I landed my first job in the newspaper business during the deep recession of the early 1990s.
The Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader had a hiring freeze. But I'd been a cracker-jack summer intern and the paper had never — never — had an African American on its editorial board. The paper's parent company waived the freeze and helped pay my salary as part of a program aimed at increasing minority presence in newsrooms.
More than 20 years later, a writing and editing career that has spanned five cities and been recognized with more than a dozen national awards culminated in last Monday's announcement that I had won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Opportunity, based at least in part on race, opened the door to that career.
That is what affirmative action means.
■ PDF: Supreme Court issues opinion on affirmative action
■ Related: Mitch Albom: Denied Michigan hopeful learns tough lesson
I wasn't surprised Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Michigan's constitutional ban on affirmative action; in fact, I predicted as much in a column last fall. I spent four years covering the justices in Washington (I was the first African American assigned to do that, in 2003), and I have seen their tolerance for, and protection of, race-based preferences waning with each passing term. The challenge to the Michigan ban was far-flung and constitutionally flimsy, at least based on the court's recent rulings.
But there's also no question that Michigan's ban on race-conscious policies at public institutions is awful policy, shutting doors that were beginning to open for people like me, in a country whose history is defined by efforts to keep blacks out — of colleges, of jobs, of neighborhoods and of restaurants.
There's a compelling desire in our culture to pretend that history doesn't matter anymore, to say opportunity is now equal in America.
But how absurd is that? Look at the profound gaps in building-block indicators such as school funding, health stats like infant mortality and child nutrition, or even the rate at which minority kids are lead-poisoned, and tell me that black people are born with the same chance at success as everyone else.
They aren't.
■ Related: AG BIll Schuette: Supreme Court 'made the right call' on affirmative action
Things are better, unquestionably. But opportunity still flows naturally to those with means and access to power, a group that in this nation remains overwhelmingly white. And without some mechanism to divert that flow — not only to blacks, but to others who have been historically locked out — the promise of equal opportunity becomes a near-criminal sham.
Affirmative action's critics are quick with stories about "unqualified" minorities getting chances they hadn't earned.
But my life stands as a testament to the way race-conscious policies can be a hand up that pays dividends all around.
I think I can say I made good on the opportunity I was given in Lexington in the early 1990s.
When I applied to the University of Michigan in the late 1980s, my grades and scores were well within the range of acceptance but hardly at the top. (Though I did graduate in the top third of my class from hyper-competitive University of Detroit Jesuit High School.)
I'll never know how strongly race weighed in my favor; I attended a summer session for minority students (in which I took first-year math and English classes) before my freshman year.
But is that more important than the work I did at the Michigan Daily, where my work inspired my peers to elect me editorial page editor? Or in the Michigan Marching Band, where I was headed for a role as rank leader before leaving to edit the newspaper?
In each organization, I was one of just a few black students involved; even back then, the university's efforts to diversify brought precious few black faces to campus.
But the university was able to identify kids with promise and potential and give them a chance. That's all affirmative action, in its cleanest iterations, was ever supposed to be about.
Yes, there have been cases of excess — quotas that dilute the value of individual qualifications. But there are also excessive criticisms — bogus claims that race-conscious policies are as invidious as the discrimination they seek to redress. Come on, 400 years of institutionalized repression, imbued into the legal character of the nation, is the same as a program that tries to move a few minority kids ahead? Talk about lost perspective.
The saddest thing is that the argument about race-conscious policies has eclipsed one of the central tenets of the whole idea: that affirmative action was a temporary fix, intended to create opportunity in the breach between the achievement of legal equality and de facto equality.
Over-reliance on affirmative action has distracted us from more aggressive work on root causes — better inner-city public schools, for instance — while the drive to wipe it out has stamped out the meager progress that has been made. At the University of Michigan right now? Less than 5% of the student population is black; at its peak, the proportion was nearly double that size.
I was part of that bigger group. So were many other high-achieving beneficiaries of affirmative action.
You can choose to say that I and other minority students didn't deserve those opportunities.
But you can't say I failed to make good, or that thousands of other minority students do the same.
Stephen Henderson is editorial page editor for the Free Press and the host of "American Black Journal," which airs at 12:30 p.m. Sundays on Detroit Public Television. Follow Henderson on Twitter @ShendersonFreep, or contact him at 313-222-6659 or shenderson600@freepress.com.
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