Even for those thousands of young people who don’t get something out there, the process is still a noble one — the process of trying to say something, of working through craft issues and the worldview issues and the ego issues — all of this is character-building, and, God forbid, everything we do should have concrete career results. I’ve seen time and time again the way that the process of trying to say something dignifies and improves a person.

This is so right to me. We all strive to be heard, and the process of getting to where we feel like we have something substantive to say is a hard one. But it’s one more people should tackle, more often, not less.

Source

Via Colorlines:

Morehouse College, the nation’s most well-known all-male college for black men, announced this week this week announced a new course focusing on LGBT pop culture, history and society.

This is good news, and potentially a major step forward for HBCUs. I love that they are approaching this from historical prospective as well. Just within the civil rights movement there unsung LGBT heroes. Let alone wider society. A key component of progress is understanding, and nothing fosters better understanding like knowledge of history. Many props to Morehouse.

Richard Kahlenberg writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Set aside the fact that American universities have no dearth of privileged students of any colors—86 percent of African-Americans at selective colleges are middle or upper class—or that those minority students most likely to be admitted without a preference are those from wealthy backgrounds. To most Americans, the privileged minority student is the very least sympathetic affirmative-action case, which helps explain why President Obama has said his own daughters do not deserve a racial preference in college admission.

Justice Alito pressed on. Does a minority applicant whose parents are successful lawyers and are in the “top 1 percent of earners in the country” deserve an admissions preference over white and Asian applicants from families of more modest means? Gare’s eventual response, “we want minorities from different backgrounds,” spurred Justice Kennedy to comment, “So what you’re saying is that what counts is race above all.” Justice Kennedy continued, “The reason you’re reaching for the privileged is so that members of that race who are privileged can be representative, and that’s race.”

Emphasis mine. Kahlenberg is very knowledgeable on these issues, and has edited a book on the subject. So I can’t understand why he doesn’t bring up affirmative action for the most privileged of all when it comes to college, legacies. To say that “privilieged” minorities are the least sympathetic in AA cases, and not contrast or ask why the same isn’t true for legacy admissions is a massive oversight.

I agree with what Laura Stampler wrote in The Nation in 2010:

…legacy preferences seem to clearly violate basic notions of fairness and equity

Maybe I’ll take attacks on race based Affirmative Action seriously when I see legacy admissions being challenged all the to the Supreme Court.