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on the bakesale:
the whole thing seems pretty ill-conceived, particularly if by it you are supposed to understand something about affirmative action---in other words, if there is really supposed to be something equivalent between the pricing structure of cookies and a coherent statement about affirmative action.
i would imagine that it was undertaken in order to be shut down---publicly--in order to generate yet another little story to be added to the book of far right martyrs in general, and to the volume within that bigger book of martyrs in which conservatives get to whine about the trouble they face on a college campus.
so this tedious little agit-prop event becomes grist for the press, and a way of framing discussion, with the result os pseudo-debate like what you have here, which unfolds as if there is something about the bake sale that is in fact a statement about affirmative action, as if you can seperate the mechanisms particular to it from the context in which they operate, both legislative and historical.
i support affirmative action.
but i have always understood it as a palliative, something made to address both historical and ongoing disparities in the states on the one hand, and to divert matters from the protection of class interests, which is not addressed directly by affirmative action---if you want to generate educational equality, then take control of funding away from localities and distribute it evenly across them, nationally. as a first step. given that the major form of discrimination in the states is spatial, and is a strict marker of class positions, it is a coherent place to begin.
the explicit agenda behind the conservative attacks on affirmative action is the naturalize once again differences in economic class position as they impact on education.
from this viewpoint, the way conservatives understand "fairness" is disengenuous--it is as if they pretend that in this manner they can frame one of the most polarized educational systems in the world, in class terms (a reflection of the overwhelmingly skewed concentration of wealth they have ushered in, beginning with reagan) as somehow equal in itself and requiring no adjustment/correction.
if you buy this absurd premise----that educational opportunities in america are equally distributed----then the arguments against affirmative action *could* hold water--but in the present environment, these premises presuppose a complete break with and denial of reality.
which is, all in all, and sadly for all of us, indicative of the conservative way of framing issues.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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