<p>This is not the same as once confusing two redheads.<br>
Read the whole thread and see what some of the “innocent” comments are here.<br>
All this would have been a lot simpler if the reaction were simply, “Wow, I didn’t realize that.” But no, it has to get convoluted with all sorts of other…assumptions. Read the whole thread and see if your own attitudes place you on your intended side of this talking point.</p>
<p>EK, I think you’re unintentionally making assumptions about Seattle African Americans, just like the Harvard kids are showing happens on a broader scale. You say “For the African Americans who BOTHER showing up…” implying that most don’t attend school board meetings. Well, on a popular local blog, activists have been complaining for years that the meetings are not timed for working individuals. That is true. I have been to meetings set later in the south end and they ARE in fact, well attended. But someone reading your post might think, “Well, those black parents just don’t CARE.”</p>
<p>And you say they complain that the AP and honors courses are “too hard”. Someone reading that might think, “Those Seattle blacks just want to skate through school…” But instead, at meetings I have been to, Black parents have complained for YEARS that their kids are discouraged from taking advanced courses, are counseled out when they run into the first sign of difficulty, and are assumed to be less literate (like some of the Harvard kids). Also, when Cleveland became a STEM school, some folks predicted the rigor would chase away the “struggling black students” and be filled with white kids (implying they’re smarter). But instead, it’s had a waiting list and is full of south Seattle black students. Some even chose it over private HS they’d been expecting to attend. As well, Rainier Beach now has an IB program, deliberately created by the African American families that go there. </p>
<p>Lastly, there has been a racial divide at Garfield for decades. The school overall isn’t racist but there isn’t a lot of mixing between the general ed mostly black population and the AP-heavy white population. Even in sports the divide is there-if you looked at the kids sitting in the stands at the basketball playoffs, you saw the kids sitting in two distinct groups-one black, one white. </p>
<p>But someone taking your word for it might think all of the above people are just whiny liars who want easy classes. And that’s how you end up with kids at Harvard and elsewhere getting the comments they get.</p>
<p>I worded that poorly.
Very few parents ever show up,& for the parents that do, it is a real commitment.
I agree that schools and the district need to consider that if parent involvement is important, then they need to make it easier for parents to be involved.
It takes a cultural shift for some groups to recognize that if they don’t show up, then administration reasons that they don’t care or that they are content with status quo.</p>
<p>Garfield offers AP courses to anyone who is prepared to do the work.
Unlike some high schools where you cannot take advanced courses until you are at least at grade level in all subjects, Garfield permitted my daughter and her friends to take AP while they were also in remedial courses.
The teachers also worked with them during lunch and before and after school so that even if they started 9th grade 2 yrs behind in a subject, they were at grade level in two more years so they could finish with the classes they needed for college.</p>
<p>ucbalumunus - Don’t think so. My husband had been in this band for a while and they were going to McDonalds. So, what else would you order. Oh yes, the healthy salad option. 
It was definitely in reference to the way he asked. He wasn’t reading anything into it. I was there. Also FWIW, I am the first person to give people the benefit of the doubt as I tend to walk through life with rose-colored glasses and do not ascribe behaviors to a given group of people.</p>
<p>sbjdorlo - My son who speaks eruditely, composes, listens and plays classical music, sings a cappella and writes poetry, has also heard the whitest black man more than a few times and he is only 18. It also doesn’t bother him. The point is that it DOES bother some people. So, if it bothers them, why can’t people recognize that it is probably not the best thing to say. </p>
<p>I agree with lookingforward, this would have been much simpler if people would have said, “Wow, I didn’t realize that” and made a mental note to not do it the next time. </p>
<p>I agree comments like “you are the whitest black man I know” are not very nice ways to talk, and can be offensive. But offensive and racist are two different things. </p>
<p>I agree that offensive and racist are two different things. I think that the signs held up ran the gamut from ill-conceived to offensive to racist. Whether or not we can agree on where the statements fall on the spectrum, I would hope that we could all agree that once we were informed that these statements are not acceptable to some people, that we would refrain from using them in the future. </p>
<p>PG, the emphasis on racism or being called racist really magnified on this thread. This thread. There is a fear among many that a simple error means they are racist. But, in their own ways of defending themselves, some do show how they freely categorize others. Or how easily they dismiss someone else’s complaint. An odd sort of forgiving the doer and blaming the person who calls for awareness.</p>
<p>EK, I get what you meant then, about the school board meetings. But I’ve seen posts on the blog before about there being no PTAs in S. Seattle, parents who don’t care, etc. so I did think that’s where you were coming from. </p>
<p>It’s great that your daughter was able to take AP classes and remedial together. But it was at the same time she was there that I sat at a special meeting between black parents and the district at which several complained that their kids had been told maybe they needed to rethink their intent to take AP classes. D has several friends there now and some DO take AP, so it’s improving. </p>
<p>D did have a friend who was ready for advanced math courses & both her parents had to push to get her in.( at another school)
D also applied for one of the few support programs at the school that did not require students to be a minority and we were turned away after a rather snippy interview with the teacher who led the program. ( who happened to be AA).
