That’s part of why I was conservative about affirmative action even while I was a Democrat, and I thought that it should be based on social class rather than race. I’ve always been in situations in college where I sometimes felt that there were poor whites that I thought needed affirmative action or needed more help, and minorities that were very privileged were being promoted based on their pedigree. I felt that all of the information at some point was not fitting the narrative of people that wanted racial preferences, so that information is just not part of the dialogue when you talk about race-based affirmative action.Īnd so those are just some of things that caused me to question affirmative action. There have always been blacks that have been able to meet the standards, but that was not generally known. When it came to college applications, the blacks wanted to see photographs taken off the applications. in the 1950s, when blacks started the civil rights movement, which was not about racial preferences, but instead about ending discrimination, blacks were strongly in favor of civil service tests because they understood how it worked: the person who had the highest score got the government job.

A number of schools, if you look at their alumni, were admitting blacks and blacks were meeting their standards. And one thing I know from looking at historical data is that schools in the Northeast and New England that didn’t discriminate against blacks have had black alumni since the 1800s.

I also encountered students who felt that because we were black, we couldn’t make it without affirmative action. I encountered along the way many African-Americans who came from affluent families, and their attitude was totally different from mine because their attitude was that “they owe this to me, and they owe this to us.” I heard students who had GPAs that were much lower than mine, and these were people that were almost on academic probation, say “ going to law school or medical school, so they have to let us in.” I don’t believe that any of those people got into schools, and they believed that they didn’t have to be as good, and so that troubled me. I worked really hard to be an honors student because I wanted to demonstrate that I could meet the same standards. For me as a female, as well as being black, I always wanted to demonstrate that I could meet the same standards as everyone else even though I started from a much lower place and was in college with people that had gone to the best schools.

The first thing that I noticed was that because you were black you would have all these advantages. This was in the 1980s, and I was older than the other students in college by a few years. TDR: Are you working on any academic research projects right now?ĬS: I am, but I want to tell you a little bit more about my position on affirmative action and some of the things that I saw.

And that always set me apart even during the early years of my life even before I became a Republican. I’ve always believed that if you were going to have assistance for people that it needed to be means-tested. At that time, I raised questions about it because I felt like it was set up in a way that actually worked to the disadvantage of the people that it purported to help. In fact, my first undergraduate paper in college was about affirmative action. I’ve just been questioning things for more of my life, but the turn to conservatism started after I had a Christian conversion experience in the late 1990s.īefore that, I had already started to question race-based affirmative action.

I’ve always seen the world differently from the people around me-I was born differently. Could you tell us a bit about how you became not only an accomplished academic but also a conservative activist?Ĭarol Swain (CS): Well, it was a gradual process. The Dartmouth Review (TDR): You a have a very unique life story. Swain about her life as an academic and conservative political activist. Recently, The Dartmouth Review had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Her views on race and the Black Lives Matter Movement and Islam have attracted national attention in the media. Her academic interests include immigration reform, religious liberty, campaigns and elections, and racial politics. She is the author and editor of several award-winning books, and her scholarly work has been cited by two Supreme Court Justices. Before joining the Vanderbilt faculty in 1999, she was an associate professor of politics and public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Carol Swain, a voice shouting in the wilderness.Įditor’s Note: Carol Swain is a nationally renowned conservative political scientist, former television host, and professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University.

Carol swain