College Republicans at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte are sponsoring their third annual affirmative action bake sale.
It’s actually a mock bake sale since the students don’t really sell anything. Instead, they will be “pretending to sell cookies and brownies priced according to the buyer’s race or gender.”
The outrage, however, is real. Minority student organizations “say the mock sale is racist,” and they are “angered that the university has refused to stop the event….”
How exactly is it any more racist than AA?
The only thing wrong is that they’re not actually selling cookies.
What is with this fascination for “bake sales?” Believe it or not, even CHETLY ZARKO, from the white male advocacy group, the MCRI is against them, and explained why, right here, last year.
>>>Speaking personally as an individual, I believe that this Roger Williams College Republican program, while exceptional in that it brings the issue to public attention and raises awareness, is distinguishable from “bake sales” because bake sales give a self-evidently absurd benefit to minorities whereas this scholarship gives a self-evidently absurd benefit to people from the “majority.” There is no irony in that and a fair amount of historical pain. For the public relations reason that this is more likely to generate sympathy for the opposition, as well as the moral reasons related to the historical significance of whites only preferences in the past, the satire effect is diminished. I therefore personally disagree with and condemn this particular action.”
http://www.discriminations.us/storage/002462.html
Now, I’d sooner shove a cactus down the front of my pants before ever agreeing with something a guy like Zarko has to say, but he’s actually right here. I guess as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
–Cobra
The quote from Cobra is misleading.
Zarko was talking about a bogus whites-only scholarship (it was worth only $50), and he said the stunt lacked the irony of the bake sale, which he actually favored. He also said, that if certain elements of the stunt were true (specifically, that the student who spearheaded it was himself a recipient of a minority preference), then the argument behind it was not hypocritical.
Also, the MCRI is not a white advocacy group.
Dom writes:
>>>Also, the MCRI is not a white advocacy group.”
I never said the MCRI was a white advocacy group. I called them a “white MALE advocacy group”, because they take positions on gender that would be detrimental to white women, in addition to their positions on racial preferences that would be detrimental to underrepresented minorities. In other words, the group most likely to benefit from the MCRI’s policy positions are…SURPRISE!–White males.
And that’s why I describe them as such.
–Cobra
Well, actually, Cobra, if current trends continue, and the public-university admissions folks are sincere about wanting “diverse” student bodies rather than wanting to redress past discrimination (which, remember, they’re not legally allowed to do since Bakke), at some point they will have to start giving an edge to men to keep the genders more or less balanced. The differential (in women’s favor) in incoming classes is reputedly already several percentage points.
(Slightly OT: one additional twist to the gender-imbalance thing is that if campuses become really heavily female, the women attending will suffer to some extent from the lack of eligible male students. So then AA for men would benefit the women admitted — who get more guys around campus — but harm the women not admitted because those guys got an edge. Tricky.)
And, Cobra, you left out a certain group yet one more time. Not all of those not helped by AA are “white.” I really do wish you’d cut that out.
Cobra obviously has something up his can about me.
First, when writing here, unless I sign it as a representative of MCRI, I am expressing my personal opinion. Contrary to Cobra’s assertion, MCRI did not take a position on the Roger Williams College story.
Michelle handles the gender issue nicely, further, I do not see how ending gender preferences is either “detrimental” OR favorable to the “interests” of “white women.” It is neutral, and would indeed protect them against the whims of pro-male preferences as well as protect them against the costs of pro-female preferences (for example, all female taxpayers pay the higher taxes associated with bidding favoritism when the lowest, or highest quality, bids, are passed in favor of contract quotas). Finally, if you were meaning to attack us as a “male advocacy group,” you shouldn’t have include “white” in there, because even within your distorted frame of logic, eliminating gender preferences ironically would benefit “black males” statistically far more than it would white males, since the male achievement gap is wider within that subgroup (note, I’m not advocating narrowing preferences to this group, just pointing out that the “pool problem” would cause pro-female gender preferences, which are not implemented in higher education partially for this reason, to disportionately hurt black males.).
Dom correctly points out how you have completely miscontextualized (not even doing a good job, since anyone who reads the quote can see through it) what I’ve said.
By the way, how does that cactus feel?
Chet