that over 43 percent of white students at Harvard were athletes, legacies, children of faculty or staff, or had some other special status . He also found that 75 percent of those white students who were admitted to Harvard would have been rejected if they had been treated as white students without status. This was affirmative action for rich white people.should
have been mad at his richer, more elite white peers, rather than me. Instead, I was told that I had an unfair advantage due to my skin color, and I believed it.So when I received my acceptance letter to the only Ivy League university I had applied to, my excitement quickly faded as my friends received rejections. My fears grew when I received the invitation to an event for admitted Black students.
My parents, who had not gone to college themselves, worried about my mental health. How would I ever succeed if I, and the people around me, thought I had not deserved admission? I rejected the Ivy League offer and went, on scholarship, to New York University instead. There, my SAT scores were well above the median. And the group of students on scholarship that I met with regularly as part of a college-sponsored research program only had a handful of Black kids in it.
Julissa was one of my most eager students, and her mom was concerned for her and her brother’s education. Our school was clearly underperforming. Julissa and her brother were not being challenged. But Julissa’s parents had moved their family to the South Bronx to chase the American dream of homeownership. This neighborhood was all they could afford, and my student’s mother understood the importance of wealth accumulation. But they had moved from a rental in a better neighborhood with better schools in Manhattan. Had they made the wrong decision? I feared that the answer was yes, but I did not tell her.