Kinja reply list

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RicwashJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:12pm
IT is unutterably sad to me that her parents did not sit her down and make her realize that she did not get in to the college of her choice because she did not earn it. Bottom line. These upper middle class parents need to get real with their offspring: race and money can only get you so far. Granted, it will get you farther than those without it, but still, after a certain point, you STILL are going to have to EARN what you think you deserve.

Entitlement is a helluva drug.
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  CisAwesomeRicwash
  6/28/16 4:15pm
  This is bizarre. You do realize that there are people who got in, of all races, with lower scores, correct? So why should she receive a message of “you did not earn it”. Because there is a POINT process that takes into account a host of other qualifications of which race is one. By your own logic her parents could tell her that she didn’t get in partly because she wasn’t black enough.
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  McScuseMeBitchRicwash
  6/28/16 4:17pm
  I wouldn’t be totally shocked if her parents were the ones who put this in her head. Mommy and Daddy were embarrassed that their legacy didn’t hold enough sway with the Admissions Office to get her in so “blame the coloreds” and don’t let her think she didn’t get in because their alumnus checks weren’t big enough.
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The Noble RenardJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:08pm
I hadn’t seen this comment from Fisher before:

There were people in my class with lower grades who weren’t in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin.

In light of the evidence that only 5 people of color with lower grades than her also got the provisional admission, it makes you think that Fisher really had no idea that those people had lower grades, she likely just saw that they were black or latino and she just presumed they had lower grades.

As always, it’s hard to find much to comment on a piece like this, because it’s very good and any real response to the piece as a whole would take me quite a lot of time and be way too long for this format.
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  SheeshTheseNamesThe Noble Renard
  6/28/16 4:10pm
  Ding ding ding
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  YoSupThe Noble Renard
  6/28/16 4:11pm
  That’s impossible, she said above that she doesn’t see race, so how could she have that unconscious bias? Obviously those five students were all her classmates.
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pre-emptive sighJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:11pm
I just moved to Houston for a job. I live in an area of Houston that apparently has a very good high school and my real estate agent was telling me all about how many people were trying to move so their kids could go. Since I have no kids, I moved a mile down the road, and I pay $200 less a month.Works for me.

I think that 10% rule could actually have some weird repercussions. Essentially, parents who think their kids are motivated enough can downgrade their school district and increase their odds of getting in.

Then there’s the whole issue of issue of charter schools which are a big thing around here. There’s a two year waiting list for some of these places, and I wonder if these parents are so motivated to get their kids into good schools, why don’t they work to make their current schools better?

Texas cuts education at every turn. Just a few weeks ago the state won a court case that allowed them NOT to channel money from rich districts to poor ones. Like the state is actually fighting to keep poor school districts poor.
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  Crispin Waughpre-emptive sigh
  6/28/16 4:16pm
  There’s plenty of speculation within the UT staff that parents are trying to place their kids in somewhat less competitive schools to game the 7% rule. Not the easiest thing to measure or study, but that definitely sounds like something a certain type of parent would do.
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  andsmokeit is mrs tormund giantsbaneCrispin Waugh
  6/28/16 4:24pm
  happens everywhere
  
  knew multiple kids from my hs whose parents encouraged them to take lower-level classes in order to pad their grades
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StoneMustardJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:13pm
When I was 16, I was paid minimum wage to participate in a reality TV show in Puerto Rico that included challenges like eating mayonnaise on camera with my hands tied behind my back.

Well now I can’t get past this one paragraph. The hell show is this? I first thought Fear Factor, but I don’t think they ever filmed in PR, and I think you had to be 18 to get on that show. My guess is this was something for MTV, but do they still let regular people on their shows?
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  JadedMoonStoneMustard
  6/28/16 4:21pm
  I have been pondering this as well and would be surprised if any American TV show allowed participants at 16. Doesn't mean it didn't happen, but it would surprise me
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  adultosaur married anna on the astral planeStoneMustard
  6/28/16 4:23pm
  right
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KarenJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:49pm
And still, when I got into colleges, I felt lucky. I never felt like I’d simply gotten what I deserved.

This whole piece, and especially that quote, really struck a chord with me. I grew up in a working class family and attended an elementary school in a predominately black and Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles. I earned a scholarship for all four years to a prestigious, private all girls high school. During my time there, it was hard not to notice the differences between me and my more privileged classmates, but I was lucky enough to make a big group of friends that made campus feel like home.

Anyway, fast forward to senior year, I had just been accepted to the University of Southern California and every Wednesday, seniors were allowed to wear college sweaters with their uniforms. I will never forget walking into my theology class that Wednesday morning, proudly wearing my USC sweater, still basking in the glow of my acceptance. At the table over, my (white, rich) classmate, whose father was a USC alum, who had only ever talked about going to USC, sat there pouting with her friends because she had been rejected. The words she said, clearly and purposefully loud enough for me to hear, are permanently seared into my brain even now, 5 years later: “I guess I’m just sorry I’m not poor and Latino with some sob story to get me accepted.” No, it didn’t matter to her that I had the grades, the SAT scores, the extra curriculars; I got into USC because I was “poor and Latino.” I know I deserved my acceptance...I just wish that girl could’ve understood that too.

