For many ambitious high school seniors, the standard end-of-summer blues arrive with an additional layer of intensity, as they reluctantly contemplate how to navigate the daunting application process for admission to elite universities. Harvard College permitted students to begin applying on Aug. 1, and the Common App released its essay prompts way back in February. That means 12th graders who have their aims set high now confront a looming question: What should I write about in my personal statement?
Those brief but pivotal essays often make all the difference between acceptance and rejection. While hopeful students compete to gain entry to America’s most elite campuses, we should all closely scrutinize this process. After all, who gets in plays a major, even inordinate, role in determining who will ultimately be permitted to walk the nation’s corridors of power.
For striving Black high school seniors, the generalized essay anxiety arrives in a particular, acute form: Should my personal statement address race? The Supreme Court decision two years ago eliminating affirmative action in college admissions fomented considerable uncertainty about the transformed admissions landscape, and the second Trump administration’s recent assaults on higher education have only exacerbated the confusion.
President Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Education Secretary Linda McMahon have repeatedly brandished the court’s decision, seeking to prohibit universities from considering race in any way whatsoever, even though the opinion plainly requires no such thing. In early August, the Trump administration controversially demanded that all American colleges and universities relinquish data about admitted and rejected applications broken down along racial lines, evidently preparing to decrease further the already-depressed Black enrollment numbers at many of the nation’s pre-eminent educational institutions.
Far from putting the issue of race and higher education to bed, the Supreme Court’s decision set the stage for the latest battles engulfing the campus courtyard. Indeed, the future of college admissions and the nation’s perennial race question have never been more hotly contested. But the perils of one ascendant approach — call it the racial trauma narrative — have also never been clearer.
Since the 1970s, conservatives have routinely aimed to eliminate affirmative action in college admissions. In June 2023, the Supreme Court delivered that long-sought triumph, when Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion killing affirmative action in a case called Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.
“Many universities have for too long … concluded, wrongly, that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built or lessons learned but the color of their skin,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. Conservatives overwhelmingly rejoiced, as a Wall Street Journal editorial titled “A Landmark for Racial Equality” called the opinion one of the court’s “finest hours.” And Edward Blum, who founded Students for Fair Admissions, celebrated the decision for auguring “the restoration of the colorblind legal covenant that binds together our multiracial, multiethnic nation.”
The first-year classes that entered many of the nation’s most prominent colleges in the fall of 2024 contained far fewer Black students than prior cohorts. At M.I.T., for example, Black enrollment plunged to 5 percent from 15 percent of the first-year class. At Amherst, Black enrollment fell to just 3 percent from 11 percent. Graduate schools also suffered massive declines. At Harvard Law School, for example, the number of incoming Black students dropped by more than half, making it the smallest class of Black Harvard 1Ls since 1965, and accounting for only 3 percent of the overall class. Such staggering declines left many liberal critics of the court’s decision (including myself) deeply alarmed.
But even as assessed by conservatives’ own professed commitments, the court’s affirmative action decision ushered in an admissions model that is markedly worse than the one it replaced. The opinion allowed that colleges may award an applicant an admissions boost if a personal essay discusses “how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” This allowance, combined with the prevention of colleges from reviewing racial boxes on applications, seems almost perfectly designed to produce a state of affairs that conservatives will detest even more than the system that it upended.
Only six weeks after the court issued its decision, an article in The Times surveyed the altered college application landscape and found that many highly selective colleges were “probing aspects of a student’s upbringing and background that have, in the words of a Harvard prompt, ‘shaped who you are.’” Some prompts after the ruling overtly instructed applicants to write about race if they so wished. But even prompts that took a subtler approach — inquiring about applicants’ “identity” and “background” — nevertheless reinforced the paramount importance of race; they just did so in a roundabout fashion.
This new state of college applications strongly resembles the mind-set from which Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion recoiled, including when he noted with evident disdain that a lawyer defending affirmative action policies contended that race “‘says [something] about who you are.’” Universities now instruct students that race says not only something about who they are, but something major, and they prompt students to write lengthy testimonials exploring the centrality of race to their identity formation.
Before 2023, Black college applicants could (if they so desired) check the relevant racial box and then write personal statements exploring their passion to study Proust, Plato, string theory, “The Odyssey” or anything else under the university’s vast sun. But since the ruling, Black applicants are strongly incentivized to produce narratives of racial woe that not only embrace the victimhood mind-set that conservatives loathe, but also complicate the idea of America’s racial progress that conservatives prize.
College application essay writing is a far more deliberate, constitutive act than simply checking a racial box, which happens without much thought in many quotidian settings — including the D.M.V. or the doctor’s office. But exemplary college application essays require careful planning, sustained reflection and numerous rounds of revisions.
