Taking One’s Place: Affirmative Action and the Legacy of Academia’s Black Expats
Frontis.: portrait of Phyllis Wheatley, and title p. of Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects..., London. , 1773. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004682060/.
Opponents of ‘Affirmative Action’ frame the policy as something that is given, defining it as an unfair advantage extended to the undeserving. For example, Roger Clegg, former president and general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity that appeared before the US Supreme Court this June in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U. S. (2023), exemplifies this misperception, oversimplifying the matter in his 2007 statement to The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission:
The point of my testimony today is that, too often, the corporate celebration of diversity becomes the opposite of true equal employment opportunity--that it is, instead, a form of affirmative action that is really, to use Nathan Glazer’s phrase, nothing more than affirmative discrimination…
The question is whether the person hired or promoted is the best qualified; no one would allow a company to defend a pro-white or a pro-male preference by saying that it was afforded only to qualified white men. Nor does it matter that race, ethnicity, or sex is just one factor (would it be all right if being a white man was just one factor that weighed in an applicant’s favor?...Would a goal to hire only white men be acceptable?
Clegg’s statement draws a parallel between Affirmative Action in the United States and discrimination that the history of the country itself disproves. Marginalized individuals have always had to take affirmative actions for themselves. They were never ‘given’ their places of prominence or possibility; particularly when the ‘factor’ in question was something as historically significant as race.
To be told there is no more place for “race-conscious” admissions at the collegiate level in the United States is to deny that racism and systemic racial discrimination created and continues to create barriers. Affirmative Action policy was enacted to smooth the path over those barriers for the most vulnerable. To pretend that these systemic failures have been resolved, or never existed in the first place, is to pretend the question is a simple of one ‘college admissions’ rather than acknowledge the deep—and deeply complex—history of first marginalizing minority achievement and then defining that marginalization as a lack of minority merit. The ability of particular individuals to succeed within intellectual institutions created by and for a white, educated elite only casts into greater relief the need to continue to contend with systemic inequity. The legacies of the inaugural US poet Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84), the first Black graduate of the University of Cambridge Alexander Crummell (1819–98), and the first Black recipient of a medical degree from the University of Glasgow, James McCune Smith (c.1813-1870) are therefore especially powerful and pertinent to this present moment. They illustrate the literal lengths to which individuals have gone to assert their merit in the face of marginalization.
Phillis Wheatley became the first published African-American poet when her 1773 journey to England introduced her to powerful English aristocrats willing to champion her poetry. Their recognition of her writing as publishable codified her as an author. However, her work did not end with her publications. It began, in fact, with the literary arts she employed in civic engagement with none other than George Washington. Wheatley wrote to the then-General Washington in 1775. Calling the nascent colonies “The land of freedom's heaven-defended race!” in the poem she addressed to Washington, Wheatley importantly inaugurated the concept of ‘the American.’ In this framing, to be a member of the fledgling nation seeking independence was to be part of one shared identity, one ‘heaven-defended race’ that marked no difference in ethnicity, education, or status.
“I thank you most sincerely for your polite notice of me in the elegant Lines you enclosed,” Washington wrote back, acknowledging how “the style and manner” of Wheatley’s words “exhibit[ed] a striking proof of [her] great poetical Talents.” Wheatley’s poetry was political, her ‘talents’ similarly so: and yet, as per the research of Sondra O’Neale, Wheatley died free but impoverished, “reduced to a condition too loathsome to describe.” Wheatley stands stands as a political and philosophical thinker, a poet whose merits were recognized around the world, prized and a writer praised by none other than the first U.S. President – and yet U.S. publishers refused to print even a second volume of her poetry, despite the successful international debut of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Wheatley’s first words to Washington were a testament to not only her literary talents, but to her investment in the future of the same United States whose persistence in undercutting Black intelligence would send Alexander Crummell and James McCune to the United Kingdom less than a century later.
