black…MYstory

I often find myself wondering why people people so easily in this concept that white people are, somehow, being disenfranchised by affirmative action. I remember when the Supreme Court was weighing in on affirmative action a few years back in the case of the University of Michigan. At the time, minority students, in total, comprised some 14-15% of all undergraduate enrollment and a relative handful of all law school admissions.

So, the argument I saw was that people were saying that they were being discriminated against because they only represented 85% of the enrollments as opposed to 90+%.

Black people tend to attend colleges in much smaller numbers than just about any other group of people out there and, still, the numbers appear to be too high for some. So, when I hear of white folks complaining about affirmative action being unfair, I shake my head in disgust.

I ran across an article from CivilRights.org that summed up some of my sentiments quite nicely and wanted to share it.

Consider a few things that have happened in the past month-and-a-half, in no particular order: First, comedian Michael Richards goes on a racist tirade at an L.A. comedy club, screaming the n-word at two black audience members, over and again for several minutes. Then, white students at four entirely different colleges dress up in blackface or throw “ghetto” parties, at which they mock low-income African Americans; next, a group of Muslim clerics are thrown off a plane because passengers get nervous after seeing them engaged in evening prayers prior to boarding their flight; and finally, New York police fire fifty shots at a group of unarmed black men, for no apparent reason, killing one who was due to be married the next day.

Oh, and then there is this: in spite of the above-mentioned events, the President of the College Republicans at Boston University, announces that race-based scholarships for people of color are the “worst form of bigotry confronting America today,” demonstrating the desperate need for BU to require a course in “Getting Some Perspective, 101,” for all incoming first-year students.

In response to this most horrible of racist practices, the campus GOP has announced its plans to offer a “Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship” for deserving white students. According to the head of the group, the scholarship is not being offered to help whites, per se, but rather, to point out the unfairness and immorality of “racial preferences” in American society. Merit, rather than race, should determine scholarships, they insist.

Yet upon close examination–indeed, even a cursory one for that matter–it becomes apparent that the arguments made against race-based scholarships, whether at BU or elsewhere, fail to demonstrate even the most rudimentary flirtation with intellectual honesty.

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