The End of the 00s: Personal Statements, by Luke Mazur

by The End of the 00s

I have anxiety about not living in a place with food trucks. Their eclectic menus and their varied proprietors, for me, represent a sophisticated and cultured world. A diverse one. Buffalo, of course, has a few hot dog carts stationed downtown and a few more Mister Softee trucks circling neighborhoods during the summer months. When I see how people line up at taco trucks in Los Angeles or pickle carts in New York, I become envious. Back in the 1990s, Hannibal Lecter explained that we covet what we see every day. And in this decade, it seems that every day I read a story about food trucks. So I covet them.

In college we had food trucks. We had so many that my friend Zeb was able to cancel his meal plan halfway through Freshman year and take almost all of his meals from those dingy mobile kitchens. There was Hemo who made chicken sandwiches with special sauce, and replied in Pashto when he overheard Zeb’s dad yelling at Zeb’s brother Amir in the same language. Hemo had t-shirts too, with his name emblazoned on the front in Microsoft Word block lettering. Some of us bought one (or two) because credit was still cheap, and still our parents’.

There was the Greek Lady, who served just about anything, and who had a spinoff truck, and after that a spinoff storefront that taught us about market saturation in spite of good branding. Her meatball hoagies with store bought everything reminded us of our working mothers or our suburban high school cafeterias. And, of course, there was the Mexi-Cali dude, who prepared these awesome plantain burritos, but who was also such a dick and who we would’ve called a taco Nazi had we not be so affected by our Representations of the Holocaust in Literature and Film class.

But we loved Bui the most. His food truck was roomy enough to fit a few people-typically his daughter and his wife. And we loved them too. Often we joked that his daughter was his wife, and his wife was, I guess, not really his wife. Or maybe not his wife anymore. I don’t remember. Either way, it was dumb, and we were most likely hung-over: even though Bui and his girls served mostly Chinese food, everyone I knew went for the delicious egg sandwiches. The fried eggs were served on a hoagie roll, and priced such that most days we could pay for one with the quarters we stole from our roommate’s laundry change cup.

My roommate Aalok ordered just egg and cheese, because he is vegetarian and Jain. Zeb ordered steak, egg and cheese-which was really just a cheese steak with fried egg on top of it-because, as a Muslim, he doesn’t eat pork. The Tri-Delts ordered egg white sandwiches and my friend Jamie ordered hers with Sriracha, because she is from California and so has better taste than the rest of us. Bui let everyone do his or her thing-a thing that was informed by culture or religion or ethnicity or geography, and a thing that because we were college students, we shared with and explained to others.

At about the same time that we were ordering breakfast sandwiches that were actually windows into our pasts as prologues, Sandra Day O’Connor handed down Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court decision that saved affirmative action. The question presented to the Court was whether the University of Michigan Law School’s could factor an applicant’s race into its admissions decisions. O’Connor’s short answer was that yes, the school could continue with its affirmative action policy. Her long answer explained why doing so furthers both Michigan’s and the country’s “compelling interest” of diversity in higher education.

Politically speaking, at least on the Supreme Court, SDO often took the middle ground among the nine. Her vote was usually the fifth vote for whichever side she liked more. This meant that a fussy woman in her seventies would write the most controversial, decisive decisions the Court would hand down this decade, and the one that preceded it. A decision about something complicated and messy, like affirmative action, would become a decision about something agreeable and American like why we order the breakfast sandwiches we do. Instead of settling scores about past discrimination, O’Connor paid lip service to diversity.

In her concurrence, Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a more explicitly racial story: one that begins with slavery, and continues through Brown v. Board of Education, and then ends who knows when. She explained that at present, “many minority students encounter markedly inadequate and unequal educational opportunities,” and implied that affirmative action programs exist in part to correct for racial discrimination. Her opinion is short, but she tipped her hand, I think, at how she would write the majority decision if the task were hers. She’d directly address the societal inequality that affirmative action, however imperfectly, seeks to redress.

Like many Supreme Court justices, SDO is a good lawyer; she didn’t just pull “diversity” out of her penumbra. She used precedent to explain herself-a tactic in which lawyers and judges retweet the law established by an older decision in order to substantiate what they’re arguing. In the Michigan Law affirmative action case, O’Connor retweeted part of a 1970s affirmation action case called Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.

We know now that retweets, with their 140 character limit, necessarily leave out information. And so too with sneaky lawyers employing precedent. Justice Powell, who O’Connor retweeted, decided that affirmative action was kosher so long as it helped foster diversity. But Bakke was a fractured opinion, and he was writing only for himself. The other eight Justices had different ideas and didn’t sign onto his conclusion. Four would’ve held that affirmative action helped correct past discrimination; the other four that it violated the Constitution because the policy wasn’t colorblind enough.

But twenty-five years later, O’Connor seized Powell’s diversity argument and dodged the discrimination and the colorblind stuff. She explained that our future depends on leaders “trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this nation of many peoples.” Michigan’s admissions policy, among other things, enabled students “to better understand persons of different races.” And diverse student bodies meant “livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting” classroom discussion. Word.

By telling us how to get to Sesame Street, she also reframed the conversation. She transformed affirmative action, a policy pretty obviously about groups, into something that implicated all of us as individuals. Which is to say, personal statements are the new quotas, and confession is the new racial discrimination. Every facet of us is a lesson, a teachable moment. Even what you ordered on your breakfast sandwich.

In dissent, Justice Scalia wondered aloud (and annoyingly) that if a law school could use affirmative action to admit a group of students who would “convey generic lessons in socialization and good citizenship,” how was it not OK for civil service system of the State of Michigan to do the same? I mean, touche.

But maybe this is the underrated genius of Grutter. Maybe the civil service exam of Michigan should include a personal statement. This decade, like the ones before it, we continued to make “we” about “me.” And Sandra Day O’Connor finally let us off the hook for it. Figuring out what to do about inequality? That’s hard. What I ordered at Bui’s? So easy.

Bacon, egg and cheese. Salt, pepper and ketchup. Every time.

Luke Mazur is an energy-efficient bulb in the City of Light.