The Supreme Court and Affirmative Action: America's “Deservedness” Myth

When the Supreme Court struck down decades of precedent and ruled against affirmative action in university and college admissions, I had a lot of thoughts. Perhaps surprisingly, one of the first was about the economy — or specifically the American story of it, widely accepted as truth.

Why think about an economic narrative when the decision was about post-secondary admissions? Because even though education opportunity and attainment remain the most sure-fire way to secure economic success, American society regularly doubles down on the message (read: indoctrination) that wealth is earned by those who ‘‘deserve” it.

The SCOTUS ruling both reflects and reinforces the idea that certain people “deserve” both “their spot” at elite institutions and therefore also their future wealth and perceived worth. It's a pervasive narrative and a fundamental element of how we arrive at the stories we tell ourselves about financial success.

There's a lot of talk about how narratives act as a sort of puppeteer within our society, but the constant use and misuse of the term could easily make it seem like a “narrative” is not particularly influential. After all, everything from NBA winning streaks to designer handbags are tagged with a “narrative” — that’s right, a Gucci bag claims to come with an “ever-contemporary narrative!” True narratives are deeper than this. Yet it’s still no wonder that many are unaware of their significant sway over broader public will and social consciousness on a given issue.

And so it is that our current economic narrative is ubiquitous yet hidden — iron-clad and still a farce. It tells us that individuals are consistently rewarded for hard work. Neoliberalism, the prevailing ideology of the political economy, which sprung up after WWII as part of the backlash against socialism, asserts that only free markets can allocate resources fairly. At its crux, the idea is that this structure rewards individuals based on “what they deserve” — their contribution to the economy. It was in the 1980s that this fundamental way of viewing the gears of the economy became deeply rooted in our consciousness, thanks to shows like Dynasty and Dallas, and movies like Wall Street and Cocktail.

This story of “deservedness” helps to frame the gains of the rich as wealth earned only through merit, ignoring advantages like inheritance (of social capital and actual capital), privilege, favorable tax codes, and class. Internalization of this prevailing story is at the root of a belief across the country and its many divides: that no matter who you are or where you’re from, if you’re willing to work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to get ahead. And this could cause many living in poverty to blame themselves for their “failures.”

During a conversation with Ishita Srivastava, Chief of Narrative & Culture Change with Caring Across Generations, she shared an important observation from her conversations with caregivers:

“In all the focus grouping and audience research we’ve done, there’s one thing that makes me tear up every time I think about it. We were talking to caregiving families about solutions to their care needs and what it would look like if the situation were different. And so many people either couldn't imagine what it would look like to have support for care and/or felt like they didn't deserve any better. They felt like it was their job, their responsibility to be able to care for their family; to have earned enough, to have done better. The answer to the question of how things might look if they were different was always about what they could have done that they did not do. It was not about the system.”

The concept that the opportunity gap has been closed and that now every good thing is just out there for the taking is a misconception unwittingly perpetuated by some of my favorite feel-good movies from the 1990s onward, where a stellar teacher, principal, or coach helps Black or brown kids living in poverty beat the odds (think: Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Coach Carter). But in reality, these occurrences are few and far between. Just as wealth often begets wealth for descendants, so too does poverty often yield future generations living in poverty.

Changing a narrative isn’t simple. It takes something to shake up our status quo, like a global pandemic, when the financially stable were also standing in lines to buy toilet paper. And the story pivoted to one of mutual support and community aid. But even then, that mirage of a leveled playing field, of neighbors helping neighbors, didn’t last. The economic narrative is so deeply entrenched that it requires an unraveling of generations of stories. As Ishita highlighted, “A lot of this is about storytelling, but we realized that this is not just about individual stories. It's about addressing and shifting meta narratives that have been reinforced by thousands and thousands of stories, told across multiple mediums and generations.”

Telling a new economic story starts with recognizing the problems with the existing one. George Goehl, Founder of People’s Action, explained it this way to his 11-year-old daughter:

“This is not just an accident [how the hierarchy is set up]. This is a set of decisions.” When they go back to southern Indiana, where he grew up, his daughter notices the difference. The very rural area once had definite industry with jobs, family farms, and hardware stores in small towns. “When she sees it now,” Goehl continues, “she thinks it’s really sad. And I explain that a small set of people came to an agreement about a way to operate that would benefit them and their friends and people like them. Those people were from both political parties and they hollowed out this place and lots like it across the country. She can kind of wrap her head around true villains in this story.”

And those stories carry tremendous weight. Individualism, merit, and scaling new heights with the use of trusty boot straps are more entrenched ideas than one might think. As a society, we broadly accept that financial success is won by merit, while those who fail to reach financial stability, let alone wealth — usually those experiencing poverty — are lumped into a category as having all made bad choices and lacking diligence. Thus, many assume the consideration of race in admissions decisions is unfair instead of seeing it as a move toward equity by colleges and universities, the vast majority of which long restricted admission to just white students, as an attempt to disrupt systemic racism and repair one of many historical injustices on behalf of qualified candidates from under-represented racial and ethnic groups.

Intergenerational poverty, which is the driving force behind much of the poverty we see across America, reflects a systemic failure. Or rather, it’s a system working as intended, pinning fault, in a broad paint stroke, to individuals and disguising the whole process as neutral and organic. The onus on the individual — to either succeed or fail solely by their own doing — is a deception with far-reaching uptake. It is a narrative turned into its own common sense, an accepted logic.

So how do you rewire that individualistic, market-will-take-care-of-it, everybody-gets- their-just-rewards mindset? It’s tremendously difficult.

These narratives that link financial stability and success to individual output are so embedded in our consciousness that sometimes those not succeeding believe that it is their own individual failing, not a systemic one, that is the cause. We all have stories of success and failure, from the earliest of ages. But we have an obligation, at no matter what age, to examine the stories we are told and the measures of collective success that we accept.

I believe we can rewrite the stories we tell ourselves and each other about why the economy works for some people and not for others. And I also believe in the possibility that exists when we question the systems we participate in and why. Because it is never too late to call in new narrators to write and tell a different story.

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