SMU shuts down racist bake sale.
 

So my fellow TFPers especially those that are new in college.. what's your opinion on use of affirmative action in respect to college admissions? IMHO it should be like all things, the most qualified person gets the spot, be it housing, job, student. Doesn't matter, most qualified. Period. Otherwise, I see it just like this SMU bakesale.

link

Texas University Shuts Down Bake Sale

By Associated Press

September 24, 2003, 11:17 PM EDT

DALLAS -- Southern Methodist University shut down a bake sale Wednesday in which cookies were offered for sale at different prices, depending on the buyer's race or gender.

The sale was organized by the Young Conservatives of Texas, who said it was intended as a protest of affirmative action.

A sign said white males had to pay $1 for a cookie. The price was 75 cents for white women, 50 cents for Hispanics and 25 cents for blacks.

Members of the conservative group said they meant no offense and were only trying to protest the use of race or gender as a factor in college admissions.

Similar sales have been held by College Republican chapters at colleges in at least five other states since February.

A black student filed a complaint with SMU, saying the sale was offensive. SMU officials said they halted the event after 45 minutes because it created a potentially unsafe situation.

"This was not an issue about free speech," Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center, said in a story for Thursday's edition of The Dallas Morning News. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created."

The sale drew a crowd outside the student center and several students engaged in a shouting match, Moore said.

David C. Rushing, 23, a law student and chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas at SMU and for the state, said the event didn't get out of hand. At most, a dozen students gathered around the table of cookies and Rice Krispies treats, he said.

"We copied what's been done at multiple campuses around the country to illustrate our opinion of affirmative action and how we think it's unfair," he said.

Matt Houston, a 19-year-old sophomore, called the group's price list offensive.

"My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students," said Houston, who is black. "They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization."

The group sold three cookies during its protest, raising $1.50.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled universities could use race as a factor in admissions under limited conditions. In Texas, universities had been banned from using race as a factor under a 1996 decision by a lower court.

I simply do not have enough words to describe my ire at this being shut down.

It was ok to protest for equality of race and gender when certain groups were getting the shaft, but it's not ok to protest against preferential treatment now that those who were once being wronged can be perceived as having the advantages.

I'm not saying one side or the other is right, I just think it ludicrous that a bake sale was shut down for being racist. Hasn't anyone in this country heard of the 1st Amendment?

Besides which, why would you bitch about having to pay 75% less for cookies?

I disagree. This is exactly about free speech. It's a protest organized in a thoughtful, visual way. I also think it makes perfect sense. I agree with Cynthetiq - the most qualified applicant should get the whatever. I worked somewhere where one of the coworkers was OBVIOUSLY filling a 'token' position, and this person was a terrible worker. So there's affirmative action at work for you.

And how about all the other protests that go on all over the country that actually DO turn into violent affairs? They're allowed to exist all the time. This one is no different, especially since it DIDN'T turn violent.

It's a methodist university for god's sakes!

we have laws and we have to follow them. i'm pretty sure that selling merchandise at different prices according to race & sex is discrimination and in blatant vioaltion of the law.

affirmative action is also descrimination, but it's legal descrimination.

btw, i'm opposed to aff. action.

I guess you've not been to the hair salon or dry cleaners. They do it day in and day out, in CLEAR and blatant violation of the laws you tout.

All of those have inherent discriminatory pricing structures across America.

Ha, this "Bake Sale" shows how ludicrous affirmative action is. The truth hurts.

If there is something to be offended at, it's the notion that a less deserving student should be admitted to college over a more deserving student based on the color of his/her skin.

To bad SMU can't see that.

affirmative action = racism

If I were one of the groups who benefit from affirmative action (WASP here) I would take offense at the thought that I wasn't good enough to get the (Job/scholarship/house/whatever) based on my own merits.

Affirmative action is worse than plain racism, because it's a legally recognized and accepted way to treat one group more favorably than another. Racism by any other name would smell as shitty, or something.

I can't help but agree that affirmative action could very well lead away from social integration. Anybody who actually thought their only motive was to sell baked goods at different prices needs to stop living in the 1950s

heh, it doesnt say anywhere that the cookies were tasty :D.


