Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?
June 24, 2004
The New York Times
By SARA RIMER and KAREN W. ARENSON
At the most recent reunion of Harvard University’s black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard.
But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were.
While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard’s undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard’s African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them – perhaps as many as two-thirds – were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial
couples.
Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. bear some responsibility for the situation they decry. Have they not promoted the racist and ridiculous myth that anyone with “black blood” is black (with the exception of Latinos and Arabs, allies they dare not offend)? Witness Gates’ “racial kidnapping” and “ethnic rape” of the late mixed white Creole (NOT “black”) Anatole Broyard. Guinier is the biracial daughter of a white Jewish woman, yet she presents herself to the public as a pure “black.”