00:00You know that affirmative action was for women because women weren't accepted and it was for
00:07Asian folks and folks of different, it wasn't just black people. Let's be really clear about that.
00:12We want to catch up after decades of people starting in a staggered way and not playing
00:18on a fair ground. You have to do this to allow diversity because it benefits everyone to have
00:23diverse communities and you're talking about college campuses. The Negro baby born in America
00:28today regardless of the section of the state in which he is born has about one half as much chance
00:35of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day. People of
00:42color
00:44because the discrimination was so extensive that we had to make colleges just for black people so
00:52we could go to college, you know, so that the schools that maybe other folks wanted to go to,
00:59you couldn't get into because of your college. In far too many ways, American Negroes have been
01:08another nation deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope.
01:20So a lot of people benefited from affirmative action, but the only people anyone ever talks about
01:26because it's easier to get pissed off about us getting something that people think we shouldn't
01:31be getting is to say, you know, well, black folks benefit, everybody benefit. We support affirmative action
01:39because the reality is that race still matters in our society. Racial segregation and racial inequality
01:46continue to shape educational opportunity in this country today. This is a very complicated mix for
01:52admissions officers who aren't just looking at race at all. That would be unconstitutional. They are
01:58looking at a number of different factors about what brings a student into diversity. I think that we
02:03should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown
02:10themselves to have what it takes to succeed. So I don't think those concepts are mutually exclusive.
02:16I think what we can say is that in our society, race and class still intersect.