Im going to have to disagree here for the simplest of reasons. When a white male leaves unversity, the jobs that he'll get offered will be of a significantly higher salary than a colored or female counterpart. It therefore makes sense that they should pay more.

And also theres the whole atoning for the "sins of the father" thing.

It says in the article that the first complaint was by a black man... i dont see the logic, he would be the one to pay the least amount for the "cookies".... (cookies being a metaphor for....)

I hope I'm getting my point across clearly...

affirmative actions aggrivates me, its not helping anything

Why should you, me, or anyone have to atone for the sins of our fathers?

I feel like punching that guy in the throat.

What the hell does my kid have to do with the reperation to the punchee?

Anyone who disagrees doesn't know what they're talking about.

Thomas Jefferson said that the new generation should not be burdened by previous generations.

Math geek here.

I appreciate the other posters comments about the important issues the sale raised.

I however found myself focused on exactly to whom they sold the three cookies to generate the $1.50.

My money is on a white woman and 2 Hispanics.

Anyone care to speculate?
Anyone really know?

i like affirmative action in theory..
i se it as something that could potentially level the playing feild, but in practivce it's not used that way at all. I think it's human nature to be miffed if someone helps another group that you dont belong in. If affirmativbe action was set up to help caucasians.. we wouldnt be having this discussion; but in turn it creates an unnatural balance in the marketplace.

While i would like some of the "behind the scenes racism" to be removed from the workplace, I dont want to be someone's pet monkey because they had to fill a quota.

i also like AA in theory. and i think at one time it was definatly necessary. but in today's society, it's outdated. i think it should be changed to socio-economic status rather than race. i'm sorry, but if my kid, wheni have a kid, doesn't get into his choice of school because a "underrepresented minority" that went to a good high school took a spot he could have taken but didn't get because of AA, then i'd be livid. a poor white kid has a lot more in common, especially when it comes to academic difficulties, witha poor blackkid then a rich black kid has with a poorblack kid. as it is, my best friend is an indian (dots, not feathers) and thus is not considered an "underrepresented" minority and AA doesn't do anything for him. which i think i a crock. either all minorities should benefit or none. yay selective racism!!!

Could someone please explain to a foreigner how race can affect your dry cleaning.

not race discrimination but sex discrimination... a woman's blouse costs more than a man's shirt, EVEN if they are the exact same style cut. same for hair salons...

Cheers, Cynthetiq, the reason behind it is that women are prepared to pay more for things like dry cleaning and haircuts.

I'd better lay low for a while after a comment like that.

my wife isn't and she's quite annoyed when I go in and drop off her shirts it's one price and when she does it's another. We had to talk to the owner and let him know we would not tolerate such practices.

$1 from a white male
+$.25 each from two black men.

$.50 each Three Hispanics

$.75 white female
$.50 Hispanic Male
$.25 Black male

They're the only way it works out.

I agree that the bake sale was a great way to protest affirmative action. I think the fact that they sold $1.50 says a lot, since they had to sell to at least one minority.

Personally, I'd like to think that our society has evolved to the point where we will choose people based on their abilities, not race, creed, sex ect without doing it to please the government. Affirmative action was a good idea, in fact it was a great idea. But, it's come to the point where it's just not fitting to have it in use today.

If they wanted to push the point even further, ALL of the cookies should have been white sugar cookies. Lord knows diversity has no place in an institution of higher learning.

im all for a diverse student population...

but i also dont think race should be a determining factor in school admissions (or anything else for that matter)...

i would not be pleased if someone who was less academically qualified had gotten my spot, because he/she was part of a minority...

and yah Texas Tech, my school has also started using race in determining admissions...

could a white guy send a black friend up there to get discount cookies??? mmmmmmmmmmmm cookies..................

Funny, I went there too. It could have been a white male and two blacks.

UT was gonna start that, but they just found out that they had to publish changes for at least a year before actually implementing them. So, class of 05 would be the first to be affected here.

absolutely beautiful. social experimentation is soooo cool to me. and look how it turned out.

if the kids got paid i'd say give them a raise.

affirmative action is a little less cool when the tables are turned, eh? isn't truth just a bitch?

you can have a Black Pride, Mexican Pride, Asian Pride... but when you call it White Pride... you can't.

