Joy Reid Explains How She Got Into Harvard

Leah Barkoukis | July 03, 2023 9:00 AM

MSNBC host Joy Reid told viewers on Sunday that Harvard’s affirmative action policies are the only reason she got into the school.

“I got into Harvard only because of affirmative action. I went to a school no one had ever heard of in Denver, Colorado, in a small suburb. I didn’t go to a prestigious high school like Exeter or Andover. I didn’t have college test prep. I just happened to be really nerdy and smart and have really good grades and good SAT scores,” she said, explaining that a Harvard recruiter came to her town and “pulled” her in.

“This was not the recruiter saying, ‘We’re going to take an unqualified person and put them in Harvard.’ Rather, they were saying, ‘We’re going to take a very qualified person who we would never know existed and put them in Harvard. That’s how I got there.”

She went on to claim affirmative action policies are the reason Supreme Court justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas were admitted to Ivy League schools as well.

“That affirmative action is okay with this majority,” says @JoyAnnReid on legacy admissions vs. race-based admissions. “But you people who want to get in just because of your brains, but you’re not from a legacy—too bad, you can’t come in." pic.twitter.com/hTIRpQSXob
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) June 30, 2023

Reid went on to criticize legacy admissions.

"Some of the people I went to school with were far less smart than me or the other black folks there. They got in because their daddy and their grandaddy went there. I went to school with someone whose name was on one of the buildings, people who are third and fourth-generation legacies, whose parents pumped money into Harvard to get them in,” she said.

"That affirmative action is OK with this Supreme Court majority," Reid added. "They said that the people who benefited from slavery — their descendants who are so far ahead of Black folk in terms of opportunity that we’ll never catch up to them (I don’t care how many Oprahs we get) — those people’s affirmative action is A-OK."

In a decision released last week, the Supreme Court ruled affirmative action policies violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.