| Topic Name: |
End Affirmative Action And Legacies |
| Message Name: |
How does AA benefit white people? |
| Date Posted: |
12/13/2001 |
| In Reply To: |
Without legacy admissions, our President would not have gotten into Yale. And might not have become President.
And i think most posters to this board would agree that AA is OK as long as it benefits white people. |
| Message: |
I guess you're saying that white people only don't agree with AA because they are negatively affected by it. Well, that's just not true. I think that it should be based on merit and it's not fair to deny someone an opportunity to go to the school of their dreams because their skin is not as dark as a competing applicant. I realize that blacks were discriminated against base on their skin color, and that was cleary wrong.
But if it's wrong then, it's wrong now, too. Wisdom suggest that you shouldn't correct the injustices of yesterday by creating the injustices of today. There are many reasons to support this view. The most important one, I think, is that the wrong people are being hurt by AA, and the wrong people are benefitting for something that did not happen to them directly--it happened in generations past.
I am a "young white male," but my family also came here as political refugees from the Middle East. We escaped because we are Jewish and feared religious persecution. I could have easily written that on my law school application to curry favor as someone who "overcame adversity" but chose not because I think it's irrelevant. What I have accomplished in my life does not mean that someone else did not work just as hard to get into that same applicant pool. Further, these schools don't even give you an independent evaluation if you claim a factor that qualifies for AA. They just lump you in a pile, a pile they extract from the over 5,000 applications they get (I am speaking of the ivy-leagues).
Just to give perspective, I was wait-listed at Columbia; who knows what woudl've happened if I had chosen to play the adversity card? But I don't regret it. I made the decision with full knowledge of the potential consequences and I accept it. And I would not change anything if I could go back because that's what I believed then and it's what I believe now.
Considering the huge increase in the law-school applicant pool over the past 15 yeears, the only fair way to administer these acceptance processes is to ask for even-handed fairness. I don't see why any one group deserves an advantage over another. Especially since the vast majority of applicants claiming AA have not faced the same adversity their forebears did. It has been nearly forty years since the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 & 1965, which ensure racial equality **under the law.** Fairness is the only long-term solution. If discrimination is wrong, it just is. It doesn't depend on what side you're on to determine how you feel about it.
For you legal eagles out there, I am aware that AA is only allowed as a "plus" system under Bakke (which is questionable ifit's even good law anymore after Croson, and cert denied in Hopwood), but that's a b.s. system that hides an AA policy in a school's decision to pursue "diversity" and the relative weight each school decides to attach to the race factor.
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