Couple examples of how Affirmative Action doesn't....or shouldn't work:

When I was in high school, a girl in my physics class was one of the worst students in school. She had a 1.2 GPA and she was admitted into Stanford because she was an American Indian. She slept during class, didn't participate in sports, no extra curricular activities, yet was accepted into Stanford. I graduated with honors, participated in school sports, was a member and chair of several academic clubs, etc....but wasn't admitted to Stanford.

A good family friend workd as a Shift manager for a road construction contracting outfit. He was forced to bring in a more diverse workforce. He told us stories of how several ethnic groups were brought onto his team, none could speak english, and it turned out to be a nightmare communication wise, not only that but it was more dangerous for his crew because he could not effectively communicate orders to his team. It took much longer to complete their contracts in a timely manner and the quality of work decreased.

Again, in high school, there was the Spanish Club, the Indian Club, the Afro-American club, the Vietnamese club, etc.....but when a good friend of mine wanted to start her Aryan club, the school administration almost expelled her because they said it was unethical to allow a white club because whites were not considered a minority group.

I am highly opposed to AA. I think the general concept of making a more diverse environment is good, but to shove it down our throats the way our government has done is not acceptable. In the majority of the U.S., people of different races, for the most part, stick to areas of their own race. Sure, there are diverse neighborhoods out there, but the majority seems to stick within their own areas of culture. If there is no effort to intermix neighborhoods and make it a more diverse environment for all, how does our government think it will work in the workforce, or school, etc...? AA is used because there are conditions of income class that don't allow some cultures to have the same benefits as others. Is this unfair? Or is is it the fault of those people who don't strive to get out of the financial hardships they are in? AA was created so all people will have an equal opportunity to pursue equal employment, education and quality of life. But all it ended up creating is a pissed off white culture, an unbalance in skills transferrence in the workforce, and bias on educational acceptance. In short, AA blows!

Golly, it is so hard to be a white person in america. We should eliminate all affirmative action. We should really try to eliminate the kind of affirmative action that allowed G.W. Bush to get into yale and harvard. Or the kind that allows miorities to get pulled over at a higher rate than whites, even though white folks are more likely to be breaking the law.

i love when people cite traffic violations as racism. Have you ever tried driving at night and be able to tell if its a white guy, a mexican, and indian, a black guy, etc? Its pretty damned difficult. From behind, beleive it or not, our heads all pretty much look the same. Now, go 5,6,7 or so carlengths back, where they usually are when they flip on the lights. Try it some night then tell me its blatand discrimination. Plus how do you know whites are more likely to break teh law? Because they said so in a poll? Maybe they do, and maybe they are smart enough to look around and not get caught when they do it.

I think they bake sale really didn't simulate AA too well, but the point got across. Reverse discrimination is far more of an issue now than discriminating against the minorities.

You have failed to address any of the points brought up, instead pointing out other instances of racist behavior as if this somehow justifies more racism.

Not a very strong argument in your favor, IMHO.

It's brown pride! :D

Me and a couple of hispanic friends had an unofficial thing like this going (just for fun though)

I wasn't trying justify racism. I said that we should eliminate all kinds of affirmative action, including the examples i provided. Are you saying such things don't occur? Are you just for the elimination of affirmative action that benefits nonwhites? I hope not. I just think that it is strange that for many white people, the only form of discrimination that they acknowledge is the kind that they don't benefit from.

For example:

In minneapolis, a report was just released by The Council on Crime and Justice and The Institute on Race & Poverty of the University of Minnesota Law School.

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache...hl=en&ie=UTF-8
If that link doesn't work, type "racial profiling in minneapolis" into google and you'll find it.
The study concludes that minneapolis police stop black and latino drivers at rates significantly higher than expected based on their proportion of the city's driving age population. They stopped american indian, asian and whites less than expected. Discretionary search rates were twice as high for latino, black, and american indian drivers than they were for whites, despite the fact that minneapolis police were more likely to find contraband during discretionary searches of white drives than any other race/ethnicity.

Now, i guess maybe a lot of people were already suspicious that this kind've stuff has been going on for a while, but many people, such as peryn, can't understand why anyone would think the cops might be racist. I just think it is ironic that the same people who cry foul when it comes to affimative action are afraid to acknowledge that the playing field isn't level. Or maybe us white folk are just "smart enough" to not get caught. I love the implication in that sentence.

