The Supreme Court ruling is just the latest version of a question that the Whitehead family — and the nation — has been grappling with for years: How to deal with the legacy of slavery?

By Audra D. S. Burch

Amir Whitehead felt that ending affirmative action was not wrong. Other family members felt differently. Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York Times

For the Whiteheads, an African American family living in the city of Baltimore, race is discussed at the dinner table. In the car on the way to work and school and games. In the backyard while the sons practice sports.

So when the Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions at colleges and universities, effectively ending the practice known as affirmative action, the family began talking about it earnestly, echoing the range of emotions felt by people across the country who are invested in the ruling.

Though the result was anticipated, Karsonya Wise Whitehead, 54, a college professor, said she was so devastated that she had to sit down to process “the type of history being made at that moment.”

Her husband, Johnnie Whitehead, 59, the principal of a Christian school, said he took no joy in the ruling but was ambivalent about affirmative action. He is hopeful that it is no longer needed, but fears it is.

The eldest son, Kofi, 22, texted his brother Amir to share the news, and thought of the chilling effect it might have on the next generation of Black students. Amir, 20, felt that ending affirmative action was not wrong because admissions should be based upon merits only.

For the Whiteheads, the Supreme Court decision — seismic in its power to reorder the admissions process at elite colleges and universities — was another chapter in a broader discussion they had been having since their children were young.

Their conversation reflects, in some ways, the complex and shifting views among African Americans grappling with the question embedded in the nation’s every contemporary racial conflict, from reparations to the American justice system: How to deal with the legacy of slavery?

Karsonya Wise Whitehead, a college professor, said she was so devastated when she heard about the Supreme Court ruling, that she had to sit down to process “the type of history being made at that moment.”Credit…Shan Wallace for The New York Times

“This is part of our ongoing conversation about the tensions around racism and around race,” said Dr. Whitehead, who teaches African American studies and communications at Loyola University Maryland and is the executive director of the Karson Institute for Race, Peace and Social Justice at the college. “We’ve seen different iterations of: ‘What does it mean to be Black in America? Where do we fit into America? Whose America is this? And if we want to have equity, what does this equity look like?’”

The family’s early talks centered on making sure their sons were confident in who they were as young Black men. That gave way to other topics.

Kofi favors reparations but doesn’t know what the right amount of money should be for Black families whose ancestors were enslaved. Amir favors reparations in some form, too, saying, “We built this country, we deserve some part of it.” Dr. Whitehead is not only in support, but she believes it is the only way forward to address the historical debt. Mr. Whitehead said Black Americans deserved reparations, particularly since the country had paid others that it harmed, but did not see it as a way to solve racism.

When it comes to affirmative action, African Americans are broadly supportive of the policy.

According to a Pew Research Center report released last month, only 33 percent of American adults approve of race-conscious admissions at selective colleges. Forty-seven percent of African American adults say they approve.

The research also revealed that 28 percent of Black adults said others had assumed that they benefited unfairly from efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity.

A separate NBC poll in April found about half of Americans agreed that an affirmative action program was still necessary “to counteract the effects of discrimination against minorities, and are a good idea as long as there are no rigid quotas.” Among African Americans, the number in support of that statement increased to about 77 percent.

The starkly different attitudes toward the merits of affirmative action were laid bare most profoundly in the words of the only two Black justices. Their written exchange mirrored how the landmark decision was discussed, debated and deconstructed among friends and families — including the Whiteheads — at dinner tables, in group chats and on social media.

Justices Clarence Thomas, who attended Yale, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who attended Harvard, challenged each other’s views, agreeing only on the existence of racial disparities but sharply disagreeing on how to address them.

“As she sees things, we are all inexorably trapped in a fundamentally racist society, with the original sin of slavery and the historical subjugation of Black Americans still determining our lives today,” wrote Justice Thomas, the nation’s second Black justice and a longtime critic of affirmative action.

Justice Jackson, in her dissent, said Justice Thomas “is somehow persuaded that these realities have no bearing on a fair assessment of ‘individual achievement,’” she wrote. In her opinion, the court’s conservative majority displayed a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” on the issue of race.

Johnnie Whitehead, the principal of a Christian school, said he took no joy in the ruling but was ambivalent about affirmative action. Credit…Shan Wallace for The New York Times

In some ways, the Whiteheads’ views of affirmative action aligned with both of the justices’ argument outlined on the pages of the ruling.

For Dr. Whitehead, a radio show host, author and the daughter of civil rights activists, the dismantling of affirmative action — rooted in the civil rights movement as part of federal policy to counteract discrimination — was a “gut punch.” She said she personally benefited from affirmative action as the first Black student in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies program at the University of Notre Dame. She worries that the decision portends what is to come, shaping other aspects of life, including corporate hiring.

Mr. Whitehead said he understood the practice as a way to counter discrimination and mistreatment of African Americans. And, he said, if affirmative action is going to be abolished, legacy preferences should go, too.

“I’d like to believe that we are a nation that doesn’t have to have affirmative action, but I fear we still need it,” said Mr. Whitehead, who is also a teacher at Baltimore School of the Bible.