If my experience had ended there, I may have thought it was a racial slight, however several of Ds friends had this same teacher for another class and her expectations for some of the students were unreasonable, which were reflected in the grades. So my final conclusion was she had her favorites & everyone else could suck eggs, nothing racial about it.</p>
<p>The fact that the district would take a meeting with parents who were trying to get appropriate classes is promising, although there are still groups, like SPED who are fighting for their legal rights and the district bately acknoledges them.</p>
<p>I looked up coverage of the “I too am Harvard” piece on the Harvard Crimson, and they mentioned it was in response to the following Crimson article on affirmative action: <a href=“Affirmative Dissatisfaction | Opinion | The Harvard Crimson”>http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-snollygoster/article/2012/11/2/Siskind-affirmative-action/</a></p>
<p>My biracial D is a senior in HS. She has been the only student of color in her grade most years, in a small, suburban school district. She has been asked if her hair is “real,” had her curls pulled, and told she’s “not really black.” In a class this year the teacher asked if anyone agreed with “white privilege” and she was the only one to raise her hand. She actually confronted the class on it and another student looked at her and said “you make it harder for us to get into college.” WOW.</p>
<p>This is the belief - my D with the 4.2 gpa, 2200 SAT, taking 4 AP classes this year, with tons of leadership positions and awards makes it harder for others to get into college. Yes, she has been heavily recruited by some top LACs (accepted to Bowdoin yesterday with an early write.) But she EARNED it every step of the way.
Those Harvard students are pointing out a hard TRUTH about present day society we don’t want to recognize. </p>
<p>Most people don’t have a clue.</p>
<p>I think this thread was helpful. It illuminates the thinly veiled racism that still pervades American society. And it figures that racists are now labeling their racist comments as “only offensive, and inadvertently so”. What a crock.</p>
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<p>They may be correct, but not for the reason they think. If she outranks them and is applying to colleges which use class rank in admissions, or otherwise prefer not to admit too many from the same high school, she pushes them down in class rank just by being a better student than they are – the reason that they are probably not willing to admit.</p>
<p>But see, collegealum, I think it is a problem to cite that article as an example of something pernicious that black students are up against.</p>
<p>That student wrote an opinion piece. I don’t happen to agree with her opinion. At the same time, if there is an acknowledged policy of giving admissions preferences to a certain group of students, a student has every right to write a measured argument against that policy. That doesn’t make her a racist. It also doesn’t mean she is responsible for creating a hostile environment for black students. In one of the articles, the student who organized this project mentioned the administration’s “lack of response” to the article. But what, really, should the administration have done?</p>
<p>Certain problems have a remedy, and certain problems don’t. I can see how an African-American student, knowing that some people oppose Affirmative Action, might feel extra pressure to prove him or herself - but there really isn’t any cure for that that isn’t worse than the disease; either you’d have to end AA or you’d have to completely silence all dissenting voices in society. I’m not prepared to advocate for either. </p>
<p>More generally, while we can and should combat both systemic racism and more insidious prejudices, as long as we do have a society in which there are a variety of groups with distinct identities, one thing we really can’t do is protect minorities from feeling like minorities. Yes, Harvard students should know better than to all turn and stare at the one black student in the class when the issue of race comes up, to the extent that is actually going on. But we live in a country that is only about 13 % black. Harvard’s population isn’t all that much lower. Even if it were precisely equal to the population distribution as a whole, that means there would be plenty of seminars in which there would only be one or two black students, and plenty of situations in which a minority student would feel the difference between their cultural context and that of their peers (a difference that would lead, naturally enough, to questions). That feeling is valid, and there is no reason not to express it. But don’t act as if your sense of difference is a matter of social justice. </p>
<p>I don’t think there is anything wrong with expressing your truth, or with asking people to examine their own assumptions. But this project is being framed in a more polemical way than it seems to me may be warranted. </p>
<p>This: “the difference between their cultural context and that of their peers” – is an interesting statement. The student in question may not have any difference in their “cultural context”. The student is an American student. The postulated difference in the culture of that American student and the culture of “their peers”, whom are also American students, may actually be nothing. The criteria for sorting that American student and those other American students is based on skin tone and certain physical features that American culture has decided is a racial categorization.</p>
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<p>Ending race-based affirmative action in some states (including in the state universities’ admissions processes) does not seem to stop people (including on these forums) from believing that there is still a substantial “hook” based on race at the state universities in question.</p>
<p>Most people make assumptions about how affirmative action works. Most people still look at SAT scores as the primary determinant. Most people haven’t seen apps and don;t know the combination of strengths adcoms look for.</p>
<p>Most just assume it’s about grabbing as many URMs as the school wants, like some vapor comes over adcoms.</p>
<p>No, most people assume that it involves people getting admitted who wouldn’t have otherwise without the race factor.</p>
<p>^Yes, most people “assume.” I almost quoted our past arguments. If we go back to SAT numbers and what some insist they predict or the value of that to adcoms, this thread will go in deeper circles. As I said, there is a longstanding thread for “all that.”</p>
<p>Well, a person I know well that lives in my neighborhood did get into Harvard. This neighborhood is your typical middle class neighborhood with an average of 120k income. His basic highlighted stats were as follows:</p>
<p>-33 ACT
-3.6 uw GPA
-All-state debater
-NHS president
-Probably great essays, he’s a pretty good writer
-During the summer he did a summer program that wasn’t very selective
-Black</p>
<p>Outside of the URM status, compared to the results threads posted around CC, this application does not look great. I know that this is just anecdotal evidence, but honestly other URMs that post their results on CC have applications that simply are not as good as the stats of others, especially ORMs. Results threads have their shares of trolls, but how can anyone deny that URMs obtain a substantial advantage?</p>
<p>I will probably have the same stats he will once applications start. The only difference is that I will have higher scores and GPA, be captain of a varsity sport, captain of SciOly team, not in debate, and am Asian. Yet, clearly I have no chance at Harvard. It’s OK if you argue AA is OK. It’s not OK if you argue that it is not a big factor.</p>