Affirmative Action May Be Over, But Identity Still Matters
By Ethnic Media Services
CA

 

(*By graduating high school senior Lucia Martínez, as told to EMS editor Peter Schurman)n

 

I’ve applied to a bunch of schools. I want to study anthropology. I like how it’s interdisciplinary, and how it’ll allow me to kind of go more into my own identity. Maybe I’ll be able to spend some time in El Salvador and do field work there and really kind of connect with my roots.

But I also like how it will allow me to connect with so many different cultures and people and places that I don’t have a connection with. That’s what I feel anthropology is, really connecting and living in a space that isn’t your own. And that really draws me.

I put a lot of effort into my college essays. I started preparing some of them this past summer. I spoke to a teacher after he read one of my essays, and he told me he hadn’t learned anything about me after reading it. I was writing about the college, about why I wanted to attend, but I wasn’t connecting it back to myself, which was hard to do in just a few words.

Then, while looking through a list of courses at one college, I saw a class on the history of colonialism, and I got excited thinking of how I could connect it back to my roots, being Salvadoran and Mexican, to learn how colonialism affects the countries that I call home.

Another prompt asked applicants to consider a research question they would want to pursue in college. And I talked about my interest in studying the disappearances during Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and 80s. I wrote about how I wanted to connect this to what happened in El Salvador during its civil war. That was one way I discussed my Latina identity.

I feel like a lot of the experiences that I have, a lot of relationships I build, a lot of the clubs and stuff I’m a part of at school are because of my identity or at least have something to do with it. So, I wanted to share that because it is significant.

But I don’t think my essays would have been any different if Affirmative Action were still in place. I think I would have continued to write about being Latina. I do think the prompts themselves would have been a lot different.

There’s one essay prompt for one college that acknowledges the overturning of Affirmative Action and asks students specifically if there’s anything that they want to share about their identity. I thought that was super interesting because while a lot of the other essays do leave room for you to talk about your identity, this one college was like, “Yeah, in the face of Affirmative Action being repealed, we’re going to ask you specifically about your identity and we want you to share that with us.”

I have one friend who is in charge of the Polynesian dance club at my school. She wrote a long essay about her being part of that, building the club up, and just bringing more awareness about Polynesian identity to our school.

I feel like we’re all talking about what’s important to us. Like we’re just talking about who we are, what’s in our blood, and how that connects to what we do at school.

Still, I have seen on social media this prominent theme among some high school seniors who are really stressed out because they’re not people of color. They post about being straight, with both parents at home, and they’re worried because they don’t know what to talk about. I see this in some of my peers, too. They’re like, “I’m white. I’m straight. And I have no story to tell.” And that, I think, is really interesting.

And while I do sympathize with them, I also feel like it’s important for them to kind of acknowledge the fact that historically it has kind of always played in their direction. People of color, women, were denied access to college because of their identity, because of their race, because of their gender, because of their orientation, like for so many reasons.

And white people did have that access, and they don’t really recognize that aspect of why Affirmative Action even existed in the first place.

So, even though Affirmative Action is officially over, a lot of people are still under the impression that race matters. Like, I’m under the impression, too, that colleges will care about it, even though they don’t say so.

(This coverage is made possible through the Ethnic Media Services / AAJC reporting project on diversity after affirmative action.)