There's a new blog in town called The Think. Check it out. It's written by a young overachiever out of Houston. He's got an interesting perspective on Affirmative Action and throws a few spitballs. I'm going to take a whack at one of them and see if I get a reaction.
In one nice graf, he says:
Did Princeton not accept a 1500 SAT student ranked 3rd in his class with an extremely solid work ethic and over 30 hours of AP credit (equal to an entire year of college courses) because I did not check “African-American”? I will never know the answer to that question. My best friend likes to say that I didn’t get into Princeton because I left the race option blank — I wanted to prove to myself that I could get into any Ivy on my own merit, not, well you know what I’m trying to say. I will never know why I did not get into Princeton. In essence, for all they knew I was just another white boy named Philip Arthur Moore who loved his calculator. Or maybe I was too boring for them? Not likely, but maybe I just wasn’t for them, regardless of my race. I will never know.
Then he turns around and says:
No one should deny the lasting effects that America’s history has had on people of color. Dating all the way back to slavery and even in more recent times during the Civil Rights Era, America has had a rich history of discrimination. What “compassionate conservatives” won’t tell you while they are throwing darts at anyone in favor of affirmative action in higher education is that they probably found their cheap mortgage rate through the exact same process of discrimination found in affirmative action.
For a smart guy, he makes a lot of dumb arguments. It should be obvious to smart people that whitefolks don't go around thinking about being whitefolks all the time, and the same honesty he gives about the reason he might not have gotten into Princeton, is blatantly missing from his assessment of racism in the housing market.
I thought that would be the only nit to tangle with and then he blows hard on LaShawn's "ilk". Feh. I'm not going to go there. He's just wrong. If he wants to be right, he'll find the answers around here somewhere.
His final paragraph is telling, and gives me some hope that the next generation has a bit going on for itself:
If affirmative action is bad, then we as a nation must find a better solution. But pretending like a 14-year-old child has complete control over their academic future, environment, and opportunities in life is idiotic. Merit only works in the suburbs, where the good houses are.
There is a reason for that. It's because the people who want to play by the rules try to locate themselves with other people who want to play by the same rules. That's where merit makes sense and where folks try hard to continue that.
The thing that no student or graduate wants to hear, I'm about to say. Brains are a cheap commodity in the US. Universities are suppliers of moderately priced labor, just as Mexico is a supplier of cheap labor. There isn't a university on this planet which is as well organized and disciplined as a sharp corporation or a halfway decent army, and that's the thing you don't learn until you've spent a couple decades out in the world of work, where people aren't protected like students and faculty are. The beefs with Affirmative Action pale in significance to the ranches of conflict out here where people with tens of millions of dollars compete with people with hundreds of millions of dollars. But that's nothing you can learn while colleges are teaching what they teach. Perhaps the only people who actually do learn that from the brainy side of the equation are those guys who figure out how to build a better medical treatment in school and cash in by building a company around it.
So when it comes down to a black thing, getting into university is just the first step into the American middle class, and quite frankly it doesn't pay as well as learning construction. I wish somebody would have told me when I was in college that I could get 500k in revenue just making and selling plastic water tanks, like the neighbor of an associate of mine is doing. Oh, excuse me. 500k in revenue per month in a 5 person company. I would have avoided white collar, upscale corporate life like the plague.
The real hardball problem is that Affirmative Action's benefits and detractions don't amount to a hill of beans in the big old world. But there are still at least a couple million people who don't much care about the big old world and are just focused on the Affirmative Action world, where SAT scores, skin color and grade point averages make all the difference. I never thought Grutter and Hopwood were worthy of the Supreme Court, so I don't get my briefs in a bunch like our old pal at Discriminations. And I suspect that LaShawn Barber's lack of concern for the veneration so many blackfolks have for those two hallowed words is why she gets verbally dissed. I don't give much of a rat's any longer. Then again, living on the nice side of the six figure glass ceiling for a decade does give this black man a bit of perspective.
Malcolm X was never impressed by Affirmative Action, and as loathe as I am to compare his vision to what we can see 40 years later, he's a good reference point for those still running the OS of Black Nationalism 1.0 on their brain pan. Malcolm could see right through the honeydripping for what it was. A job. A job you get because you symbolically represent 400 years of something irresistable to white liberal guilt. Yeah well, I suppose people get what they deserve.
Meanwhile, I'm perfectly content to see undergrads get whatever Affirmative Action the polity can stomach. Undergrads don't change much. They still get entry level jobs at big employers, and none of them have the brains, experience or guts to get much more. Fine. But I say make the graduates, specifically the professionally certified graduate programs get colorblind. The last thing we need are our experts racially codified.
The better solution for 14 year olds whose parents raised them in those parts of America where merit doesn't work, is to get them to the parts where it does. That means not tying them to legacies of this, that and the other, so they won't learn the hard way how deep that racial rabbit hole really goes. If anybody gets the idea that Affirmative Action for undergraduate admissions is nudging us towards a (oh man do I love that NPR advertisement) "just, equitable and sustainable society", they need to get LASIK and take off the multi-colored glasses.
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