Voronwë the Faithful wrote:
As for my own, opinion, I disagree that all consideration of race should be eliminated, and think that the current system should be preserved for some time. Won't happen though.
Well, perhaps as no surprise, I agree with Voronwë (albeit with a tiny bit of foot draggin'). I feel like the pressures against "fairly" choosing without a racist factor are still there, if not just a bit more subtle. It's not gone, and until it is, we need to fight it.
However, I don't love a system that is
designed to be unfair. The fact that it was designed to correct an egregious unfairness makes it understandable.
Two examples (not necessarily of AA in particular, but in the kind of policy that AA is):
When I graduated high school, I had a 3.9+ GPA (this was before the 5-point-for-an-A-in-some-classes era). Being the money-grubbing little thing I was, I applied for a scholarship based on GPA; the minimum GPA you had to have was a 3.8, to apply.
I lost to a kid I had tutored in math, that senior year. He and I had been in school together since second grade; we both went to public schools. His GPA was a 2.5. Turns out that since his parents were from Puerto Rico (he was born and raised in the USA, his father had an air conditioning company and they lived in a tony part of town, with housecleaners and gardeners and such), *his* minimum GPA (for a GPA-based scholarship) was a 2.5, which he got, not a bit ironically, mostly because I carried his sorry butt through Algebra I (my senior year class was Calculus, btw).
Not fair, really. I understand the reason for it, and I did make it through college without the scholarship, so all's well that end's well. But it wasn't fair.
The other example is in my own family. My brother's first wife is 1/4 Cherokee, which puts his daughter at 1/8, which qualifies her as a minority in some books. His daughter is wildly accomplished, but he investigated whether applying for her as a minority for certain things would give her more access/money/clout. Surely that system was designed for someone who had faced some hardship because of their race? Unlike my very privileged, very intelligent, very athletic, very ambitious, tall, beautiful, spoiled, slightly-darkly-tinged niece with the remarkably weathy father?
I still understand the reason for it. But the holes in it really are large enough to drive big ole' logic trucks through them.
"What do you fear, lady?" Aragorn asked.
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King