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Out of 40 students (there were about 300 in the school), only about 7 took advantage of that opportunity, which goes to show you that the rest weren't extremely interested in the first place. Opportunity was there and is there still.
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I find it hard to be indignant here because we are dealing with kids, fairly young kids. I suspect should we take any group of middle schoolers, regardless of race, and suggest to them that they give up their summer break to study, only about 7 of 40 will take the opportunity. They are middle schoolers, and likely are not able to perceive the value of this sort of opportunity on their own.</p>
<p>If this is true, then the disparity between the races in this instance is probably due to a difference in the perception of opportunity between the parents of these students, and not between the students themselves. I suspect whites are better able to perceive opportunity in America than blacks. I think this is because the difference in experience between these races is vast and has persisted since 1619 until this very minute. Blacks are like an elephant, deliberately conditioned over several hundred years to think they are much less than they are.</p>
<p>* An elephant was tethered to a pole when it was young. Struggling to free itself, the rope finally cut a sore around the elephant's leg. Realizing the futility of its attempts to escape, the elephant stopped trying. As the years went by, the elephant grew into an enormous creature and was used daily to dislodge and carry large poles to a pile. Every night he was tethered with the same size of rope to the pole. With his increased strength it would have been an easy matter to free himself, but he'd been conditioned to think it impossible.*
<a href="http://www.collegejournal.com/successwork/onjob/20001221-raudsepp.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.collegejournal.com/successwork/onjob/20001221-raudsepp.html</a></p>
<p>Where many of us grow indignant when we “even think of affirmative action”, I grow indignant when we wish to take the one or two black kids who are essentially able to do as well as other kids despite being subjected to a history that has conditioned them to fail, and then throw them onto the effective trash heap of chance with literally hundreds of thousands of whites and Asians who have never known such a history. The reason I grow indignant is because we wish to call this obvious sham “equality” when it is nothing of the sort.</p>