Why hasn't there been more accomplished to improve retention rates for African-Americans or increase enrollment to more than just a miniscule 9 percent of undergraduates. On one hand, Chancellor John Wiley has been very supportive of the efforts of students of color to improve the campus climate. Without providing the money to back up its claims, the UW System is breaking its promises of support to students of color. Although it may seem antithetical to everything that conservatives call equality, affirmative action is necessary because a social group in America suffered more than 200 years of oppression. No other ethnic group in American history has been so consistently and institutionally shut out of positions of power and wealth.
Education is the gateway to such power and wealth.
Thus, the most effective way to correct the horrible injustice of the past is to provide a key to that gateway. Affirmative action is that key for thousands of African-Americans every year and to take that key away before any real change occurs would reiterate just how little diversity means to America. Slavery and oppression occurred in the United States up until the 1960s in an institutional form, the least the white majority in this county could do is provide additional opportunities for African-Americans who want to rise out of poverty. Diversity will no longer be an issue when no one can point to people living in poverty and despair and say that it is a result of racism. That day lies far into the future.