As someone raised in Texas trailer parks, I don't hate Felicity Huffman — she's not the real problem

On Tuesday, federal prosecutors charged 50 people—including actors Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman—with, among other things, bribing testing proctors and college officials at various elite institutions including Yale, Stanford, and Georgetown in order to secure spots for their kids.

While it may come as a shock to some outside the United States, I don’t know any fellow American who is surprised by this. I’m certainly not. If anything, we’re confused as to why these wealthy, white members of the elite didn’t simply get their kids into the best schools the way it’s always been done in America: a large donation that puts your name on a building.

That’s the American Way. For all of the bluster about bootstraps and grandeur of the go-go-getter kid who hits the books and earns their spot among the so-called “best and brightest”, this country is anything but run on merit.

Two weeks ago, on national television, Michael Cohen told congressional leaders that Donald Trump directed him to send threatening letters to schools warning them against making his grades or SAT scores public. The Washington Post reported that wealthy Trump allies among New York Military Academy alumni pressured the school to turn over his records, ostensibly to be destroyed. The school declined but did supposedly move the records to a more secure location. When did this happen? In 2011, just days after Trump infamously demanded then-President Obama release his own transcripts from Columbia and Harvard. It apparently felt unrealistic to Trump that a black man with no wealthy connections could build such a sterling resume. I mean, c’mon, what’d he do? Work hard and demonstrate excellence? In retrospect, maybe Obama’s genuine academic success was the only credible evidence he wasn’t born here.

Again, none of this is surprising. Every level of the college admissions process for elite institutions is filled with barriers seldom overcome but with privilege. Students in America attend schools that are unequally funded and often racially segregated, take tests that are culturally biased and for which some parents pay thousands of dollars in formal coaching and other prep, have disparate opportunities for extracurricular activities, and are constantly competing against each other for spots in incoming freshman classes at top institutions that almost pride themselves on handing down seats to the highest-bidding white families as though they’re heirlooms.

And this is all legal. The game is intentionally rigged so tightly that when someone like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a woman of color and standout high school student who placed second at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, makes her way to the corridors of power through sheer grit and disregard for systemic whitewashing, it’s met not with a celebration of the vaunted bootstraps theory but an incredulity emanating from faces not much darker than their families’ hidden transcripts.

This is the American Way, and so it is painfully curious why Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin and William H Macy (Huffman’s husband, who has not been charged but surely knew) and dozens of others—multi-millionaires with vast networks and untold resources and skin as white as the day is long—didn’t simply make a donation to their kids’ preferred university and let the system take care of the rest. The playbook has always been there for anyone willing to read it (though, I guess for these families, that’s probably asking a lot). Last year, emails revealed that officials at Harvard essentially traded significant boosts in the application process for applicants whose families were willing to hand over enormous contributions to the college. So direct were the transactions that one email stated two applicants were “big wins” and one family “has already committed to a building.”

It’s curious why these people—flush with enough wealth and access to make Solomon blush—couldn’t simply connect their children with the private schools, tutors, coaches, and camps to get the job done without getting the FBI involved. Ironically, that would have been a cost-efficient alternative to buying a building.

I was raised in trailer parks in central Texas. My parents graduated high school by the skin of their teeth and went into blue-collar jobs, like their parents before them. The idea of a formal tutor for SAT prep would have had me laughed out of their presence. As with so many others from poor backgrounds, I served in the military and used my G.I. Bill benefits to earn a degree from Georgetown, a path that only required me to sign a contract pledging to give my life should it be requested. I’m sure these parents know all about that.

I don’t hate these folks, and I legitimately feel terrible for their children, but that doesn’t compare to how bad I feel for the students from underprivileged families who worked hard for years to get into schools that would be lucky to have them, only to be edged out by a system that caters to the whims of parents with heavy cheque-books, soft hands, and calloused consciences.

As a wise poet once said: “You can pay for school, but you can’t buy class.”