SCOTUS delivers ‘a rude awakening’ to Blacks and Latinos with big-time college dreams | Opinion

In our privileged multi-ethnic cocoon of Miami — where the Cuban minority created wealth and amassed political power, quickly becoming the ruling majority — many of us grew up with blinders to prejudice and discrimination.

We bought into the narrative that we were special, a collective rags-to-riches story, modern-day Horacio Algiers all. No one gave us anything, we told ourselves. It wasn’t exactly true. President Lyndon B. Johnson gave us the most precious tool of all: protective legal immigration status with a path to citizenship.

And President John F. Kennedy, using for the first time in a 1961 executive order the term “affirmative action,” also opened doors for us, not only for African Americans in this country. Hispanics, too, benefited from the prohibition of employment discrimination because of “race, creed, color or national origin.”

The protection from discrimination, coupled with “a level playing field” for minorities, expanded in the 1970s to the admission practices of colleges and universities. Lots of us accepted into a competitive university benefited in some way from affirmative-action programs.

Now, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling issued Thursday, enabled by the election of the worst president in American history and his three conservative appointments to the high court, may end the education dreams of scores of Blacks, Latinos and other minorities.

Perhaps even of mainstream white women, who initially most benefited from the wider aperture.

Given the gravity of the decision, why is South Florida’s reaction to erasing affirmative action programs that opened college and university doors to so many of us only alarming leaders of the Black community?

READ MORE: ‘Unconscionable.’ Miami reaction to Supreme Court striking down race in college admissions

‘A rude awakening’

Where is the collective consternation over the loss of policies instituted to increase the number of underrepresented Black, Hispanic and other minority students on campus?

This will affect countless South Florida students who want to attend competitive prestigious schools.

“A lot of ‘pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps’ Latinos are in for a very rude awakening,” tweeted John Gutierrez, the Newark-born-and-raised Cuban-American director of the Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies at The CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

His tweet resonated with me.

When my admission letter to the University of Florida arrived in the late 1970s, I didn’t know a thing about affirmative-action programs. If I ever heard the words uttered, I certainly didn’t understand them.

But I felt lucky that some invisible force had been on my side, evaluating my application and giving this Cuban refugee, only eight years after arriving in Miami, knowing little, if any English, a chance to become what she wanted to be: a journalist.

There was added value to my admission.

It had proven wrong the Hialeah High School counselor who refused to help me apply, telling me that I wasn’t “college material.” All I could aspire to be, she said ending our brief meeting, was “a bilingual secretary in downtown Miami.”

She just doesn’t know me, I thought. Disappointed, but not broken, I applied anyway. Naivete has often served me well: Ignore the offense, stay focused on the goal, proceed to thrive.

Very boot-strap of me, but the law was on my side.

No doubt I was intelligent, worked hard in school, participated in extracurricular activities and landed the No. 14 spot in a graduating class of 840 students. I had held a job since the age of 15 and had saved more than $3,000 for college. But, given the gaps of being from another culture, I wasn’t the kind of student who tested well.

My SAT scores were decent, but not high. No doubt that affirmative action paved the way in the door.

Closing doors

I was too young then to know what I do now.

Because we never had to live with the fear of deportation, it was easy to accept that there was only one valid feeling to express: gratitude for this great nation.

This positivity opened doors to the so-called American Dream — and still does.

But token acceptance of a few isn’t inclusion, nor equality.

Whether or not we want to acknowledge it, political action nudged universities to consider race as a positive factor — not “the” factor, but as an experience and point-of-life reference that bestowed on minority students who had none, some leverage.

After all, we were competing with vastly all-white and often legacy students, whose parents had attended these institutions and, therefore, were shoo-ins for admission. And we were competing with athletes, who might not be as academically strong as us, but had extraordinary physical abilities and were admitted to benefit money-generating sports programs.

My admission was miraculous.

But we, the pioneers, brought diversity and became contributors to college culture. And when we graduated and returned home, our communities also benefited from our hard-earned, made-possible education.

But now, high school students in the United States like I once was — female, Hispanic, immigrant, not “seen” by people like my counselor — will find it more difficult to successfully compete to attend the colleges and universities of their choice.

Voting 6-3 in the University of North Carolina case and 6-2 in the Harvard case due to Justice Ketanji Brown’s recusal because of her ties to the university, the justices decided that these institutions’ race-conscious admissions programs were unlawful.

And so, now all must stop considering race when evaluating admissions.

“Without these admissions programs, what you are going to have are fewer and fewer Blacks and Latinos entering these institutions,” Gutierrez told me. “And it’s going to be bad for the country.”

Data backs his assertion.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Berkeley experienced almost a 50% decline in the enrollment of Black and Latino students after the state banned affirmative action in 1996 under Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.

The erasure of diversity is a dream come true for the country’s white supremacists, who are busy in red states like Florida dismantling African-American and Latino Studies programs, white-washing American history and banning books about minority experiences from schools.

The inclusiveness that opened doors for millions of students like me is no longer in fashion.

And much of South Florida doesn’t seem to care.