Kofi, the eldest son, who graduated from Rhodes College in May with an English degree, has a sensibility closer to his mother’s. He first began following the issue in high school after learning about a white student in Texas who sued the University of Texas at Austin for its use of race in admission decisions.

He sees last week’s ruling as both out of touch with the pervasiveness of modern racism and a blow to future generations of Black students looking to attend elite schools. And he chafes at the argument that college academic standards are lowered to create diverse campuses.

“Affirmative action is about opening the door to diverse backgrounds because that is what education and higher learning is about,” Kofi said. “It’s not about having 5,000 of the same kids in two-parent households and white picket fences who all come in and do the same thing. No. College and higher education is about bringing in different people so you can learn from each other.”

His younger brother Amir, who is a member of Lafayette College’s fencing team, sees it differently. A college sophomore who is studying economics, he began developing his political and socially conservative views as a middle school student during the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.

Kofi Whitehead, seen on the campus of Rhodes College, says he worries about the negative effect the court’s affirmative action decision might have on the next generation of Black students. Credit…Priscilla Foreman

While he and his mother’s views are the farthest apart, she said he was raised “to be an independent thinker.”

He agrees with the other members of his family that race, and the nation’s history of enslavement of Black people, undeniably affects the present day. But, he said he believed that affirmative action undermined the concept of earning admission based on qualifications rather than race.

“Affirmative action being taken away is not so much a bad thing, because I don’t think that anyone who is not qualified for something should get that purely based off their skin color,” said Amir, who noted that he included his race on his college application but did not include the subject in his personal essay.

“I am not saying the bar has been lowered,” he said. “I just feel as though sometimes, cases come down to race. I think that goes back to us, as a country, where everything is focused on race.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2023, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Black Family, Split On What a Key Ruling On Admissions Means. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Ignoring Race Will Not End Racism

The National Women’s Studies Association, the nation’s largest network of feminist scholars,
educators, and activists, vehemently opposes the Supreme Court’s decision in the Students For
Admission v. Harvard College and the Students For Admission v. University of North
Carolina cases. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent to the Students For
Admission v. Harvard College case that this country has never been colorblind. We would add
that it has also never been race-neutral, nor has it ever been equal. America rests on a foundation
of race and racism. Enslaved people were forced to build this country, and the status quo has
been maintained by the descendants of those who enslaved people. In 2008, with the election of
President Barack Obama, many of us braced ourselves for what we knew was going to come. We
knew then that a gear had shifted somewhere in the white supremacist mechanism and that their
slow walk back to power would result in a universal gutting of equity-based policies, plans, and
initiatives. Some of us tried to sound the alarm, but it was hard for many to believe that the
country was on fire when it felt like we had won. And then Black Lives Matter. And then Donald
Trump. And then Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett. And then George Floyd. And then
Ron DeSantis. And then the attacks on critical race theory, Black History, and the LGBTQ
communities. And then the Dobbs decision. And now affirmative action.
Today’s Supreme Court decision to strike down race-conscious admissions as a violation
of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment was not unexpected nor was it surprising. We knew that it was coming.[1] In fact, Justice Clarence Thomas had long said that even though he benefitted from affirmative action, he disagreed with it and wanted to strike it down.[2] He just never had the votes, until now. It is important to note that the SCOTUS Supermajority
(Justices Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Coney Barrett, and Alito) not only watered
down the historic Brown v. Board decision but they also intentionally narrowed their decision to
only focus on race, allowing preferential treatment based on one’s status as a legacy; an athlete;
or a child of either a donor, faculty member, or staff to remain in place. Thus, affirmative action
for the SCOTUS Supermajority only matters in discussions about race, and for them, the only
way to end race-based policies is to remove race from consideration. Justice Brown Jackson
notes that this type of thinking is in vain because “if the colleges of this country are required to
ignore a thing that matters, it will not just go away. It will take longer for racism to leave us.
And, ultimately, ignoring race just makes it matter more.”[3] Additionally, studies have shown
that the percentage points given to a Black, Brown, or Indigenous applicant are considerably
lower than the percentage points given to legacies (in some selective schools, being a legacy
raises an applicant’s chances of being accepted by almost 20 percentage points).[4]
So, one wonders why race is the determining factor that the SCOTUS Supermajority chose
to focus on. According to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, today’s decision is “not grounded in law or
fact and contravenes the vision of equality embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment.”[5] And yet,six Justices have succeeded in turning back the clock on equity and equality, a decision that will
be felt for years to come. They did it because they are not colorblind. They are not race-neutral.
And they did it simply because they could.

As Shirley Chisholm once said, “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines,
whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.” This is why we
organize. We cannot get tired or be weary or give up. We cannot stop pushing.[6] We must
work locally and nationally. We must continue to push President Biden and all of our elected
officials to do everything that they can to right this wrong. We must keep our eyes fixed on
where we want to go and not be stopped by what we see now. The SCOTUS Supermajority
thinks that the battle is over because they have spoken; we know that the battle will not end until
we have the last word. As always, we stand ready to fight with you and, if needed, fight for you.

