Friday, October 25, 2013

Is Your Race Card Valid









Honestly color blind racism is a bunch of bull, but you knew that already right? If you ask me it goes way beyond color. The basic idea of color blind racism is that when we look at a person, we should not look at the color of their skin but instead in the famous words of Dr. Martin Luther King we should “be judged by the content of our character. In chapter 4 of Racism without Racist, Bonilla Silva analyzes color blind racism racial stories. He takes a closer look at how Caucasians view affirmative action or in other words the government compensation to blacks for past discrimination. According to several of the testimonies given by Caucasians is Bonilla-Silva’s book, they feel that affirmative action was put in place because of what happened between our ancestors and the slavery era. They also feel that because they were not around during slavery that they should not have to “pay” for what happened and that everyone should move on with their lives because no other group, i.e. the Jewish has complained or been compensated for what happened to them. Discrimination rotates at 360 degrees. If a minority yells discrimination they are pulling the race card, if a white feels they were denied an opportunity, its automatically because they figure affirmative action was in place and a minority was rewarded. Here at Northern and many other universities, they have the chance program. The chance program is for students who probably did not perform all that well in high school but still are capable of succeeding in college. I have had several white people on this very campus ask me did I come in through chance. I didn’t even know what chance was but after being asked about it a few times I decided it was time to investigate. Majority of the people that I knew on this campus my freshman year were admitted through chance and after going to program presented by one of the orgs on campus I learned that supposedly, majority of the students in the chance program were black and that NIU was thinking about cutting the program because the students were not performing. I guess because I am black I am not supposed to be smart enough to be accepted through regular admissions. With that being said we all have our own story lines of what happened and what we seem to think is true and what we want to accept. In the case of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, Fisher believed that she was denied entry because of her race, but at the same time Fisher failed to meet the school’s academic requirements for automatic admission. Did she think for one second that maybe she did not qualify? What made it ok for Fisher to pull out her race card? If she were black would we automatically expect that it was a scheme and that this black person does not have the academic background to be admitted? Color blind racism will never work because there is no way to break the chain and we will continue to go back and forth about what happened then and what is happening now.

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