‘White students are not victims of discrimination’
A student newspaper is condemning the Trump Department of Justice’s investigation into anti-white discrimination in higher education, claiming the matter is “frustrating and outright degrading to students of color.”
The fact that Attorney General Jeff Sessions is investigating affirmative action-based racial discrimination against white students is “like a work of satire,” according to University of Southern California sophomores Zoe Cheng and Kylie Cheung in the school’s Daily Trojan newspaper.
“[A]t a time when cries of ‘reverse racism’ are becoming increasingly prevalent,” the writers claim, “it is unsurprising” that the Justice Department is investigating claims of anti-white racism in college admissions.
The writers claim that the Justice Department’s investigation “loops in a racial minority: Asian Americans.” The Department of Justice’s focus on a 2015 complaint leveled at Harvard over the matter of Asian admission numbers, the writers assert, is merely a facade: “[T]he idea that some Asian American students may be denied admission to a university for no other reason than their race is…clearly not a priority for this administration.” These Asians are allegedly “excluded from Trump’s narrative of perceived white oppression.” The Department of Justice, they claim, is executing “a tactic as transparent as it is manipulative:.”
“Colorblindness” is a game only the privileged can play: Young black boys who misbehave in the same way their white peers do face graver disciplinary actions in their schools as children. They grow up to be statistically far more likely to be singled out by police. It’s impossible for them to ignore the color of their skin. Similarly, Asian-American students who suffer from anxiety and other mental health disorders at higher than average rates, largely as a result of being held to standards dictated by the “model minority” stereotype can’t be “colorblind” either. And ultimately, the same could be said for every group except white people.
At the heart of opposition to affirmative action is a sense of frustration toward universities for refusing to overlook the past — a past in which people bought and sold other human beings because of the color of their skin, a past strained with segregation, lynchings and systemic, race-based denial of meaningful opportunity. Institutions of higher learning will not ignore a present colored with targeted police brutality and intergenerational poverty. In this very real past and present, white students are not the victims but the beneficiaries of inequality. Through generations of enjoying implicit and, at times overt, advantages, the pursuit of equity has become misinterpreted by white affirmative action opponents as oppression.
“[A]s for white people being denied opportunity for being white,” the writers claim, “Jeff Sessions need not look further than President Donald Trump’s cabinet — stocked with more white males than that of any other U.S. president since Ronald Reagan — for some stark evidence to the contrary.”
MORE: Prof: Trump administration fighting affirmative action ‘reinforces white supremacy’
MORE: Professor denounces affirmative action: ‘Very damaging to blacks, other minorities’
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