Long before the recent U.S. Supreme Court Decision, the Journal
of Educational Controversy published an important article on affirmative
action, entitled, “Anti-Affirmative Action and Historical Whitewashing: ToNever Apologize While Committing New Racial Sins,” by author Hoang Vu Tran shortly
after his death. Hoang V. Tran was a
young assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University. He died from drowning
in a lake while trying to save his friends from a strong current. He left a three-year-old daughter and another
child who was not yet born. This article
was probably the last manuscript he published, and we would like to highlight it
for our readers in light of yesterday's Supreme Court decision.
The article appeared in our 2020 issue of the journal on the
theme, "The Ethics of Memory: What Does It Mean to Apologize for
Historical Wrongs."
Professor Hoang Tran’s
Abstract of his article, “Anti-Affirmative Action and Historical Whitewashing:To Never Apologize While Committing New Racial Sins.”
Abstract
Apologies, official or otherwise, for historical wrongs are
important steps in the road towards reconciliation. More difficult are
historical wrongs that have yet to be fully acknowledged. The reemergence of
affirmative action in the public consciousness via the Supreme Court represents
a striking example of the ways in which our collective consciousness has yet to
fully account for our past educational sins: segregation and income inequality.
This essay explores the multiple consequences to our historical memory when the
anti-affirmative action narrative continues to dominate the public discourse on
racism in education. I offer a renewed focus on ‘fenced out’ as the
deterministic consideration of racism in education. In doing so, our historical
memory and contemporary consciousness regains the potential to differentiate
between admissions grievances, and ongoing racists practices such as de facto
segregation and income inequality in education.
