Discriminations

Forget about Obama's daughters, maybe someone should ask the candidate whether he himself feels he was given preference in his college and law school admissions, and if he thinks these preferences were justified. Isn't being raised by your wealthy (white) grandparents, going to prep school, etc. advantage enough?

Because they're black they have something different about them. In other contexts this is called "racial profiling." By the way, children of career military enlisted personnel would doubtless have a lot to say that U of C. students don't often hear. May we assume affirmative action for them is in the offing?

"He would give the Obama girls “a break” anyway."

Why does he assume they need a break?

Dom: Good point.

Obama, himself, is a beneficiary of race based AA in his admissions to Columbia, Harvard Law and the Law Review. Harvard Law Review President is an elected and political position at the Harvard Law School for honor students. Many of the top honor law student do not even opt for Law Review or its presidency.

The following excerpt is rom Columbia College Today, the alumni magazine of Columbia College in the City of New York, Obama's alma mater to which he transferred from Occidental College in California. He received race based AA on admission, as well as on his admission to Harvard Law, since there is no mention of him being in or even anywhere near the top of his class at Columbia, which is usually required for admission to Harvard Law. He was certainly not a stellar student in high school according to the following.

http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/jan05/cover.php

Obama was born in 1961 in Hawaii to a white woman from Kansas and a black man who came from Kenya to study at the University of Hawaii, where the two met in 1960. They were married for a brief time. His father, also named Barack, went on to graduate studies at Harvard and then back to Kenya, where he had two other families, one with a Kenyan wife from before his marriage to Barack’s mother, and another with a second American wife. Obama saw his father one more time, several years later, and grew up idolizing him. Obama’s Midwestern mother nurtured her son’s appreciation of and identification with black culture.

Obama, who is married to an African-American woman from Chicago, describes himself as an African American, and says he is “rooted in the black community but not limited to it.”

People have been asking him recently, if he’s half white, why does he describe himself as an African American? He responds that the term African American denotes one has two sides to his heritage. “And I would broaden that and say, by definition if you’re an American, you’re a hybrid person,” Obama said recently on the television program Charlie Rose. “All you have to do is look at these white suburban kids who are wearing baggy pants and listening to Snoop Dogg to get a sense of how cross-pollination has taken place between cultures.”

Obama’s heritage goes beyond black and white. When he was 6, his mother remarried, to an Indonesian student she met at the University of Hawaii, and the family moved to Jakarta, where a half-sister, Maya, was born. After spending two years in a Muslim school and two years in a Catholic one, Obama was sent back to Hawaii to be raised by his Kansan grandparents, a furniture salesman and a bank employee who lived in a small apartment.

Obama went by the name Barry and got on the wrong track as an adolescent. He shunned school, spent much time playing basketball and turned to drinking and smoking marijuana, even experimenting with cocaine. Obama described this period of his life in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. “I guess you’d have to say I wasn’t a politician when I wrote the book,” Obama told The New Yorker. Now that the transgressions are public information, he makes the best of the disclosure. “I wanted to show how and why some kids, maybe especially young black men, flirt with danger and self-destruction,” he said.

On the eve of delivering his keynote address at the Democratic convention, Obama explained on the television program Meet the Press, “Fortunately, I think that my family had such strong values, very much Midwestern values, that I pulled out of that funk, and was able to succeed.”

Obama & Elvis
Obama meets a supporter during a campaign visit to Chicago's suburbs the week before the election.

Obama says he was still goofing off for the first two years of college, which he spent at Occidental in Los Angeles. He continued to play basketball, which friends say he is still quite good at, and was involved in other organized activities. He also spent “a lot of time having fun.”

He changed course junior year when he transferred to Columbia. “I realized I wanted to be in a more vibrant, urban environment,” he says. As a transfer student, he didn’t receive housing, so lived off campus in various makeshift arrangements, such as living in one bedroom of a three-bedroom apartment, and renting a sixth-floor walk-up with slanting floors on the East Side, “just north of gentrification,” as he describes it.

As he pursued a political science degree, specializing in international relations, Obama says he was somewhat involved with the Black Students Organization and participated in anti-apartheid activities. “Mostly, my years at Columbia were an intense period of study,” he says. “When I transferred, I decided to buckle down and get serious. I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk.”

Obama says it is difficult to separate his college experience at Columbia from the urban experience of living in New York City, and his memoir offers little about his time on campus. One noteworthy event during Obama’s college years, however, was his learning in 1982 of his father’s death from a car accident. It was not until years later, however, when Obama’s older half-sister visited him in Chicago, that he learned how inaccurate his image of his father had been. After working for an American oil company in Kenya and then for Kenya’s Ministry of Tourism, the economist fell out of favor with the government, was blacklisted from finding work and was socially outcast. He became a heavy drinker, turned abusive to his American wife and eventually was destitute, borrowing money from relatives for food, as Obama describes his sister’s account in his memoir.

“All my life, I had carried a single image of my father … The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader. That image had suddenly vanished,” Obama wrote. “Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! The king is overthrown, I thought. … Whatever I do, it seems, I won’t do much worse than that, I thought.”

Upon graduating from Columbia, Obama attempted a career as a community organizer. He wrote that when classmates weren’t sure what that was, he didn’t have a sufficient answer for them. “Instead, I’d pronounce the need for change,” he wrote. “Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. Change won’t come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

“That’s what I’ll do, I’ll organize black folks. At the grass roots. For change.”

Obama wrote letters to community organizations all around the country asking for a job, but received no positive responses. He ended up working as a research analyst at a consulting company before being promoted to financial writer. “I had my own office, my own secretary and money in the bank,” he says in his book. But he left to pursue his original goal of activism. For six months, Obama carried on another letter-writing campaign seeking a job and worked with an environmental group to encourage City College students to recycle. At last, he landed a job with a nonprofit in Chicago.

Obama drove to his new home, not knowing anyone there, and worked for three years in low-income neighborhoods helping churches create job training programs and advocating school reform.

In his late 20s, Obama attended Harvard Law School, where he received national publicity when he became the first African-American president of Harvard Law Review. Publishers contacted him about telling his life story, and he began to work on his memoir, which was published in 1995. It had a 15,000-copy print run but didn’t win a large readership and soon slipped out of print. Last summer, in the midst of Obama-mania, stray copies started selling on eBay for 10 times the original cover price. In August, a division of Random House reissued it in paperback, and the book promptly climbed to The New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list.

Obama's daughters would definitely be given racial preferences in admissions to the elite colleges, whether they needed them or not. That's the kicker, when the present system of preferences includes race as a MAJOR DETERMINANT in the zero sum game of admissions using "diversity" as the rationalization for the race preference. This system of preferences may also include the ones for legacies, children of rich and famous VIPs, and the athletic preferences which benefit whites in admissions to the Ivies/Elites, but not exclusively. Collectively these preferences are known as "affirmation action for affluent whites" according to WSJ writer, Daniel Golden. However, blacks can also be beneficiaries of the said preferences.

Obama's daughters may be beneficiaries of all these preferences, including the race preference, WHETHER OR NOT THEY WILL EVER NEED THEM FOR ADMISSIONS in our current admissions process to the Ivies/Elites.

In any case, they will be a shoo-in for admissions, since they will have the best chances any of the applicants, if and when they apply with the current admissions process in place.

The other KICKER in all this is that we may NEVER KNOW whether or not they will need race based AA for admissions by meeting a lower bar and being given a leg up, if the present system of admissions is used. They may have a "star" next to their accomplishments for many observers, as Barry Bonds will have a "star" on his 755 record breaking home run baseball, thereby tainting his accomplishment.