We are not inherently experts
It is a faulty assumption to believe someone is an expert on a topic merely because they belong to the relevant group.
I wasn’t planning to write a second piece about the recent SCOTUS decision on affirmative action. The last two weeks have featured an abundance of significant and strange American legal decisions, several of which I hope to break down and analyze, not to mention a number of other topics that continually get pushed further and further down the line. But there is a part of Justice Roberts’ opinion ruling that the affirmative action policies of Harvard and UNC are unconstitutional that I keep going back to in my mind and that I feel raise a relevant point of discussion.
Justice Roberts wrote, on page 39, with regards to the consideration of race in university admissions: “nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.” The Chief Justice was making clear that while using the fact of race as a check-box was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, it does not mean that where an applicant’s life experiences, activities, and other qualifications are impacted by their experiences as a member of a particular racial or ethnic group that is something that can’t be considered.
Just belonging to a minority group doesn’t have the same impact on everyone. There are individuals for whom their minority status has played a significant role in their life experiences, opportunities, interests, and activities. There will similarly be others for whom it is merely another fact of life.
While Jewish students were never covered by affirmative action policies - in fact the initial demographic quotas at Harvard were introduced in order to prevent there from being too many Jewish students - because it is the minority group I belong to, it is the one I am the most comfortable drawing on as an example. When things came to a head with Antisemitism on campus during my time as a Jewish student leader, one of the things we had to navigate internally in deciding how to handle things was that just because we were all Jewish students by no means suggested that we were similarly versed in the literature on combatting Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism or that we had even all encountered it before. For some of us, what was happening was simply another manifestation of things we had experienced and thought about for years, and for others it was an entirely new experience that they had previously only witnessed from the sidelines.
There seems to have been a shift in recent years to assuming that because an individual is a member of a certain group, they must be able to speak knowledgeably for, and about, that group and its experiences, both present and historical. It’s a strange form of stereotyping where an assumed set of life experiences and perspectives are imputed onto an individual because of one immutable characteristic about them, be it their race, sexual orientation, or creed.
I get asked regularly to share my thoughts as a “Jewish person” on Israel. While I have devoted time to learning the history of Israel and trying to keep up with the issues that arise there, and I can speak confidently on a range of issues, I would never pretend to be a true expert on Israeli politics, particularly compared to friends who are. Yet, because I belong to the Jewish community, there is an incorrect assumption that I will be able to speak to what is happening in Israel and that my perspective will be in some way reflective of “how Jews feel.”
When I write and speak about Antisemitism in the Diaspora, my confidence in the authority of what I am saying is not just because I am Jewish. It is because in addition to my lived experiences, I have made a conscious effort to stay up to date on the reports, studies, and other literature that have been published. Furthermore, I look to those more knowledgeable than myself and who have been in engaged in discussing these issues for longer, such as Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks z”l, Dr. Rachel Fish, Alyza Lewin, Bari Weiss, Noa Tishby and Hen Mazzig, for guidance and confirmation that I am speaking accurately. I don’t say this to boast about myself, but to demonstrate how being Jewish has significantly impacted my life as a source of both discrimination and inspiration. This can be contrasted with how being female, another minority group I am part of, has not had the same impact. If I was going to write an essay on how parts of my identity how shaped who I am today, I would write about being Jewish and not about being a woman, because I am far more versed and impacted regularly by one area than the other.
The checkbox approach that Justice Roberts is saying it is time to move away from is almost a form of tokenism: we are looking around the room and saying not only that [insert minority individual] is missing, but also that anyone who is a member of that group will do, because the simple fact of being born into a particular minority equates to expertise on that group’s experiences. This approach places every minority applicant or candidate in the position of bearing the responsibility for representing the needs, wants, and perspectives of a group that they may or may not be comfortable, confident, or interested in doing. There are times when I am ready and willing to be the voice in the room representing the Jewish perspective, and there are also times when I don’t want what I am saying to be viewed through a lens that places the burden of speaking for my community on my shoulders.
Allowing students to decide how and if they would like to represent their experiences as a member of a minority to universities gives them the opportunity to decide whether it is something they would like the school to consider or be aware of. It further provides applicants with a chance to demonstrate the ways that these experiences may truly have shaped their unique personality and perspectives. It also gives applicants a chance to decide that the membership in a minority group is not something that they would like to have taken into consideration because there are other aspects of who they are they they feel are of more significance to shaping what they bring to the table.