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Perhaps a little less nefarious. Maybe people think that at some point those who have succeeded and risen to the ranks of the middle and upper class should no longer be getting extra boosts from the system, particularly when there are still those who could better use those boosts, one or two of whom are not actually URMs.</p>
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You’re new here, so just a word of advice - one of the forum rules is that you can’t attack other posters. </p>
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<p>Race should not be a factor in college admissions for the upper class. Grant Hill’s Kids, assuming that he has any, do not need any help (Duke educated wealthy NBA star). It is a different story for the poor.</p>
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<p>Most of the debates on the subject of whether Asian students are disadvantaged versus white students in college admissions tend to result in a lot of overreaching claims (in both directions); the most that can be said in general is that it is mostly inconclusive, at least from the outside (of admissions offices). It is certainly possible that Asian students are being unintentionally discriminated against by colleges looking to “build a diverse freshman class of unique individuals” where “diverse” encompasses non-racial aspects like urban/rural background, geographic diversity, unusual extracurriculars, etc… But that is not necessarily a result of deliberate policy (although it can be).</p>
<p>Then again, “most [post-secondary] schools” are open admission community colleges, which generally don’t discriminate on anything other than first come first served for admissions.</p>
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<p>A favorite saying of many revisionistic governments and their supporters who want to deny their responsibility for the genocides, war crimes, human rights violations, and more. </p>
<p>I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read/heard that very comment or similarly expressed sentiments used by unrepentant Japanese military vets, their supporters, prominent politicians within the Japanese government…including some recent prime ministers, and a few sympathetic/ignorant Europeans/Americans with a strong interest in Japan. </p>
<p>I could say the same thing about some unrepentent Nazis/Neo-Nazis and a few sympathetic/ignorant Europeans/Americans with strong interests in Germany/Nazism…except that even the current German government’s history education policies are in direct opposition to your sentiments above. Their K-12 German history curriculum spends a great deal of time on WWII, the Holocaust, and other dubious examples of Germany’s wartime inhumanity towards anyone they deemed “untermenschen”(sub-humans). </p>
<p>Moreover…there’s an opposite view expressed in the following “If we fail to learn from the past, we’re doomed to repeat it.”</p>
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<p>An attack would arguably be something to the effect of accusing somebody for having a persecution complex for pointing out long-established facts that don’t make the overly privileged group I’m a part of look so deserving of all the breaks we get, not to mention the constant benefit of the doubt and the never-ending parade of white knights and champions. What I’m doing is more along the lines of good-natured mocking.</p>
<p>Hypothetical question- Why is it always assumed that when minorities are admitted to a program that their test scores,GPAs and EC are inferior to the rejected white students? Ms. Fisher did not make the 10% cut off. Why does she assume that she was superior to the students selected who were in the group that fell outside of the top ten per cent… Also ,if so superior,why isn’t Ms. Fisher “setting the world on fire” at LSU?</p>
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<p>On the other hand, such governments or other organizations are dwelling on the past by actively covering up the dirty parts of their history.</p>
<p>Dwelling on the past may be a good thing if it results in learning the history and learning what not to repeat. But it may be a bad thing if it is used to incite or continue a blood feud that creates more victims in the present, perpetuating the hate for more generations (often, each side has a very skewed version of the same history that is unrecognizable to the other).</p>
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<p>You’re right, Nrdsb4. It seems as if the opposite is true - 20% (closer to 25%) of incoming freshmen are NOT accepted under this rule.</p>
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<p>You may want to tell that to several Latino neighbors from my old neighborhood who were strongly discouraged by their White GCs from going on to college despite great SAT scores and GPAs because of their ethnicity/immigrant status. </p>
<p>Or an African-American college classmate who despite being from the upper-middle class family background has been routinely profile-stopped by cops with all its inherent indignities for URMs because he wore nice clothes/drove a BMW given to him as high school graduation present and they assumed he was a drug-dealer because “there’s no way he’d have the money for those things” or frequently being stopped by Harvard PD for ID* as opposed to myself or many White/Asian Harvard students I’ve observed while visiting/taking classes…despite the face he’s the PhD student there and I was his guest.</p>
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<li>This issue of Harvard PD profiling African-American Harvard students became such a serious problem that even their head and some officers acknowledged it was a problem some years back. Not sure how that has been resolved since the mid-'00s.</li>
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<p>Good point about history and it’s abuse by ucbalumnus. The culture wars use history as indoctrination.</p>
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<p>If it is the latter…then it is blitheringly obvious that one or both sides are not actually learning from history. </p>
<p>I’d argue, however, that it’s better to openly learn from the more dubious aspects of our past at the risk of what some who are uncomfortable with this process label “Historical guilttrips” or “Masochistic history”* After all, the learning/studying of history shouldn’t be mostly/completely confined to “happy history” where the attitude is “My country is 100% good and right…and anyone saying otherwise is an unpatriotic subversive type to be harshly dealt with by any means possible.”</p>
