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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (67846)	1/22/2003 9:14:09 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

John, thought you might be interested in this letter that was written to Andrew Sullivan: As a victim of affirmative action, I think I know a little bit about just what happens to a Hispanic student at a prestigious university. I was accepted into an accelerated pre-med program at the University of California. My SATs were very good, as was my GPA. I graduated 4th in my high school class. Both of my parents were college-educated; my mother worked in a nuclear test lab, and my father was the proverbial Rocket Scientist. The high school I attended was a joke. All of the district's money, expanded programs, etc., were funneled into a different high school. I could not transfer there because Hispanics were "under-represented" at the school near my house, which was the one I did attend. We were supposed to have a special "gifted student" program, and we did indeed have one. It was co-ed PE. The good school had advanced math, languages, physics. We had volleyball. Every single semester started exactly the same way for me. I would get my assigned classes, then spend the rest of the day transferring into the ones I needed. It got to the point that all the teachers knew I'd be in the advanced class, so they'd save me a spot while I got transferred out of the remedial classes. Why was I always placed in the remedial classes? Well, with a Spanish surname, it was just impossible for me to be able to read or write. The other Hispanic kids simply went along with it, taking the path of least resistance. Over at the good school, which was 40 percent Hispanic, only three Hispanic kids were in the advanced classes. I was the only one at mine. When I started the accelerated program I was in deep trouble, and not because of my name. The high school had never had anything higher than elementary geometry for math, and so I was already a year behind. The counselors bluntly told me that the only reason I was in the program at all was because of my "heritage." After two years of that I transferred over to the English department. This is where it turned into a farce. I did not qualify for any scholarships because I was "too white". That meant that I did not have an accent, that my parents were not illegal aliens, that my grandfather did not use a burro to plow a bean field. Like most immigrants, my grandfather held a lot of different jobs in his life, but none that fit the correct mold. I could, however, get scholarships for Chicano Studies, Women's Chicana Studies, Latina Studies, Women in Chicana and Latina Literature, and so on. That I wanted to do serious work in Medieval literature was unacceptable. I didn't understand that I was the Other, that construct so beloved by the literary critics. Since I did not understand my place, I could not be funded. Grad school was surreal. I was soliciting letters of recommendation from my favorite professors. One, a man whose opinions I cherished, was startled to see that I had applied as a minority student. What he said has never left me. He said, "You? I never thought of you as a minority student!" His comment summed up the attitude towards minorities. Everyone "knows" that we are just being allowed in; everyone "knows" that we are there as window-dressing, not as serious students. How can we be serious? We have to have special departments just for us. We have to have the bar lowered, just for us. We can't really compete on equal footing. If we could, we wouldn't need to fill out minority student forms. If we were really equal, we wouldn't find out that professors expect less of us than they do of everyone else.