Are you satisfied now with my points?

/shrug

It isn't required that I be satisfied with them, but I'm glad to see that you do not endorse one wrong to 'right' another wrong.

And I agree with you that racism exists among white people as well as among hispanics and blacks and that it is wrong regardless.

One thing about being a minority is that you have to wonder exactly why things are happening to you the way they are. Racism isn't an unreasonable guess sometimes.

Granted, if you've got any brains at all you'll know when it's a possibility and when it isn't. But please don't paint it as if all minorities blame all of their social problems on racial discrimination. That's a very pervasive stereotype that takes attention away from where it should be - racism is more real than most people think it is (even today, yes), and we need to keep working to minimize it.

I don't know how I feel about affirmative action, because it seems so blatantly wrong on one level, and yet... well, consider this. Stop enforcing it and black and hispanic attendance at the average university will decrease significantly. Won't that inevitably do weird things to the American population in the future?

Once again, I find myself paralysed by being able to see both sides of the issue.
First, my gripe with affirmative action: I was the dux (Americans read: valedictorian) of my high school, and I was kind of hoping for a scholarship at uni (They're pretty rare here, and usually only offered academically; there's no such thing as a sporting scholarship). There were 19 scholarships available to undergrads in my course. 5 of them are gone because none of my family have ever fought in a war. Those I can deal with not getting; these guys fought to defend my country (in theory), so they deserve it. Another 3 go to 'rural' students, those who live outside the city (and believe me, outside Perth gets pretty damned rural in some places). Those I can also deal with not having. They need the help living alone in the big smoke.
But then, of those 11 scholarships, I lose 3 because I am not Aboriginal and 7 because, in Engineering, I am not female. Leaves me with one scholarship out of 19 that I'm even eligible for. Needless to say, I'm not happy that a less qualified chick took a scholarship I could really have used.
There is also a big shitstorm in Australia at the moment over students getting into uni on grounds other than academic merit, but I'll leave that for another time.

The other side of the story: The Aboriginal population over here is widely viewed as very uneducated, and unless we can get some real role models running around being smart, sophisticated, successful Aboriginals, we're going to have a lot of trouble getting rid of those stereotypes. It's a shame that talented kids have to lose their places at uni because of it, but we really, really need to improve the lot of Aboriginals around here, and for a few years, that'll mean giving them a leg-up to a better education. Once they get some kind of equality, then we can get rid of affirmative action. But as long as Aboriginal kids aren't getting into uni, often more because of their home lives and inadequate schooling than any lack of talent, we need to try and even things up.

But again, on the flip side of that, I'm not sure I want the reputation of my uni being dragged down by a few substandard students who are ushered through the system, and affirmative action doesn't exactly breed goodwill.

But then again...anyone heard of Pauline Hanson? That's what happens when you speak out against AA in Australia.

Oh, before I go, I'd like to check something in filtherton's quote:

Lies, Damn Lies, and...
The rest of the report seems to draw its conclusions through reasonable processes, and even acknowledges the fact that there are a thousand and one hidden factors in every such survey. But I can't accept this claim. If officers are conducting searches on a basis of racial profiling, then let's say they are searching 50% of the Black drivers they pull over, and only 15% of the white ones. We agree that they're mainly searching the black drivers because they are black. So they need some other motivation to search the white drivers; they're only searching the drivers they really think have contraband in the car (on basis, presumably, of glazed eyes, Hendrix music, and empty coke bottles on the floor), so of course they're more likely to find contraband in those cars.

Either the officers are racially profiling, or white drivers carry more contraband. You can't draw both conclusions from the same statistic.

This was an interesting way to protest, and the fact that the university shut it down only helped to make their point and illustrate the hypocrisy of the university for calling them racists.

Thanks for clarification. I didn't realize that the way i said it is misleading.
It basically means that cops are more likey to find contraband in the cars of white drivers because they are searching them based on probable cause, rather than skin color.
To summarize: White drivers probably don't carry more contraband, the cops are very likely using racial profiling.
On that note,
Waaaah, it is sooo hard to be white, hopefully, one day if we work hard enough, we can overcome this affirmative action thing. Then, we can go back to pretending like society is a completely equal level playing field.

