LatinaLista — There’s a new $250.00 scholarship at Boston University. To apply, you have to fill out the application, submit two essays, have a 3.2 GPA — and be 25 percent Caucasian.
It’s called the Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship and it’s the latest sensational tactic by students, this time Boston University’s College Republicans, to protest race-based decisions.
Boston University
The scholarship states that the group believes that “racial preferences in all their forms are perhaps the worst form of bigotry confronting America today.”
The group further states that they did not set up this scholarship just “to give a scholarship to white kids” but to foster a discussion.
Their reasoning is that race-based scholarships are a way of the “majority” telling the “minority” that they are different and “inferior and incapable” of meeting the majority at their level and so must be especially accommodated. The group believes these racial preferences are absurd and contradictory to American “ideals of freedom and equality.”
Too bad this group can’t see past the Ivy walls of their city-surround campus. If they ventured out into the Boston neighborhoods where Latinos and African-Americans live then they might learn that the ideals of equality and freedom sound good when recited but, for too many, exist only within the pages of textbooks.
Where does freedom exist when families are generationally tied to poverty? How can education be valued when the return on investment is too long to wait for some families who live day by day and depend on every member of the family to work to pay the bills?
Where does equality exist when it’s been documented that lending institutions treat people of color differently when granting loans or mortgages?
Where does equality exist when 90 percent of whites have a high school diploma versus 59 percent of Hispanics? Or that only 11 percent of all college students are Hispanic?
In an ideal world, all opportunities would be equal – education, housing, jobs but the truth is it just isn’t — not yet.
Can the system be trusted to correct these inequalities without oversight or forced maintenance?
Too many times, it’s proven that it can’t — simply because those in the majority don’t see that a problem, a.k.a. inequality, exists.
It happens every day and usually takes an act of Congress or a court order for people to react.
The latest case was the Dallas, TX elementary school principal who was cited by a federal judge for operating, at taxpayer’s expense, a private school for Anglo children within a public school that was predominantly minority.”
The principal was in essence segregating the children of color from the white students. She has until January 17 to correct it.
With situations such as these that exist in different pockets around the country, it’s obvious things are not equal.
But who will speak out on behalf of people who suffer these injustices — more than likely the ones who have walked in those same shoes.
