Lucky.

Affirmative action.

At the beginning of my final year of high school, my friend of ten years came to sit with me in the senior lounge. On either side of the large window overlooking the school entrance were taped two bubble-lettered signs:

“Acceptions.” 

“Rejections.” 

It was the wall where people were encouraged to post anything they received back from colleges no matter the outcome. 

“You’re so lucky,” she said to me followed by, “I feel so bad for people like Nick.” 

Nick. The Italian-Korean literal model in our brother class. 

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he wants to go to Harvard so badly but the odds of him getting in are slim because he’s Asian. And me? I’m not going to get in anywhere because I’m white.”

“What?” I asked, completely baffled as to where any of this could be coming from. 

“You must know that there are all sorts of programs and quotas for black students. Once you check that box, they’re like ten times more inclined to let you in.”

When we were much younger, Katie had been Rapunzel for Halloween multiple times because that’s what she looked like. Long blonde hair, blue-green eyes, and the only people in the school whiter than her were the gingers. By our school’s standards, she didn’t live in a mansion. But to the standards of a decent portion of the United States, she did. 

It’s not something I ever really actively thought about. Race. I typically only thought of skin color if we were going to the beach together or were about to bake under the sun during a long day of tennis practice because I knew the odds of her getting sunburned were pretty high. Or that time I went with her as a guest to the country club she’s a member of and random old ladies in the dining area would hand me their dirty dishes in passing. Or if a white person showed up at my otherwise black church, an occurrence I could count on one hand. 

“You have straight A’s. You play sports and instruments. You volunteer. You have your entire life mapped out including your wedding and your funeral.”

“It won’t matter,” she said with a sigh. 

“And a school isn’t going to let me in just because I’m black.”

“Yes, they will. I’m telling you, they have a quota.”

Nick went to Harvard. Katie went to Yale. I got into my first choice school early decision. 3% of the undergraduate student population was black. I graduated early with honors and got my original dream job that very same day which only meant I needed to be dreaming bigger. But even once I got to college, once I got the internships, once I got anything I was supposed to be going after - someone would open their mouths about “the quota.” Like I had some magic cheat code for life that would make it so the assumption was that I was inherently less qualified to be anywhere than anyone else.

“I’d like to take this time to spotlight one of our seasonal employees,” the man on the Zoom call said in early 2021 nearly a year after race became the headline topic every single day on every single news station. It was my first all-hands meeting for a summer festival I’d been hired to do as an intern of all things because the plague had killed my entire industry and this was the only major show happening in the whole city that season. “Her name is Anna and she is the result of a magnificent launch for our diversity initiatives. She is a black graduate intern born and raised here in the city.” The man brings up the next slide of his presentation. A graph. Numbers. Projections for the future. 

It was the quota. And that year, the organization had brazenly met its quota of one. 

“I’m a bit split on it. Mostly relieved,” my mother said the day the Supreme Court ended affirmative action two years later. We sat together in the kitchen watching a row of people upset about it on MSNBC. She went to Princeton. She began her own firm. Her mother didn’t go to college and cleaned houses for a living. 

“It might be the right decision,” I said. “But the people who have long since made up their minds about what ‘qualified’ looks like won’t change. And if they don’t have this excuse, surely there will conveniently be another one soon enough.”