Roderick Graham: The End of Affirmative Action?

With the right-leaning US Supreme Court poised to eliminate affirmative action in higher education around the country — this seemed like an opportune moment to take stock of how effective affirmative action has been since President Kennedy instituted it in 1961. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Roderick Graham, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University to examine who will actually be affected by the seemingly inevitable change, what the right wing might do once affirmative action is gone, and how this decision may affect other selection preferences in college admissions. 00:02 Narrator – This is Sea Change Radio covering the shift to sustainability. I’m Alex Wise. 00:17 Rod Graham (RG) – We want to make sure that they get college degrees because they’re going to go back to the communities they’re going to raise good families. They’re going to be our doctors, our firemen, this type of thing, and so we think it’s in our best interest as a university and a community to target that population for that reason, and I think that’s how we should do it. 00:36 Narrator – With the right-leaning US Supreme Court poised to eliminate affirmative action in higher education around the country – this seemed like an opportune moment to take stock of how effective affirmative action has been since President Kennedy instituted it in 1961. This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak to Rod Graham, a sociology professor at Old Dominion University to examine who will actually be affected by the seemingly inevitable change, what the right wing might do once affirmative action is gone, and how this decision may affect other selection preferences in college admissions. 01:30 Alex Wise (AW) – I’m joined now on Sea Change Radio by Rod Graham. Rod is a professor at Old Dominion University and a sociologist and he’s a contributor to The Editorial Board. Rod, welcome back to Sea Change Radio. 01:43 Rod Graham (RG) – Hey, thanks for having me. 01:45 Alex Wise (AW) – So I wanted to have you on to talk about affirmative action. We have discussed affirmative action in different iterations previously on the show, but we’re at a new breaking point in the American legal framework and the approach to affirmative action. If all predictions prove correct, the Supreme Court, this conservative-leaning court, is going to reverse 60 years of affirmative action legislation through this case brought by an organization at University of North Carolina and Harvard – Students for Fair Admissions. You wrote a piece for the Editorial Board entitled “Who needs affirmative Action when we have racism? Leveraging white power can produce the same results.” Walk us through. Your process of absorbing and how do you square this in your mind? 02:41 RG – Well, as it happens, like a year or two ago, I was reading this book. I think it’s called “The Economics of Race.” It’s from an economist at Columbia, Brendan O’Flaherty, and it was just an offhand piece in the book. He was talking about racial inequality and all this stuff and he said, well, I’m not going to talk about affirmat