Alexander Crummell graduated from the Oneida Institute of Science and Industry in Whitesboro, New York before continuing on to Queens College, Cambridge, where he joined the transatlantic abolitionist movement. This action would cement him in an international network that allowed him to spend the rest of his life advocating for education as a civil liberty both in the United States and in the fledgling nation of Liberia. Impressive, though complex, Crummell has been critiqued for the ways he “urged his fellow Black Americans to assimilate…agree[ing] with those racist Americans who classed Africans as fundamentally imitative.” Placing debates about his specific intellectual trajectory aside, Crumell nonetheless joins Wheatley in demonstrating that some Black Americans found academic recognition only once they left US soil.
Compounding Wheatley’s and Crummel's shared legacy is the story of James McCune Smith, who also left the US for the UK to pursue his intellectual career. Smith earned his Bachelors (1835), his Masters (1836), and his medical doctorate (1837) all from the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He garnered the credentials abroad that would allow him to return to the United States to serve his New York City community both as the medical director of the Colored Orphan Asylum and as a public intellectual admired by Frederick Douglass. Smith’s early research, which resisted what would become the pseudoscience of eugenics, reveals how his personal academic success benefitted his community. And, as was so often the case, Black intellectual achievements aided U.S. society writ large - white as well as Black.
Smith’s medical talents made him a highly sought-after doctor amongst patients of all races, while Crummell’s place as an ordained minister and prolific author revolutionized the already-diverse Episcapalian Church. Wheatley’s work defined the concept of ‘American’ well before “the melting pot” (initially coined by playwright Israel Zangwill) became a favored phrase. Their personal success was public good to all, and yet these figures could only assert their merit by asserting distance from the United States. Their lives illustrate the difference between a state-mandated Affirmative Action policy which can be rescinded at (ill)will, and the taking of affirmative actions by determined individuals and the communities willing to support them.
Wheatley, Crummell, and Smith all represent one version of what taking action – making a trip, seeking recognition, fostering networks, engaging one’s intellectual pursuits as a political endeavor – has historically looked like for marginalized peoples from the United States. Far from being given, they show that affirmative action is a thing to be taken – a journey we in the academy must recommit to taking, every day, with every student: not just during the admissions process but throughout their scholastic career.
From Wheatley, Crummell, and Smith, I’ve learned that ‘place’ is one of the most important pieces of this transtemporal debate about the barriers to minority success. That is because it is in ‘placing’ the marginalized scholar that history reveals the difference between the policy of Affirmative Action and those affirmative actions necessarily taken by marginalized individuals and communities to support themselves. Wheatley, Crummell, and Smith represent just three instances of marginalized figures seeking out new space in which to take their place as scholars, creators, and thought leaders. They represent a history to which it seems we must return.
When I can recall the personal instances of discriminatory treatment that led me on my own journey towards finding a new place in which to claim space as a young scholar, I have to ask if post-June 23, 2023 Affirmative Action should be defined as demanding that academia now concentrate on not “bestowing” Affirmative Action, but taking affirmative actions?
When we admit students only to leave them without mentors, resources, or advocates poised to help these students resist odds so systemic they are as invisible and yet as powerful as gravity, then did we ever really implement Affirmative Action?
And if not, then does this moment represent an opportunity to resist the Supreme Court’s decision by resolving to affirm students of color, to confirm that these students deserve –not just admission– but recognition and respect, support and supervision?
It is undeniable that dismantling Affirmative Action is an attack on academia. It curtails the academy’s ability to reframe the spaces from which today’s students create tomorrow’s future world by demanding that these spaces reflect the world into which these students will emerge. It is a loss that we should mourn but, more importantly, resist: galvanizing history to reexamine the examples of those from the past who outmaneuvered the systems designed to minimize them.
Thai-Catherine is a 2023 Insurrect! fellow.
Recommended Reading:
Primary Sources:
Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004).
Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U. S. ___ (2023)
Secondary Sources:
Books
Articles
Misc.