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<li>An actual translated term commonly used by Japanese right-wing revisionists trying to deny and suppress open discussion of Japan’s imperialistic militarist past within Japanese society.</li>
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<p>Agree … My high school history was the happy kind. Real history was much more interesting.</p>
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<p>Of course. But they are teaching their children that “their side” is 100% good and right, while the “other side” is 100% evil and wrong (and therefore ok to victimize/oppress/terrorize/etc.). And when the loudest voices are pushing versions of history are the 100% good/evil ones, no one reads or listens to the historians who describe history in shades of gray that show no side has a monopoly on good or evil.</p>
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<p>I had to retake American History I when I went back to school (1 GOVT and 1 HIST class were required to be taken in Texas). I had a laundry list of the stupid crap we were “taught,” but two stick out right now: that the mass genocide of Native Americans was “inevitable,” and that some slaves had “good relations” with their masters. I actually wound up retaking the second class as well just to replace a C on my transcript with an A, and that class was so bad that it bordered on parody. </p>
<p>The funny thing is that taking those classes made me understand conservative white Americans a lot better. They truly do believe that they are where they are because they are the best and the brightest because that is exactly what they are taught, along with everything that minorities have achieved are because they were “given” or “granted” to us by them. (It’s not like women didn’t march for their right to vote, and I don’t even remember that Civil Rights Something-or-Other was all about.) And if there is one thing the state of Texas frowns on, it’s learning and forming your own opinion outside of academia.</p>
<p>The problem with guys like Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson is that they see most of the problems in America through the prism of race. As Bill Cosby has said on many occasions, it is actually counterproductive because this victimization complex actually perpetuates the problem. Why take responsibility for your actions and work to improve your life, if you are powerless to overcome the effects of racism in our society. We are never going to eradicate all racism so long as humans populate the earth. If you are consumed with anger and feel that others owe you something for your plight, it is less likely you will take the actions necessary to improve your life. I don’t about others on this thread, but I have taught my son to always take responsibility for his actions and never to envy or resent others because life may appear to be easier for them.</p>
<p>MaxineShaw, I have read your posts and this seems to be a very emotional topic for you. You have a very jaundiced view of America. Your anger and cynicism are evident in most of your posts.</p>
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<p>First of all, what you learned in history class in Texas is not what most people learned in the rest of the country. I don’t agree with history taught with an agenda, either the whitewasing of history in Texas or the hateful propoganda masquerading as African-American and Latino American history in California and Arizona middle schools. When I was in elementary school in the 80’s, they told us about slavery and the Trail of Tears, but they didn’t include the other garbage as they do in Texas. I think this revisionist history is a recent phenomenon.</p>
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<p>So if two people take the same class in the same school and are of the same socioeconomic strata and one person does better, it’s outrageous to say that person with the better grade deserves to be rewarded for it? They got it because of “history.” Uh, ok. </p>
<p>My mother, who was a 1st generation ethnic minority (not a URM but they were considered minorities sixty years ago,) encountered a lot of sexism as well as discrimination based on ethnicity. I think it’s particularly offensive to disparage the accomplishments of all “white” Americans because they were made on the backs of “minorities.”</p>
<p>^^you grew up where?</p>
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<p>I’ll search for the quote, but, I don’t think that’s what Maxine said.</p>
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<p>It’s not what I learned in history class in Texas.</p>
<p>^^search complete. i think what Maxine was saying was that whites tend to think of every bit of good luck that falls into their laps as a result of their hard work whereas minority accomplishments tend to be picked apart or minimized. I suspect that many people in the minority community have the reverse filter on their philosophical lense: that white accomplishments are the result of being “born white” and it’s the minorities in this country that have to “work harder” in order to achieve the same level of recognition. </p>
<p>My personal view is that all Americans are to some extent guilty of confusing their good luck at being born in a country that controlled ninety percent of the world’s manufacturing capacity (or, something on that order of magnitude) seventy years ago, with their own individual merit. </p>
<p>The reality is that American history has always been a story of collective effort – and collective responsibility. Whether it was a tiny band of colonies on the eastern seaboard seeking independence, the taming of the West (and Native American genocide), the Civil War (and ninety years of state-sanctioned apartheid), or victory at the end of World War Two (and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), everyone benefited, including subsequent generations. </p>
<p>And, yes, I would say, even the civil rights movement was a collective effort. I think the question now is, how do we harness that same sense of mission in a post-affirmative action world? A court can only go so far in prescribing solutions for society’s ills; they are much better at telling us what is <em>not</em> constitutional than they are at telling us what is. In the long run, we can only hope by trial and error to get it right.</p>