Sophisticated applicants hoping to attend one of the nation’s foremost colleges will jump through almost any hoop to help them stand out among the crushing pile of applications, if they believe that doing so will even infinitesimally increase their chances of securing a coveted spot. And with good reason, as several eminent colleges admit only about 5 percent of applicants. The Supreme Court has now expressly instructed that highlighting experiences with racial discrimination is one constitutionally sanctioned method that can furnish students with that elusive edge.
Conservatives have often excoriated affirmative action because, they argue, it makes racial minorities see themselves as victims. Shelby Steele’s 1990 book “The Content of Our Character,” published 12 years after the Supreme Court first legitimated affirmative action policies, is the undisputed ur-text that pursued this critique. Mr. Steele argued that a core “liability of affirmative action comes from the fact that it indirectly encourages Blacks to exploit their own past victimization as a source of power and privilege.” In a particularly evocative turn of phrase, Mr. Steele asserted, “The power to be found in victimization, like any power, is intoxicating and can lend itself to the creation of a new class of super-victims who can feel the pea of victimization under 20 mattresses.”
The essay-based approach to racial diversity, however, seems unwittingly calculated to increase the disempowering sense of victimhood that conservatives have long lamented. That is because the new system invites applicants to fixate on their encounters with racism far more than the box-checking method that was jettisoned.
The decision permits applicants to write essays exploring how race shaped their lives “through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” But it hardly seems extravagant to maintain that applicants are feasting on “discrimination” and abstaining from “inspiration” and “otherwise.”
The reason is simple: an excellent personal statement, like many pieces of good writing, requires at least some friction and tension, including obstacles overcome, or, as the decision itself put it, “challenges bested.” Essays singing only in the key of racial inspiration, though, are the personal statement equivalent of exploring one’s love for rainbows, ice cream sundaes or long walks on the beach. Those essays are simply not going to get the job done in today’s ultracompetitive world of college admissions.
Even some Black and brown applicants who would prefer to avoid focusing on their racial pain now feel compelled to do so. One Afro-Latina high school senior told The New York Times that she “didn’t want to write her essay about race,” but “now that the race box is gone, she feels she should at least mention it.” In 2024, a Cornell undergraduate of color expressly told the university newspaper that had she applied before the end of affirmative action, she would not have focused her essay on racial identity. “I would have talked more about my achievements and things I’m interested in,” she said, “rather than just about how my parents came” to America.
Predictably, some Black college students have expressed delight that they applied under the old system. On the heels of the court’s decision, a Black undergraduate at Duke University voiced relief that she felt free to write her essays about any subject she wished. “But if I were applying now, I think I would … opt for writing about things that I don’t really like thinking about, like my experiences with racism or my racial trauma,” she stated.
It is hardly accidental that the student invoked the word “trauma” in discussing the sort of material that she felt admissions offices would expect. Roberts’s opinion promises to intensify what one high school senior labeled the “fad of trauma dumping” in college applications. Teen Vogue has observed that there is “an even harsher burden on applicants’ essays,” and that students now “are practicing ranking themselves against their peers in a form of trauma Olympics.”
This new, higher premium placed on racially traumatic experiences produces numerous undesirable consequences. Most prominently, many college applicants will be filled with racial resentment that they feel required to — in the parlance — “perform their trauma” for admissions officers. When Black applicants feel pressured to comb through their prior brushes with racial discrimination, no matter how incidental, for the sake of improving their chances at the Ivy League and its ilk, that process sows the seeds of resentment.
Applicants who have experienced genuinely traumatic events, moreover, seem likely to find reliving those events ad nauseam, well, traumatizing. As a Harvard Crimson editorial noted in 2022: “This pressure to package adversity into a palatable narrative can be toxic.” The editorial added: “It can make applicants, accepted or not, feel like their admissions outcomes are tied to their most vulnerable experiences. The worst thing that ever happened to you was simply not enough, or alternatively, it was more than enough, and now you get to struggle with traumatized-imposter syndrome.”
More insidiously, the trauma premium in college application essays encourages Black and brown students who have, mercifully, led lives relatively devoid of such painful experiences both to feel that they have been robbed of the authentic racial experience and to grope for that elusive “pea of victimization” buried beneath dozens of well-insulated mattresses. On this account, applicants who have ample reason to hum a few bars of the song “Happy” will instead feel obligated to write essays intoning “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Teen Vogue’s Trauma Olympics thus may, for at least some applicants, be superseded by the Microaggression Olympics.
Now, as the Trump administration aims to seize universities’ racial demographics, how does the essay-driven dynamic created by the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision further erode longstanding conservative principles?
Spurring applicants to write elaborate, individualized narratives of racial aggrievement to win admission to elite universities clashes with a foundational conservative commitment holding that America has witnessed tremendous progress in realizing the goal of racial equality. That narrative is highly controversial, of course, but conservatives endorse it as an article of faith.
