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Affirmative Action   --- The American Way

By Ed Basquil

          Affirmative action is the American way. I saw it happen the way it was supposed to happen, and it was a beautiful thing.

          I graduated Central High School in Philadelphia in 1983.  Central was a magnet school, and the most racially integrated school one could find anywhere, on a completely voluntary basis. We were just about half black and half non-black---white and a large percentage of Asian, I don’t know the exact percentage. Even thought Central was a public school, you had to pass a rigorous test to get in----we bragged on being the second best public high school in the country on most surveys, behind the New York School of Arts and Sciences. I know how vacuous the school rankings are in the present, with Newsweek, the leading ranker of schools, creating marketing categories and weighting for school lunch participation and other nonsense in order to make it “fair” or sell more magazines by mentioning more schools as number one at something. How you see it depends upon your aptitude for business.  Central High has dropped to 300, but it is difficult to tell if its fall from grace is due to a decline in academic standards or because it doesn’t have enough kids on free lunch. 300 is quite a fall; it is safe to say there has been some significant decline since my glory days. Even so, I saw affirmative action at its absolute best in my time at Central.

          I was on the swimming team at Central. My freshman year, I barely made the team. My brother was a senior, and the captain of the team. We had 20 or so guys on the team: 18 white guys, and two black guys. One of the black guys was a good friend by the name of Scott Mann. Scott was special. He had this sense of humor and this manner that brought people together, a kind of charisma that some are born with.  People would give him flack for being black and he would give it right back to them, only he was funny; he would make everyone laugh without giving an inch or starting a fight. He would tell us “white” jokes------somehow, even though we had our black jokes, we had no idea that they made fun of us too, the myopic nature of the human experience that is so often terminal. Scott and I were going to train together in the off season. He died in a tragic accident that year, passing out while swimming laps while working as a life guard in a local pool. It was shocking, inexplicable. 

          I didn’t know that I would get to share a small part of his minority racial experience, only with less people skills. By my senior year I was the only white guy on the team. The team barely practiced, yet we won the public league. We had the high school coach’s permission to practice instead with our other team, the Philadelphia Department of Recreation, PDR. I was the only white guy on the PDR team as well.  Everyone was nice to me, nicer than my white friends were to Scott. This was a joy, because I was not witty like him.  I was a little uncomfortable when we had an away swim meet with Howard University; I was the only light skinned guy anywhere nearby.  I can see in hindsight that the coach arranged the meet with Howard not to embarrass the poor college by beating them: we were an AAU team made up of high school kids that were beating up small colleges. It was about networking, getting the kids up there and showcasing them for scholarships.

          The best affirmative action program I ever saw turned Central High’s swimming team black in four years. There was a myth in the Italian neighborhood where I grew up that black people couldn’t swim. Boy, were they wrong. This affirmative action program wasn’t mandated by the government, it was mandated by a man, Jim Ellis.  Coach Ellis affirmed his kids, and lifted them higher. They not only swam well, but passed the test to get into my selective high school. This is real affirmative action, a man affirming a bunch of kids, not a government program.  I didn’t know how the whole thing started at PDR; I was too awkward and too busy trying to fit in myself. I didn’t know until I saw the movie PRIDE with Bernie Mac. It was an emotional experience for me watching the movie, as my wife rented it on a whim because we loved the Bernie Mac Show. As the story slowly unfolded, I realized I had a small personal connection with the story, that I knew this guy.

          Ironically, Central was also a great example of affirmative action gone awry. My graduating class was the last all male class. Despite “Girl’s High” walking distance away with many of the same teachers, the ACLU and some golden spooned liberals encouraged a law suit ending the all male policy at Central. The Newsweek results now have Central nowhere near second in the country, but in the 300’s.  Women are just as smart as men, if not smarter. The problem was that a quota of women had to be admitted to meet a court ruling, and disrupted a fragile cultural system that had been doing well without overactive legal intervention for a long time. Central was the second high school established in the United States.

          Affirmative action is the American Way, but it is bigger than government; it is about leaders affirming others.  Everyone should agree that one Coach Ellis caring about a bunch of kids, dragging them off the street, and lifting them up----that beats ten sterile government programs, no matter how you feel about politics. If affirmative action is to be done by force, it should be the force of love, the charisma of a man--- not the force of a gun, and the hammer of the government program.  We should affirm others -----the government is a weak sister that seeps in like mud when “good” blessed and able people do nothing: social security is something that takes care of old people whose children won’t take them in, and welfare is for people whose families are too hard hearted to help them.   Perhaps one day instead of arguing about what government can do, which isn’t much, we can go out and do a couple of things ourselves.

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