I knew I was smart growing up, but I didn’t know until my freshman year of high school that it was socially expected for me to go to college. Both my parents are working-class immigrants from Latin America who never attended college (or high school, in my mother’s case), and they were mostly grateful that I was even given the opportunity to study and go to school, period. So when I heard talk about colleges during my freshman year, I knew I had to work hard to get there. And work hard I did. I graduated from an under-resourced public high school near the top of my class, with mostly A’s in all the tough courses, and many honors and leadership positions. I had my eyes set on Brown University, the Ivy League university famous for its open curriculum.

Except, in order to get into a college like Brown University, I was at a disadvantage. I did poorly on my SAT, bad enough that my score didn’t even touch the bottom rung of the average. Numerous studies have revealed that the SAT tells us more about a student’s racial and class background than about their likelihood of success in higher education. Nevertheless, to my delight, I received an early admission letter in December 2003.

Was I an “affirmative action” applicant? Maybe. In any case, if I was, I am damn proud of it. Despite what the SAT predicted about my likelihood of success in college, I graduated with honors in Philosophy and History, Magna Cum Laude from Brown University, and now I’m nearly finished with my Ph.D. in History at Columbia University.

In a country ruled and founded upon white supremacy, affirmative action is one of the few existent policies in this country that explicitly recognizes the historic oppressions faced by people of color and marginalized groups in the United States. Affirmative action has radically transformed the physical faces of universities across the country, and it’s probably the reason why someone like me—a working-class Latina—was able to attend and thrive at a place like Brown University. Yet, as the black and student of color protests that have swept the nation the past few months reveal, there is still so much more work to be done in order to make college campuses truly reflect the diverse makeup of our country. And that is why the anti-affirmative action case initiated by a young, white woman named Abigail Fisher that is being heard by the Supreme Court a second time is so important.

Abigail’s story begins in 2008, her senior year of high school when she was anxiously awaiting a letter granting her admission to her dream school, the University of Texas. According to the court case, Abigail specifically applied to a program where all seniors in the top ten percent of their class were automatically admitted to the university, but given that she was not in that top ten percent, her application was entered into a secondary pool where admission counselors took into consideration several other factors such as academic achievements, extracurricular activities, and…race. Much to her dismay, Abigail received a rejection letter in the mail. She claimed that some of her peers who were students of color were granted admission over her despite the fact that they had lower scores. In other words, Abigail was mad that affirmative action dashed her hopes and placed a lower-scoring black or brown student in her ‘well-deserved’ slot.

Never mind the fact that white students (42 to be exact) in that same pool of secondary applicants with identical or lower scores than Abigail’s were accepted over her.

According to Abigail, who would become the soft-spoken, strawberry blonde, innocent-looking poster child of the conservative “reverse discrimination” and anti-affirmative action movement, the university’s policy of affirmative action violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause and she took her case to court. No small aside, a non-profit called the Project of Fair Representation, described by ProPublica as “funded by deep-pocketed conservatives” who “fight race-based policies that were meant to address inequalities,” has bankrolled Abigail’s lawsuit. After several district and circuit court rulings in favor of the university, Abigail eventually appealed to the Supreme Court, which heard her case back in 2013, and now it’s back again to the Supreme Court this past month.

Abigail’s (and more importantly her rightwing bankrollers’) argument is pretty simple: admission should solely be based on merit, reflected in a student’s grades or activities, and not seemingly extraneous factors like race. But what’s often lost in this debate is the fact that race is always taken into consideration precisely because schools consider grades or activities. For decades, social scientists have continually proven the existence of a racial achievement gap in the United States between African Americans and Latino students on the one hand and white students on the other. This gap is a product of racial capitalism in the United States, marked by redlining districts, under-resourced public schools, and racialized poverty. These are most definitely not “extraneous factors.” They crucially mold a student’s “grades” or “activities,” which are not neutral markers by any means. Whiteness, on the other hand, is always invisibilized.

Race does matter: as the U.S. Census data shows, low-income white families tend to live in better neighborhoods than low-income black families, and therefore benefit from a better schooling system and college future. What Affirmative Action merely does is pull the blinders on that system momentarily and make that achievement gap legible.

And what’s perhaps the most ironic thing about the Abigail Fisher case is that numerous studies have demonstrated that more than any other people in the United States, affirmative action has actually helped white women more than men or women of color. According to one study from 1995, for example, 6 million American women (the majority of whom were white) held jobs they were only able to get because of affirmative action. Whiteness, again, is always invisibilized.

In the wake of the second round of Supreme Court hearings on the Abigail Fisher case, black graduates took to twitter to speak out against this attack on affirmative action. In so doing, the brilliant and hilarious hashtag #StayMadAbby was born, poking fun at the young, white, strawberry-blond woman’s attempt to singlehandedly dismantle a system designed to acknowledge this country’s violent history of slavery, sexism, and white supremacy and its present-day effects on our lives.

So, in the meantime, my parting words remain: #StayMadAbby.

Yesenia Barragan is a Doctoral Candidate in the History Department at Columbia University and a student of color activist.

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