... let us all do something now.

being disabled has caused me to not get three jobs in particuliar that I had far more experience due to me not being 'normal'. i was tempted to do something but i felt like i would be stinking to their low parasitic existance and staid quiet. i know first hand that people can pretty much do wtf they want.

let us use our head. if we are smart, let's go for it. if you are unqualified but can get the part because of race or what have you, i hope you feel like you've wronged someone greatly .

tell AA to fuck itself. use your head and get some ethics. nothing would make me happier than seeing a guy to tell AA to stfu because he will NOT use a crutch. the government is hellbent on rules for dumbing shit down. break their rules and fucking WORK to get there, then when you're older you can say, hey...... look where i come from, where i've been. Pride from work won, not an egotrip or an AA puppet trick.

good luck.

Are there any people on here that are supporting affirmative action?

I know that it was created to help minorities that come from bad schools and such, but what about the minorities that are richer than I am? There is just no way possible to take into consideration econimical and educational levels of everybody. Race is an easy factor to use, although, in my opinion, it's not the right way to go.

In black colleges there is descrimination between light skinned and dark skinned students. It's the same in Brazil. People identify their race by their color and not their heritage. So many times there are different races among siblings. My point is that race is such an easy way out and creates a superficial look on the world.

I thikn the bake sale was a great idea and was shut down out of fear because the weak idea of afirmative action was being questioned.

I remember a fund raiser for world hunger where when you came in the door you got a card.
The card said which table you got to use.
80% of the guests had to use the table where only brown rice and water was served.
15% got a table with a simple but decent meal.
5% had a huge table covered with roast pork, steaks, and baked goods.

I'm sure there are people who would say that is a vast over simplification of the worlds food problems.
I say the same about the bake sale.
It did nothing to account for all the people with their own ins (rich parents, alumni, sports skills) that give them a 'unfair' advantage over the rest of us. (maybe a dime for a half dozen for those folks)
The world is not based on who is the smartest and hardest working.
As long as that is the case, we need programs like affirmative action to balance things out.
Maybe one day it won't be needed but I don't think that day is today.

A point was made of this earlier, but I want to back it up.

Anyone advocating getting rid of AA should also be advocating the removal of all preferences for admission, including alumni. I don't hear anyone whining about how they lost their place to someone with lower grades who's daddy went to the school. But they should be. That's a preference system for white people.

I think we can all agree that AA is BAD. But consider why it was installed in the first place. To level the playing field for students who had suffered from underfunded/inadequate schools due to race based preferences (public funding racism.) Preferences which I think we can also agree was BAD.

So what's the answer? Nobody can tell me that racial funding bias in elementary/high school has been eliminated. Poor neigborhoods, primarily populated by minorities, have worse schools than rich white neigborhoods. Does that mean poor minority kids should have less opportunities than rich white kids just because they didn't have as good an environment for learning? How do you balance the scales? Perhaps a kid who got B's in a lousy school should be admitted over a kid who got B's in a good school. Yeah, and race shouldn't matter.

I'm writting an arguement essay on affirmative action right now, or at least i should be. I have 2 hours to complete it. I wanted to read this first though.

On the point about traffic stops. cops do tend to be "racist". My cousin is mexican and he was pulled over 14 times in one year. Two of those times he was in my driveway cleaning his car. I agree that police do tend to look at skin tone and the value of ones vehicle, but what does that have to do with affirmative action?

The only thing I really have to say about affirmative action is, "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" -the end....

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.

Wow,

Blast from the past.

How many pages was this buried under??

see, this is the traditional "defense" of affirmative action yet i don't see it as an ideal or a potential solution. ever. end of story. it's ridiculous to think that any given minority group needs the proverbial "playing field" to be leveled and more so to think that slapping a weighty label on them will do it. this "defense" almost seems to be a blatant contradiction of itself, isn't the playing field level when it's merely a game of numbers and experience rather than factoring in varying "race constants" and PC bullshit?

to say that a quota having been met establishes an "unnatural balance" is equally laughable. why do we think that there shouldn't be an abundance of minority groups in the workplace. just because theres a better likelihood of having a qualified white person (simply due to population densities) doesn't necessarily mean that its commonplace. if there happens to be a glut of minority business majors somewhere in the middle of bohunk, MO, who's to say that quality can't match quantity.

we're in a capitalist nation here, affirmative action undermines the foundation of that very set of ideals. affirmaive action prevents us from utilizing our resources, unless of course, they're "integrated" resources.

