The following comment just appeared on an old post of mine. Since it expresses an interesting and very common point of view, I thought it worth posting here:
I’m so glad I attended a historically black university. It kept me from having to study with people with the same opinions as those I’m seeing on this board.I can’t believe how widespread the feeling that blacks are “getting it easy” is in the white community. The black kids you are so jealous of are only separated by one generation from their grand-parents who, had to endure a life time of racism. You all love to use even playing field argument. But if you really want to make the playing field even, strip every white person of their personal wealth and place all their children in second rate schools, and do this for about 200 hundred years. Then the playing field will be even! I’m sorry if a good white student doesn’t get into the school they desire, but affirmative action was created for a reason. To offset the affect of racism on the black community. But I guess everyone forgot about that. I mean it was 30 something years ago, and that has to be enough time to make up for the 200 and something years prior.
I think this point of view should be taken seriously. It deserves an argument, which follows.
The post from last spring to which the commenter objects cited then-fresh statistics about applications to next fall’s freshman class at UVa.
UVa received 15,094 freshman applications this year, including 1,018 from black students. UVa accepted 4,724 students in March; 582 are black. They must accept or decline the invitation by the beginning of May.
If these numbers are correct, I pointed out, then:
- 7% of the applicants were black;
- 12.3% of the admittees were black;
- 29.4% of the non-black applicants were admitted;
- 57.1% of the black applicants were admitted.
Asked to comment on these numbers, UVa officials replied that all black students admitted to UVa, like all other admitted students, were “qualified” and that UVa’s policies were withing Supreme Court guidelines.
True. But I emphasized that
critics of racial preference do not maintain that minority admittees are not
If the poster ever ventured out of his little niche of group think, he’d realize that this is actually the opinion of most Americans. And not even just white Americans.
Actually, I’m glad he/she went to a historically black school as well. That meant that individuals like me were not subjected to the victimhood whines of one more racist who insists that he should receive additional privileges because of his/her skin color while I have rights stripped away because of mine.
What that racist fails to recognize is that each and every one of us, save for the most fortunate among us, comes to the race with various handicaps beyond his or her control. We have the choice of griping and putting a hand out because we concede defeat before we start or of doing the best we can with the situation we find ourselves in and hopefully improving ourselves and our society.
My skin may be white, but that doesn’t make up for my physical handicap (the benefits of which I always refused to claim), the historical discrimination against my religious group in this country or any one of a number of ways I could try to claim victim status. And my wife’s skin color doesn’t make up for the fact that she grew up in poverty in a single parent home after the loss of her father, nor does it make up for her being the child of an alcoholic or the fact that she was refused placement in the gifted and talented program in her school because “project kids rarely go to college” (by the way — she dropped out at 16, got her GED six months later, started college at 17 on scholarship, and eventually earned an M.Div.).
No, let the poster stay in that insular little world, content to be the victim. And he/she can, as I tell my students continue to claim that the every discomfort and setback is “because I’m black.” And it will be, because his/her own self-programmed sense of inferiority over his/her race will be the cause of those failures.
My grandfather only had an 8th grade education because in his day, you had to go to boarding school to go further. The farm community he and all his family grew up in didn’t offer a high school. My mother grew up on the farm. No shoes, etc. They were poor white, I guess (but NOT trash.) My dad grew up in a tiny community that only had a one-room schoolhouse. I guess I need to tell my daughter to forget about becoming a pharmacist – you have to have generations of educational achievement before you can accomplish anything like that. Lamarck would be proud of this reasoning.
So is the original commenter asking for 170 more years of preferences? If she says that 30 years of AA can’t make up for 200 years of discrimination, then that is exactly the recommendation she is making.
While it is a shame that blacks did have to live through those 200 years, the commenter (assuming she is college age, about 20) has never lived through that. So why does she have to act like she did live through that.
What preferentialists forget is that Asians face the same discrimination. No, they were never enslaved in America, but they were treated like second class citizens in CA during the rail days. They were still included in anti-misceginist statutes. And WW2, Korean War, and Vietnam War didn’t do much to endear Asians to the US as a whole. Yet Asians don’t need preferences to get into college and they are, in fact, being discriminated against in favor of other minorities.
By this reasoning, preferences should cover Irish, Asians, people descended from poor families, etc. Everyone except those directly related to the original settlers.
And did they really have such an easy time of it?