Sob stories? Trauma dumps? Black kids worry about writing college essays after affirmative action ban

CHICAGO (AP) – When Hillary Amofa began writing her college essay, she told a story she thought admissions offices wanted to listen to. About being the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants and growing up in a small apartment in Chicago. About hardship and struggle.

Then she deleted every part.

“I would just feel like I’d let go of the trauma,” said the 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago. “And I just think it doesn’t really say anything about me as a person.”

When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in higher education, it left the college essay as one among the few places where race can play a task in college admissions decisions. For many students of color, more immediately relied on an already high-stakes writing task. Some say they felt pressured to capitalize on their difficulties by competing for a spot on campus.

Amofa was just beginning to think about her essay when the court issued its ruling, prompting a flood of questions for her. Could she still write about her race? Can she be punished for this? She desired to tell colleges about her heritage, but she didn’t want it to define her.

In English class, Amofa and her classmates read sample essays, all of which focused on some trauma or hardship. It impressed her that she had to put in writing down the toughest moments of her life to point out how far she had come. But she and a few of her classmates wondered whether their lives were difficult enough to draw the eye of admissions offices.

“A lot of students feel like they have to go through something so horrible to feel worthy of going to school, which is kind of sad,” said Amofa, the daughter of a hospital technician and an Uber driver.

This yr’s graduating class was the primary in a long time to attain college admissions without affirmative action. The Supreme Court has upheld this practice in decisions dating back to the Seventies, however the court’s conservative majority found it unconstitutional to assign extra weight to students due to their race.

Still, the choice left room for the indirect role of race: Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that universities can still consider how race has shaped an applicant’s life “so long as that discussion is specifically related to quality of character or exceptional ability.” “

“For example, the benefit to a student who has overcome racial discrimination must be tied to that student’s courage and determination,” he wrote.

Many colleges responded with recent essay prompts that asked about students’ backgrounds. Brown University asked applicants how “some aspect of your upbringing inspired or challenged you.” Rice University asked students how their perspectives were shaped by their “background, experiences, upbringing and/or racial identity.”

Wondering if schools are ‘expecting a sob story’

When Darrian Merritt began writing his essay, he knew the stakes were higher than ever with the court’s decision. His first impulse was to put in writing about the events that led him to live along with his grandmother as a baby.

They were painful memories, but he thought they might play well at schools like Yale, Stanford and Vanderbilt.

“I feel like the admissions committee might be expecting a sorry or tragic story,” said Merritt, a senior at Cleveland. “And if you don’t provide this, they may not feel like you’ve gone through enough to deserve a place at university. I struggled with this a lot.”

He wrote sketches specializing in his childhood, but they were never greater than a group of memories. Ultimately, he abandoned this concept and decided to put in writing an essay that may stand out for its positivity.

Merritt wrote about a summer camp where he began to feel more comfortable in his own skin. He described how one can accept your personality and resist your tendency to please others. The essay was humorous in nature – it focused on a water pistol fight during which he had victory in sight, but in a comedic twist, he slipped and fell. But the essay also reflects his feeling that he was not “black enough” and that he was ridiculed for listening to “white people’s music.”

“I thought, ‘OK, I’ll write it for myself and see how it goes,’” he said. “It just felt real and felt like an honest story.”

The essay describes a breakthrough when he learned to “take responsibility for myself and my future by sharing my true personality with the people I meet. … I realized that the first chapter of my story had just been written.”

The ruling prompts changes to essay topics

Like many students, Max Decker of Portland, Oregon, wrote a college essay on one topic, but modified direction after the Supreme Court’s June ruling.

Decker initially wrote about his love for video games. In a childhood of constant change and going through his parents’ divorce, the games he moved from place to put on his Nintendo DS were a source of comfort.

But the essay he submitted to schools focused on the community he found through Word is Bond, a leadership group for young black men in Portland.

As the one biracial Jewish kid with divorced parents in a predominantly white, Christian community, Decker wrote that he continually felt strange. While traveling from Word is Bond to the Capitol, he and similar-looking friends shook hands with lawmakers. The experience, he wrote, modified the best way he saw himself.

Featured Stories

“It is because I am different that I give something valuable to the world, not the other way around,” he wrote.

As a first-generation college student, Decker reflected on the subtle ways his peers looked as if it would know more about navigating the admissions process. They made sure to get into advanced classes early in highschool and knew how one can get great letters of suggestion.

If writing about race would give him a slight advantage and show admissions officers a fuller picture of his achievements, he desired to benefit from that small advantage.

Decker said his first memory of race was when he went to the barbershop in elementary school and the barber made rude comments about his curly hair. Until recently, the insecurity this moment caused caused him to maintain his hair short.

Decker said that through Word is Bond, he found space to explore his identity as a black man. It was one among the primary times he was surrounded by black peers and saw black role models. It filled him with a way of pride in his identity. No more noise.

Decker said the pressure to put in writing about race involved compromising with other necessary issues in his life. This included his passion for journalism, reminiscent of an article he wrote about efforts to revitalize a once-thriving black neighborhood in Portland. Finally, he punched in 100 characters about his journalism within the app’s activities section.

“My last essay was real for me. But the difference between that and my other essay was that it wasn’t a truth that I necessarily wanted to share,” said Decker, whose favorite college is Tulane in New Orleans due to the region’s diversity. “I felt like I had to limit the truth I shared with others to what I thought the world expected of me.”

Determining the influence of race

Before Imani Laird’s Supreme Court ruling, it seemed obvious that schools would consider the impact of race on her life. But now she felt she needed to spell it.

As she began her essay, she thought about how she had faced prejudice or felt missed as a black student in predominantly white spaces.

There was a yr in math class when the teacher called her by the name of one other black student. There were comments that it will be easier for her to get into college because she was black.

“It hasn’t been easier for me because of my race,” said Laird, a senior at Newton South High School in suburban Boston who has been accepted to Wellesley and Howard University and is waiting to listen to from several Ivy League colleges. “I had things I had to overcome.”

In her final essays, she wrote about her grandfather, who served within the military but was denied access to GI Bill advantages due to his race.

She described how discrimination fueled her ambition to excel and pursue a profession in public policy.

“That’s why I have never settled for mediocrity,” she wrote. “Regardless of the subject, my goal in class was not only to participate, but also to excel. Apart from academics, I wanted to stand out by remembering what sparked this motivation in the first place.”

Will schools lose racial diversity?

Amofa used to think that affirmative action was only used at schools like Harvard and Yale. After the court’s ruling, she was surprised to search out that race was taken into consideration even at a few of the public universities to which she applied.

Now, without affirmative action, she wondered whether majority-white schools would turn out to be even whiter.

She wondered about that when selecting between Indiana University and the University of Dayton, which have relatively few black students. When she was one among the few black students in her elementary school, she had help from family and friends from Ghana at church. In college, he worries about loneliness.

“That’s what I’m nervous about,” she said. “I go away and feel so isolated, even though I’m still around people.”

The first drafts of her essay focused on growing up in a low-income family, sharing a bedroom along with her brother and grandmother. But that did not tell colleges who he was now, she added.

Her latest essay describes how she has come to just accept her natural hair. She wrote that she went to a predominantly white school where classmates made jokes about her afro. When her grandmother sent her away with braids or pigtails, they made fun of them too.

Over time, she ignored their insults and located beauty within the styles worn by the ladies in her life. She currently runs a business that deals in braids and other hairstyles in her area.

“I stopped looking at myself through the prism of traditional European beauty standards and started looking at myself through a prism that I created myself,” Amofa wrote.

“Criticism won’t stop, but it loses its power when you know you have a crown on your head!”