Every year, millions of high school students across the country dream of attending America’s most selective colleges. In California, that goal may be harder to reach as pro-affirmative action lawmakers push for new ways to give certain groups a leg up in admissions.
As a high school junior in San Jose, I will be applying to college next year. Students like me are taking AP classes, building their profiles, and doing everything we’ve been told to help us get into the schools of our choice.
The system is far from perfect but the basic premise is that colleges will then, in good faith, try to weigh each applicant based on merit and context. No group receives an unearned advantage at the expense of others.
California Assembly Bill 7 (AB7) blows a hole in that idea.
The bill, which recently passed in the Assembly by a 54–17 vote, would allow California public universities to consider whether an applicant is “a descendant of a chattel enslaved person of American chattel slavery.” It’s part of a broader reparations push and now headed to the state Senate.
The bill’s author, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, says it’s not about race but historic harm. “For decades, universities gave preferential admission treatment to donors, and their family members, while others tied to legacies of harm were ignored and at times outright excluded,” Bryan told the Associated Press.
He’s right about history. The legacy of slavery has shaped socioeconomic outcomes for Black Americans. But that doesn’t mean all descendants of slavery are disadvantaged — or that ancestry should now serve as some kind of admissions shortcut.
That distinction seems to be missing from the conversation. What we’re left with is a bill that awards preference based on ancestry.
This bill proposes an eligibility line drawn by lineage. To be clear, the text does not use the words “Black” or “African American” but rather delineates a specific historical category, “descendants of U.S. chattel slavery,” without using racial language. It’s designed to sidestep Proposition 209, which banned racial preferences in 1996, and the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions that struck down affirmative action nationwide.
Legal scholars describe such policies as “race proxies”: mechanisms that dodge explicit racial language but preserve race as the decisive factor in practice. Courts have repeatedly scrutinized such end-runs: in Parents Involved v. Seattle, the Supreme Court warned against policies that look constructive but act as racial stand-ins.
The legal system has long treated ancestral classifications with the same suspicion as racial ones. In Hirabayashi v. United States, the 1943 case on Japanese-American internment, the Court held that “distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Moreover, the express text of Proposition 209 includes “ethnicity” in its enumeration of protected categories as well as race.
The bill defines a “descendant of slavery” as someone whose ancestors were enslaved specifically in the United States, meaning it would exclude many Black students whose families came from Africa or the Caribbean after abolition. Meanwhile, someone who identifies as white but has traced a distant enslaved ancestry through DNA testing could, in theory, qualify. And we know these terms circle a ridiculously arbitrary line. African American activist Angela Davis went on PBS’s ancestry show Finding Your Roots only to find out she’s a descendent from Mayflower colonists. She was mortified.
But even if Bryan turns out to be right on the legal question, does the technical distinction between race and ancestry suddenly make it fair to those it excludes?
No. Ancestry-based preferences would still have effectively all the same downsides as other affirmative action policies: lack of individual assessment, blunt group categorization, and fairness concerns for everyone else. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the SFFA majority opinion: “College admissions are zero-sum. A benefit provided to some applicants but not to others necessarily advantages the former group at the expense of the latter.”
Even if preference is framed as reparative, someone else is paying the price.
There are better options to help marginalized students. California lawmakers could index Cal Grants to local cost of living. They could strengthen the UC/CSU admission guarantees for top students at public high schools. They could improve outreach around community college transfer guarantees or pass bills like the BASIC Act, which would give colleges resources to help students cover food, housing, and health care.
This bill, by contrast, like other affirmative action-adjacent legislation before it, assumes inherited identity stands in for “lived struggle.” It doesn’t.
We don’t need another lecture on systemic inequality. We see the results of it in classmates of all backgrounds who stop aiming high because they don’t think college is for them, or can’t imagine paying for it.
The California Senate should reject this bill and pursue fairer solutions, rather than advancing a measure the Supreme Court is likely to strike down.
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William Liang is a student journalist living in San Jose, California.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
