Quote:
Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy
I've been involved in a number of recent conversations with relatives (white ones) about college admissions, and even among supposedly enlightened good white people, there is a feeling that if their kids were black they would have gotten into X which they didn't. And when I remind them of the number of kids in our extended family that are legacies, that have gotten favoritism because of their genes, they always view that as somehow "earned" favoritism while affirmative action based on race, instead of legacy status, isn't.
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This is the one area where I think white people can actually point to something tangible and say "I'm giving that up." I remember watching my brother go through these feelings in a very severe way. As a decent but not great student, and a good but not superstar athlete, he was in a position to compare himself to black classmates who were roughly equivalent, or lower, in academics and sports and got into much better schools.
It's easy to justify that by looking at the broader context -- we don't all start from the same starting line, and white privilege is real. And even if he went to a lower-tier school, he would come out with those same privileges and advantages.
On the other hand, we're the first generation of Americans, born to parents who lived through WWII in Italy and came to the US with essentially nothing but the educations they received in Italy. We were certainly not "legacies" (except to the extent that our two older siblings both went to the same college -- one from which the brother I'm talking about was rejected). By the time we were in high school, our family was perfectly comfortable but not rich. The kid he was mostly comparing himself to was from a wealthy black family. That context does make the broader context harder to see.
I support affirmative action (though I would like to see it more targeted on economics than solely race), and yet I fully understand the difficulty that the above situation caused, particularly for a teenager. I don't like responses to that difficulty that boil down to "stop whining."
But, okay. Leave that context aside. Do I give anything -- anything at all - up if police are held accountable for killing unarmed black men? No, and the same is true of many other of the legacies of US race history.
