitals gave free medical care to Hispanic children. Native Americans enjoyed juiced-up welfare and free college. Black Americans received preferential hiring and a free education. Because she believed me to be both Black and Native, college appeared to be a given.

My grandmother’s understanding of how college entry worked for Black Americans was shaped by decades of white-poor hearsay about affirmative action. She had no Black friends; ethnic gossip and popular culture were all she had to go on, and these gave her a wildly inaccurate view of what was to be my college experience. But I have found that even wealthier and more sophisticated Americans have absorbed similar fictions.

According to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, out of 153,000 Black test-takers in 2005, only about 1,200 scored a 700 or above on either section of the SAT. I was among that handful. Unlike the stories my grandmother told me, a red carpet wasn’t rolled out in front of me. The guidance counselor at my New Jersey public high school said nothing about my test scores and was similarly apathetic when I said I was not going to apply to college at all. When I came back a week later to recant after my father threatened to throw me on the streets if I didn’t apply, my counselor—rather than hand me a blank check from the office of affirmative action—handed me a thin packet about the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.

[Drew Gilpin Faust: The blindness of ‘color-blindness’]

Being a former foster youth with a missing mother and a father only just released from prison, I was legally eligible for quite a bit of aid via the FAFSA. But without legal documentation of my situation, which no adult around me had kept, acquiring that aid would require me to obtain signed statements from members of the community testifying to my fractured living conditions. As a transient youth suddenly crashing with a father I had known for barely two years and residing in an entirely new town, there was no community to vouch for me. Unable to meet the federal requirements, I slogged through an associate’s, a bachelor’s, and eventually a master’s degree, accruing substantial loans despite eligibility for grants that could have paid for my entire undergraduate education.

Since 2018, I have used what I learned (albeit too late) to help my foster sister navigate college and the FAFSA, which must be renewed every year (including resubmitting community testimony on official letterhead). On more than one occasion, she has been selected for “additional verification,” one of several variations of bureaucratic rigmarole that can result in the delay of aid long enough to force lower-income students to miss a semester if they cannot afford to pay tuition out of pocket. Even when you’re prepared for this, as she and I were, the delay is demoralizing.

Every poor kid with aspirations of college faces a slightly different constellation of obstacles, but those differences abate beneath a homogenous disappointment. The National Center for Education Statistics found that, in 2012, just 14 percent of low-income high-school students  obtained a bachelor’s or higher degree within eight years of high-school graduation. Rates of college attendance specifically among Black youth and kids below the federal poverty line—the lowest of low-income—are lower still. Given that the rate for foster or homeless youth is a meager 2 to 11 percent, it’s safe to assume that the one for Black fosters is effectively zero. Meanwhile, compiling data scattered across publications, I’ve calculated that 85 percent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Black students go to Black folks raised in the middle and upper classes. For daily life, the result is this: In any office—in any room—where a bachelor’s degree is a prerequisite, the odds that the person next to you has come from poverty, especially Black poverty, are staggeringly low.

Affirmative-action policies are not directly responsible for the impediments that poor Black students face in higher education. Nevertheless, those policies have existed for nearly five decades and have demonstrably not been an obstacle to the formation of a status quo in which so few poor Black Americans obtain a bachelor’s degree. Although that might be viewed as a policy failure, the oral arguments in the Supreme Court cases make this much clear: Affirmative action is not intended to combat the barriers faced by the poor, Black or otherwise. It is meant to achieve racial diversity. Where it finds the bodies does not matter.  

In the case of Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, all parties involved—the justices, the petitioners, and the respondents—agree that the intention of affirmative action is to produce the “educational benefits of diversity.” As described by Seth Waxman, the respondent on behalf of Harvard, “a university student body comprising a multiplicity of backgrounds, experiences, and interests vitally benefits our nation. Stereotypes are broken down, prejudice is reduced, and critical thinking and problem-solving skills are improved.” The contention of Students for Fair Admissions is that Harvard could use other metrics, particularly socioeconomic status, to achieve educationally significant diversity without the need for racial considerations.

In response to the SFFA plan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that weighting factors such as class in admissions amounts to “subterfuges” for reaching some sort of “diversity in race.” She probed the lawyers in oral arguments by saying that she did not “understand why considering race as one factor but not the sole factor is any different than using any of those other metrics.” The view that Sotomayor lays out here asserts that considering income and wealth, or considering them in conjunction with race, is just a tedious path to the same outcome achieved by considering race alone. But of course, an admissions scheme that considers class would not just be a subterfuge. Even if it yielded a student body with the same degree of racial diversity, the students themselves would be very different.

Many Americans retain a certain dissonance about class, believing simultaneously that it does and does not matter. Would a classroom with one Black student who was raised by parents who met while studying business at Yale benefit from the added diversity of a Black student who was raised in the Cuney Homes projects that produced George Floyd? You would be hard-pressed to find someone who answers “no,” and it is doubtful that Sotomayor would either. But the only way to promote the admission of these two hypothetical Black students is with policies that recognize both class and race. Unfortunately, conversations about diversity too often focus solely on the gaps between Black and white Americans, excluding entirely the issue of class divides among Black Americans.

[Kimberly Reyes: Affirmative action shouldn’t be about diversity]

In 2018, William Julius Wilson—a survivor of Jim Crow and a pioneer in the study of urban poverty—reported that Black Americans had the highest degree of residential income segregation of any racial group: Our top and bottom classes were then the least likely to live alongside each other. That same year, Pew Research Center released a study on income inequality within races. From 1970 to 2016, the top 10 percent of Black workers earned nearly 10 times what the bottom 10 percent of black workers did. For nearly 50 years, Black Americans experienced more income disparity than any other racial group in the country. The report received widespread coverage, including in The Atlantic, but mainly for its findings regarding Asian Americans, who had (temporarily) displaced Black Americans as the least equal group.

I can only cheer on, and envy, the speed at which knowledge of class disparities among Asian Americans has permeated popular culture. I hope it continues, because the Asian parity that Harvard has achieved is certainly not the result of admitting impoverished Burmese Americans. In the time since the 2018 Pew study was released, we have seen not just class-focused journalism, but Always Be My Maybe, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Beef. Each pop-cultural work  demonstrates not just that class exists for Asians, but that it drastically alters their lives, their opportunities, and their interactions in ways that—shockingly—mirror how class affects white Americans.

That no similar awareness is burgeoning on behalf of disparities afflicting Black Americans is absurd. The fact that the white upper class had a median wealth more than 20 times that of the white poor helped fuel Occupy Wall Street, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a socialist revival among white youth that continues today. In 2015, the Black upper class had a median wealth 1,382 times greater than the Black poor, along with an incarceration rate nearly 10 times lower than what I inherited. Yet still, some of the best-educated minds in the country claim to not understand how taking this into consideration might yield a qualitatively different student body than what comes from treating Black Americans as a class-free blob.

Powerful as they may be, elite institutions require support from the ground. The social prestige that achieving racial diversity offers and the ability it has to smooth over the appearance of other inequities are too alluring for a university like Harvard to pass up. But, rich as it is, Harvard does not have the capital necessary to employ all of the country’s poor, fix their neighborhoods, and fund their public schools, or the willingness to wait an entire generation for those social changes to generate a cohort of low-income children who are nevertheless academically excellent. It will always be cheaper and more expedient to simply recruit wealthy kids instead. If what comes after affirmative action penalizes the Black middle and upper classes, that is nothing to celebrate. But if we want to erect something that benefits all Black Americans, we cannot expect that to happen without policies that treat class as meaningful.