RUBEN NAVARRETTE JR.: I’m ready for affirmative action in college admissions to end

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, discussing the indictment of Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling government documents, recently insisted that the only informed opinions were those of former Justice Department lawyers with security clearances who have handled classified material.

Now that the Supreme Court is primed to strike down colleges’ and universities’ practice of taking race into account in admissions, I’m following Hewitt’s lead.

There can’t be two sets of rules, one for white males and another for the rest of us. Latinos and African Americans will always be at a disadvantage, and white males will get a head start.

The most informed opinions on affirmative action don’t come from people with a grievance or an ax to grind. You want to hear from what some people call “affirmative action babies.” These are the Black and brown folks who attended predominantly white colleges or universities. Those in the first wave who entered college in the 1960s or ’70s no doubt benefited from affirmative action. But, by the ’80s and ’90s, these communities were producing enough high-achieving students who got in on their merits that schools didn’t have to lower standards to achieve diversity. Even so, these people had their qualifications challenged. I’ve heard dozens of stories.

These people are the real experts on affirmative action. They’ve seen it up close. They know what it is and what it isn’t. They’ve experienced racism, as well as the prejudice baked into a policy that was supposed to remedy the vestiges of racism.

And if there are victims in all this, they know exactly who is and isn’t being victimized.

I consider myself a member of this club, though I’m convinced that I did not benefit from affirmative action. As a Mexican American with two Harvard degrees, I wrote the book on the experience of being non-white at a mostly white university — literally.

The memoir I wrote about my college years begins in my senior year of high school. That’s when white classmates with grades and SAT scores that weren’t as good as mine informed me that if I hadn’t been Mexican, I wouldn’t have been accepted to Harvard and other elite universities. Never mind that I was carrying five Advanced Placement classes, was doing five hours of homework every night and would eventually graduate with a 4.0 GPA (96 A’s and 22 A-pluses) on my high school transcript. All my friends saw was the color of my skin.

The experience inspired me to write my senior term paper on preferential treatment in college admissions, making this topic the one that I’ve studied, and written about, longer than any other.

Now that the Supreme Court — in a pair of cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina — is primed to ban colleges and universities from taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions, I’m sure of three things:

■ Created by a 1961 executive order from President John F. Kennedy, affirmative action gave opportunities to earlier generations of Latinos and African Americans who had suffered discrimination. It allowed people such as my father — who spent 37 years scratching out a career in law enforcement — to break into professions that were determined to keep them out. My kids, who were raised in the suburbs by parents with master’s degrees, should not be saddled with it.

■ Claims that affirmative action is really “reverse discrimination” will always get eye rolls from Latinos and African Americans who live in the real world — and can count. In the Harvard case, plaintiffs essentially argued that the school keeps out Asian Americans. In the Class of 2027, Harvard accepted a record share of Asian American applicants: 29.9 percent. The undergraduate student body is more than 20 percent Asian and about 37 percent white. Is this the definition of discrimination?

■ I’m not worried about affirmative action ending. I’m now ambivalent about a program that doesn’t work as advertised. Colleges and universities skim the cream and admit high-achieving Latinos and African Americans who would probably be accepted anyway. Meanwhile, severe inequalities at the K-12 level are never remedied. I’m not going to beg conservatives to keep affirmative action any more than I would bend the knee and thank liberals for helping deliver it.

For Latinos and African Americans, the road to college has always been bumpy. We’ve had to work twice as hard to get half the credit. What would a world without affirmative action look like? Probably a lot like it does now.

Ruben Navarrette’s email address is crimscribe@icloud.com. His podcast, “Ruben in the Center,” is available through every podcast app.