What Are You Celebrating Today?

Two years ago today, I was brainstorming my Harvard supplemental essay. I turned to Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech to fully grasp the meaning of this holiday to me, a descendant of slaves. For Generational African Americans, it is hard to celebrate the Fourth with fanfare when the independence it symbolizes is deeply linked with this country’s history of slavery and oppression.

This Fourth of July, I am shaken by the irony of my supplemental essay. Less than a week ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Harvard’s race-based admissions practices are unconstitutional.

Generations before me gained access to a wealth of educational and professional opportunities due to affirmative action. I am no different. The ruling is an insult to the story I told in that essay.

My essay concluded by recounting a transformative realization: Our community has prevailed despite an utterly painful history in this nation. For many Generational African Americans, grief is a deeply familiar feeling on this day due to its entanglement with slavery. The Court’s decision is yet another reason to grieve. Today, I grieve because I am pessimistic about how this decision affects the future of Black communities — Generational African Americans and beyond — on campus.

I expected the decision to play out this way; likewise, many affinity groups have been preparing for this result. Yet, I still struggled to regulate my emotions when I read the ruling. The hours and days that followed were overwhelming, as my phone blew up with emails from Harvard and messages from clubs, peers, and others who thought to send me the news.

I so badly needed to be on campus with my community to process the news and care for each other. Yet thinking about the value of our diverse community has also proven a challenge, because this decision could cause vast changes to the Harvard we are used to.

The reputation Harvard carries and its relevance for higher education nationwide are powerful. It has been unsettling to watch my school’s direct loss in a Supreme Court case with such strong racial implications. And it’s been even more unsettling to be one of those “Black students” the nation is discussing. I’ve felt beyond frustrated and uncomfortable as our realities have become a trending topic on social media and a headline on the national news.

When thinking and planning for the future, we cannot forget about the student body, especially those most directly affected. Many Black students and applicants are trying to process and heal from the implications of this decision, and I hope our administrators and student organizers prioritize the safety and comfort of Black students on campus over political agendas.

Though I keep hearing that the future is unknown, I grieve today because the future is predictable. In Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor’s dissent, she finds that “eliminating the use of race in admissions ‘would reduce African American representation … from 14% to 6% and Hispanic representation from 14% to 9%.’”

She also notes that we have seen changes in admissions like this before. When California prohibited race-conscious admissions in public universities in 1996, underrepresented groups such as Black students experienced a drop in admissions by 50 percent or more on some campuses.

These are devastating effects, especially because Black students already made up less than 10 percent of the freshman class at the University of California, Berkeley, — and similarly, around 15 percent in Harvard’s freshman class today.

So I am terrified, in particular, for my Generational African American community. This demographic may be only 10 percent of the already underrepresented Black population on campus. Our community is a minority within a minority, and to imagine a future where these numbers could drop even lower is genuinely scary. I cannot help but sit with a message I read that said some affinity groups within the Black community might not survive such a substantial drop in Black representation.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, we’ve often focused on admissions, but I worry about what happens after, too. Harvard’s vibrant and diverse Black community attracted many of my peers to choose it over other schools, and I wonder whether this decision could lower the amount of Black students who even want to call Harvard home.

On this Fourth of July, two years after I pored through Douglass’s words, I think about the damning Harvard’s Legacy of Slavery report and how the Court’s decision represents yet another moment of grief and discomfort for the Generational African Americans on this campus.

I always tell people that my favorite part about Harvard is the people. The unique stories, backgrounds, and experiences that make each student themself are the most fascinating and enjoyable aspect of this school for me. I sincerely hope that Harvard remains committed not just to diversity but to the well-being and requests for progress from its Black students.

Zion J. Dixon ’26, a Crimson Editorial Editor, lives in Winthrop House.