The problem with affirmative action, as with racism, is that it is ideological.

We can't ban racism, because it would be impossible to enforce...and if we did try to enforce it, I don't like to think of the results.

What we need to do is educate. The more educated a person is, the more likely they are to ignore racial factors and see people for people. (can someone find a reference for this....I'm fairly certain I saw it somewhere).

This all goes back to a federally funded education assistance program that does NOT socially promote children through the grades. Further, being a teacher should require more than just (in Texas) a bachelors degree and a certification. I think the minimums should be a psychology degree for the very young, Masters degree for primary, and a doctorate for anything higher. The teachers also need to be educated using this system (no social promotion), and the Universities need to increase the difficulty of their programs.

This would be a great topic for a social psych or sociology essay topic...

wow, i thought the discrimination at the dry cleaners was when the korean ahead of me in line paid $5 for two armfuls of drycleaning and my white ass paid $23 for two shirts a pair of pants and a tie. fuck them.

and F affirmative action and its proponents.

i'm not a supporter of affirmative action... ACTIONS and CONTRIBUTIONS to the community not skin color...

while we have a diversity initiative here it's not like some other companies where if you are white and a black competing for same job the black guy gets it... even if GROSSLY underqualified...

Let me start out by saying that I'm not a supporter of AA. As a Mexican male the last thing I want is to be hired on to fill some quota or to be some token minority or to be hired on because in hispanic.

But now look at it from the other side. For all the examples of "this person is a token AA person that obviously isn't right for the job" stories there are out there, there are AT LEAST that many that can be said for how many minorities were/are still being passed up because they are minorities even though they are more than qualified for positions/jobs.

So please guys don't try to make it out like there is no discrimination going on other than AA.

geez...caught again by the passage of a year....

Happy 1 year anniversary bump.

I don't think anybody gets pulled over 14 times in one year without a reason. Are you saying your cousin was innocent all 14 of those times and was pulled over simply because he was mexican? I'm not buying it.

That's averaging a little over once a month, which is quite doable if you live in the wrong neighborhood with the wrong skin color.

There are some drawbacks to AA, but there wouldn't even be AA if the "good old boy" network wasn't still the major player in most hiring situations. I think those who are against it are the ones who don't understand just what it feels like to be constantly discriminated against. Not just at the job interview, or not getting into your first choice of colleges, but at the store, walking down the street, driving your car...

You complain over one instance where you might get discriminated against, what about all the rest of the time? You don't feel it then, do you? If you're white, then the answer is most likely no.

to act as though educatioal opportunities are evenly distributed across class and often racial lines is simply wrong.
opposition to programs on the order of affirmative action presuppose a "level playing field"
there isnt one.

if all that was at stake in this matter was skin color, then maybe the objections would have weight.
but since you have to blind yourself to see things in that truncated a manner, they dont have any weight.

it has nothing to do with race. and everything to do with being attractive. attractive people, of any race, sex, gender are more likely to be hired than less than attractive people of similar background. need proof: go walk around the offices at any of the following fortune 500 companies (just as an example):

Booze Allen Hamilton
Price Waterhouse Coopers
Accenture
Bearing Point
Ernst & Young
Merrill Lynch

to name a few.

When you are a cop, you do not look for minorities. You look for people breaking the law. If that person happens to be African-American, so be it. Maybe it is just that they commit more crimes?
From the FBI Database in 2002: Murder crimes
Whites: 5,356
Blacks: 5,579

Now, the whites are the majority but are committing less crimes.

That's pretty interesting, is there a link I can click on. There are other things the site would probably have that I would sure like to explore.

So is it that the cops aren't looking at race, or are they just playing the odds, and in doing so using race as a factor in determining who to pull over?

I think that for some, not all, when you are a cop you look for minorities because you know statistically that they are more likely to be breaking the law. That is called racial profiling.

Becasue for the most part, their sins (or the mentality of them) are still being repeated today.

Think about it.

If you think discrimination doesn't exist anymore, then YOURE living in the dream world.