The conservative emphasis on American racial progress animated Chief Justice Roberts’s opinion in Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which effectively eliminated one of the Voting Rights Act’s central provisions. That provision may have once been necessary to combat segregationists, but “history did not end in 1965,” the chief justice wrote. Yes, there was horrific anti-Black violence in Selma, Ala., and Philadelphia, Miss., in the 1960s. But “today both of those towns are governed by African American mayors,” Chief Justice Roberts noted, a racial transformation that must be acknowledged, as “there is no denying that … our nation has made great strides.”
His affirmative action decision, however, inadvertently encourages racial minorities to minimize or even outright deny the nation’s racial progress that he extolled in the Shelby County opinion. Although conservatives have often objected that affirmative action typically assists wealthy racial minorities, it seems quite probable that the essay-driven diversity approach will redound to the benefit of privileged Black applicants.
Here, too, the decision perversely threatens to intensify the very problem that it attempted to remedy. Conservatives vociferously maligned the box-checking approach to college admissions because the attendant boost benefited the Black scion of a wealthy industrialist as well as the Black son of a struggling sanitation worker. But the box-checking regime also virtually assured that all Black applicants — even the poorest ones — would receive the boost. All they needed to do was simply check the box.
This novel approach means that the racial boost will be reserved for those who obtain the required knowledge to finesse the discrimination essay effectively, and poorer applicants seem less likely to acquire that knowledge. The concern that the Students for Fair Admissions ruling’s essay-based approach to diversity will inflict outsized harms on underprivileged Black students is, alas, hardly hypothetical.
Following the court’s decision, The Washington Post covered Demar Goodman’s evolving college application strategy. Mr. Goodman, according to The Post, had previously planned his personal statement to be “about growing up Black in a poor part of Atlanta. About attending an underserved high school with a reputation for drug use. About making do with subpar materials, out-of-date technology, and people’s prejudices.” His intended statement, in other words, seemed to be exactly the sort of essay that could materially improve his chances in the college admissions sweepstakes.
But Mr. Goodman decided to alter his plans after the court’s decision. Not only did he think that it was no longer worth even applying to Harvard, his dream college, but he also decided against addressing race in his personal statement. Mr. Goodman believed, incorrectly, that the court’s opinion meant that merely mentioning race had somehow become verboten.
Instead of chronicling his resilience in the face of racialized adversity, Mr. Goodman’s personal statement focused on his extensive “collection of flag lapel pins.” Mr. Goodman, one of the very sorts of students the court’s majority portrayed itself as helping, ended up being harmed by the decision. The decision intimidated him into omitting his experiences with not only racial adversity, but adversity of any kind. And early returns suggest that Mr. Goodman is far from alone.
Another unintended outcome of the essay-based approach to racial diversity is that it heightens race’s salience on college campuses — exactly the opposite effect that conservatives hoped they would achieve. That end also rests in profound, inexorable tension with the Trump administration’s efforts to use the court’s decision to regulate the entirety of American higher education and render all considerations of race impermissible.
During oral argument, a lawyer opposing affirmative action stated flatly that “racial preferences on college campuses in our belief … have increased racial consciousness.” Chief Justice Roberts also floated the idea at oral argument that affirmative action policies should be blamed for establishing the wrong racial climate: “I’m talking about student groups taking [their] cue from the university and saying we ought to take race into account [with] whatever we’re doing.”
Yet the court’s opinion seems assured to yield even greater racial salience on university campuses than did racial box checking. Indeed, the essay prompts many universities have since devised inculcate the very lesson that many conservatives wish would dissipate: the notion that racial differences define us. As Black college applicants polish their statements of individualized brushes with racism in response to the affirmative action ruling, it is hard to imagine that they will simply abandon those sentiments when they arrive at college. Rather, the essays that weave tales of racial woe invite students to lug their senses of racial aggrievement to campus right along with their dorm refrigerators. Today, with their long-sought victory firmly in hand, conservatives will soon be forced to recognize that the opinion is actually a glorious defeat.
One need not be conservative to harbor reservations regarding the way current law encourages Black applicants to conceive of race as the singular, dominant aspect of their identities. In his 1994 memoir, Henry Louis Gates Jr., a liberal, distinguished scholar of African American literature and history at Harvard, balked at the notion that Black people must subscribe to the totalizing, all-consuming vision of race that the court’s decision unintentionally promoted. “I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups, that I can’t construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me,” Mr. Gates wrote. “Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?”
His question is a haunting one. But the Students for Fair Admissions opinion guarantees that many bright Black college applicants are about to start chafing as they find themselves being eased into the racial straitjacket.
Justin Driver is a professor at Yale Law School.
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