America Is Headed in the Wrong Direction | Opinion

This year, America's July 4th Independence Day comes on the heels of a Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action. The decision, like America itself, has left me sad, but also grateful.

What is there to be grateful for? As a Black immigrant to the United States whose ancestors endured the cruel hand of slavery in Jamaica, I am a beneficiary of the legendary civil rights battles fought by African Americans past and present.

I am here in the U.S., a professor of History at one of the flagship universities of the state of New York and a writer of three books with another on the way because of what others achieved.

To be sure, I owe much to my family and their focus on education, and to the caring teachers who aided me on my journey. But those of us whose families were not here during the 1950s and 60s struggles for civil rights are standing on the shoulders of African Americans like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ambassador Andrew Young, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Professor Mary Frances Berry, who is still fighting for our civil rights.

The debt that is due is not only to the most prominent participants in the movement, but to African Americans as a whole, since it was their forefathers who endured and fought against the institution of slavery. That resilient spirt is alive and well today.

So I am grateful. I have spent most of my life paying back that debt. In every job and at opportunity I have, I am committed to dropping down a ladder for others. Have I done this perfectly? No. Nor have I done it only for people of color. But for every young person that has come into my orbit, I like many others who have benefitted from this legacy of civil rights have tried to make sure that they leave with a leg up, not down.

That is what affirmative action means to me—to take affirmative action to ensure that qualified, talented applicants have a seat at the table and that no racial or economic barrier will deny them that.

Anyone committed to that goal will have been dismayed by the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action. But for me, it was also personal. I attended Harvard University—one of the defendants in the affirmative action case before the Supreme Court. My class at Harvard, the Class of 1986, was at the time the most diverse class in Harvard's history. In spite of the landmark ruling of Brown vs. Board of Ed., many of the schools we came from were de facto segregated. But Harvard was not, and we took special pride in that. You never knew who you were going to meet: the kid from Montana who was brilliant at carpentry but had also read every Shakespearean play; the engineer in the making who was already inventing things; the organic farmer who was committed to sustainable farming long before it was fashionable; the virtuoso violinist from inner-city Chicago; the Christian missionary who had lived and worked in China; the lawyer in the making who was already arguing cases in the cafeteria.

It was such a beautiful mix, and all the more so because Harvard Admissions had defied the typical expectations and not just chosen those with the highest scores and GPAs. Instead, from their perspective, they had found a treasure trove of original folk uniquely qualified to make contributions to the world and to each other.

Part of what made my class and the classes that followed special was that they represented a beautiful mix: We were all from different spaces and perspectives and incredibly curious about each other.

I could say then as I do now that I learned as much from my peers as I did from my professors.

It's this that makes me sad: Unless Harvard can pull off an unbelievable hat trick, this incredible experience, which many more kids deserve, will not be the same.

Worse still, America will not be the same. America still has a long way to go to live up to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, but with the gains of the Civil Rights movement, it was on its way. Now it seems like we are in retreat from these foundational promises.

Is this really the direction we want to take as a country?

That is what I will be thinking about on this July 4th, even as I remain grateful for what I received. I am deeply concerned about our future.

Anne C. Bailey is the Director of the Harriet Tubman Center for Freedom and Equity at Binghamton University.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.