Bending toward social justice,
Karsonya Wise Whitehead, NWSA President
Ariella Rotramel, NWSA Vice President
Erica Williams, NWSA Secretary
Dominique Hill, NWSA Member-at-Large
Gina Velasco, NWSA Member-at-Large
Yi-Chun Tricia Lin 林怡君, NWSA Past President
Beverly Guy Sheftall, NWSA Past President

ENDNOTES

[1] The Supreme Court cases that challenged affirmative action began in 1978 with the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke and continued with Hopwood v. Texas in 1996, and Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger in 2003.

[2] Justice Brown Jackson in responding to Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion in the decision, wrote that he is obsessed with race-consciousness in such a way that it “far outstrips my or UNC’s holistic understanding that race can be a factor that affects applicants’ unique life experiences.” 600 U.S. (2023), Jackson, J., Footnote 102.

[3] 600 U.S. (2023), Jackson, J., dissenting for the case No. 21-707.

[4] Golden, Daniel (2010). An Analytic Survey of Legacy Preferences. In Kahlenberg, Richard D. (ed.). Affirmative-Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions. New York: The Century Foundation Press.

[5] 600 U.S. (2023), Sotomayor, J., dissenting for cases Nos. 20–1199 and 21-707.

[6] At the same time, we want to remind you again of the need for radical preventative self-care. In other words, take care of yourself now by choice before you have to do it by circumstance.

Historical Trauma: Past Pains, Future Promise

Co-Guest Editors: Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead, Ph.D.; María Colompos-Tohtsonie, MPPA; & Dr. Walter Greason, Ph.D.

Black History Bulletin (BHB), Volume 85, Number 1 (ASALH)

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration, and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.[1]

In 1937, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, at the urging of Mary McLeod Bethune, founded The Black History Bulletin (née The Negro History Bulletin) aimed at providing teachers, students, and the general reader with a foundation in Black history. Since then, the BHB has become one of the academic lighthouses publishing articles and lesson plans that are designed to provide truth, historical knowledge, and insight into many of the critical issues facing the African American community. As we look to celebrate the 85^th anniversary of the critical knowledge project of Dr. Woodson and Dr. Bethune, we selected Historical Trauma: Past Pains, Future Promise as the Sankofa theme. We are looking back from whence we have come while moving forward toward who are ancestors dreamed of us becoming. We are reflecting on the social, political, economic, and cultural realities of historical trauma and collective development in the realm of knowledge building and citizenry constructs. The goal is to understand how the past has influenced the present and how the present can be used to shape our future understanding of our traumatic nexus where race, trauma, violence, and white supremacy intersect.

It is in this spirit of solidarity, of a shared commitment to racial healing, understanding and justice that we invite educators across the spectrum (K-12^th grade teachers, college professors, and independent researchers) to join us in our exploration of the ways in which we teach, catalogue, remember, and research African American history.

Organized around three main areas: Historical Trauma: Past Pains, Future Promise, contributors are welcome to take either a broad approach or a narrow one. Some potential ideas of exploration include:

1. Historians who want to explore the residual impacts of slavery, potentially addressing how multigenerational oppression of African Americans influenced institutional racism and outlining the possibilities and challenges for fostering civic social justice knowledge, engagement, and action.
2. Political Scientists can contextualize the historical challenges and transcendence of trauma facing African Americans by exploring structural inequality within the law-making policy driven apparatus and examining how is it rooted in historical trauma.
3. Psychiatrists can broaden the general understanding of the insidious effects of the heritage of slavery on the life of African Americans within contemporary America from the vantage point of psychic stresses engendered by discrimination.
4. Critical pedagogical educators can invoke the use of culturally responsive intervention approaches and historical pedagogical methodologies as educational vehicles for social justice and provide avenues for how teachers can integrate social justice tenets as facilitators of change.

The deadline for a snapshot synopsis (between 250-300 words) is by NOVEMBER 15, 2021, to Karsonya Wise Whitehead, kewhitehead@loyola.edu. Please include BHB Submission: Your Last Name in the subject line.

The entire manuscript will be due by JANUARY 15, 2022, with a publication date of Spring 2022. A complete package consists of an article, no more than 7 typed, double-spaced pages, including endnotes. The article should be accompanied with a lesson plan and /or educational pullout/ supplement to enhance the ability of teachers, community organizers, or activists to apply the core ideas of the article in practice. The Chicago Manual of Style MUST be used for citations. Author Guidelines: https://asalh.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BHB_AuthorGuidelines-FINAL-8.12.20.pdf

The editors are very interested in contributors who find ways to work collaboratively using a transdisciplinary approach (which means, finding ways to both connect disciplines and transcend them).

About the BHB

The Black History Bulletin (BHB) is one of the oldest journals of Black History https://asalh.org/document/the-black-history-bulletin/. The BHB is dedicated to enhancing teaching and learning in the areas of history.  Its aim is to publish, generate, and disseminate peer-­‐reviewed information about African Americans in U.S. history, the African Diaspora generally, and the peoples of Africa. Its purpose is to inform the knowledge base for the professional praxis of educators and scholars through articles that are grounded in theory yet supported by practice.

[1] Joy A. DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing, (Joy DeGruy Publicans, 2017).