<p>I’m a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I’m a good bit older than most people who post on College Confidential. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated–the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation–and I remember the “long hot summer” and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.</p>
<p>One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern “white” parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was “Negroes”), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn’t all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.</p>
<p>It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn’t shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.</p>
<p>One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term “affirmative action” still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don’t.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term “Negro” or “Afro-American” or “black” was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, “What do you want to be called, ‘black’ or ‘Afro-American’?” His answer was, “I’d rather be called Henry.” Henry’s answer to my classmate’s innocent question really got me thinking. </p>
<p>I still support affirmative action in college admission, by which I mean I continue to support colleges reaching out to young people unlike me who didn’t have college-educated parents, for example. (I’m a third-generation college graduate, so of course I can guide my children’s education more readily than can a parent who never attended college.) I DEFINITELY support equality of rights under the law and full enjoyment of civil rights by all people in the United States. I learned that from my parents even before I learned it from my classmates and my teachers. But I’m ASTONISHED that forty years after the visitor to my class reminded me and my classmates that we have the choice of treating our fellow citizens as individuals that there are still people in America who want to give the Klan and the segregationists the win by making sure we are classified by “race” for all time. My college alma mater has been admitting students of all “races” since before my late grandfather was born–as has Harvard. Diversity is a wonderful aspect of American life, and I think our diversity can best be appreciated by not lumping our neighbors into “race” groups that are approximate at best, and downright misleading and pernicious at times. I’m confident that every which kind of people will be admitted to all of the finest colleges of the land if those colleges holistically consider lots of admission factors without considering “race” at all, as I am convinced by personal acquaintance with lots of smart young people that there are smart young people and young people with great leadership skills and young people with any characteristic a college might desire in all the ethnic groups in the United States.</p>
) skin, and said, “If your daughter looks like you, you can count on her not being seriously considered, since there are so few spots, and at this point, we would only open our already full list to someone of a different color.” </p>