p.s. I’ve been here quietly lurking the comments for months but this piece was so great, I felt compelled to share. :)
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  OtherKate8Karen
  6/28/16 5:18pm
  Oh man, yeah, that imposter syndrome... I was 2nd in my class and had high SAT scores and activities out the wazoo and worked all kinds of jobs on top of it, and I still believed it when I was told that I got into my undergrad institution because I’m female. I’m white, and it’s probably true that affirmative action does benefit white women more. But it sure does sting to have dudebros who didn’t do the work in school or anywhere really say that you wouldn’t have gotten in if you were a man when, you know, strictly by the numbers that you slaved to make, you would have...
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  LushOtherKate8
  6/28/16 5:30pm
  Bloody hell. I rage hard whenever someone insinuated I got my job because I was a woman (internally, can’t go setting off the delicate dudebros “bitch”-ometers). I got my job because I’m a bad-ass with a stellar resume who worked my ass off to both make it through university while taking an insane amount of extra-curriculars. I am not lucky to have my job in this shit economy, I earned the fuck out of it and no one gets to make themselves feel better by blaming my uterus for my success over theirs.
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Nina SwanJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:18pm
It bugs me just a bit that you felt you had to quit a lucrative gig because it offended your boyfriend’s finely tuned sense of social justice. From the way it sounds, you weren’t depriving a non-white student of a place at UT Austin; you were just indirectly helping prop up the delusions of adequacy of mediocre white students for a season. So, how much was your boyfriend making at the time, and how did he plan to help compensate you for the time you’d have to spend working instead of writing as a result of quitting this job?
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  randilynisFINDILYNNina Swan
  6/28/16 4:29pm
  That little part was a thing that makes you go hmmm for me. My first reaction was “you quit because you were mansplained about why it was wrong”. But then I took a minute and remembered that we look to others in our lives to tell us what we already know, or wish we knew in time. And had she disagreed he might well have just shrugged?
  
  And I also decided to go easy on the term mansplain. It gets too easy to get my hackles up sometimes.
  
  But like you, it was just a bit.
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  mazzieDNina Swan
  6/28/16 4:32pm
  Yeah this really bugged me. Like when I dated this guy I met in some activism circles who called me a sellout for pulling back on my activism and focus my time on going to grad school to become a librarian. A LIBRARIAN, of all things, was a sellout to him.
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Major Lazer Power BlazerJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:22pm
i actually kind of know her. we’ve never met(or even talked) but our fathers know each other. beyond racism, i just cant understand allowing my name to be attached to something so polarizing. the ego it takes to allow your name to be attached to this for the rest of your life is beyond comprehension to me. every job interview she ever goes on she will be the girl that tried to end affirmative action. i guess in the world she lives in this will get her positive responses, which is sad and pathetic.

idk this is a pretty meaningless comment. i just always wonder about the people that willing put their name on something so high profile that will get them sooooooooooooo much hatred
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  definitelynotaninternMajor Lazer Power Blazer
  6/28/16 4:30pm
  you can’t “kind of know someone” if you’ve never met them or talked ot them.
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  bublsortMajor Lazer Power Blazer
  6/28/16 4:33pm
  Well she was so young (and still is), encouraged by her family, etc. I feel bad for her in some ways. I think it’s very possible she will look back on this and really regret it.
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CisAwesomeJia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:21pm
The root reason that people disagree over this is that there is a conflict between whether a school should admit based on objective qualifications (test scores) or some combination of objective and subjective (are you a minority? are you a legacy?) criteria. Obviously you fall into the latter camp, so it’s dissonance for you to acknowledge that and in the same breath say that she did not have the chops to get in. The “chops” in this case are wildly subjective (race, extracurricular activities); if we were to consider it by what we can objectively measure, there are students who got in with lower test scores/grades than she.
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  kc2775CisAwesome
  6/28/16 4:36pm
  Those things can’t be measured as objectively as you believe. My high school didn’t offer a single AP class and the district had a policy that prevented anyone from having over a 4.0. There would be no way for any of us to compete with the people doing extra AP classes during the summer to get those 4.9 gpas. The test prep classes were also not available to us (this one has changed since I graduated). Merit based admissions arguments assume an equal playing field that simply does not exist.
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  GryphonMageCisAwesome
  6/28/16 4:44pm
  But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest those objective measurements are unreasonably skewed in favor of white kids. There’s a racial gap, and there’s also a financial gap.
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mollymlf05Jia Tolentino
6/28/16 4:57pm
This was fantastic, Jia. This sentence in particular really summed up the entitlement that exists among upper-middle-class, mostly suburban white people:

That, to Abigail Fisher—because she worked hard and is a nice white person whose parents have always had burnt-orange Longhorn pot holders hanging on the grill in their nice neighborhood with nice schools made possible by nice FHA policies that made possible a life in 2016 in which “diversity” could seem like a value that would hurt white people rather than assuage whatever it is in their soul that makes them this way—is wrong.
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  TheBurnersMyDestinationmollymlf05
  6/28/16 5:03pm
  I’ve said it before, but people like this really, really believe that there is a spot at the University of their choice with their name on it, and if they don’t get in it is because some brown person stole what was rightfully theirs. Not that they should have tried harder in school, or done extracurriculars that would have set them apart, or that they should have applied to a different school. No, it is because some totally unworthy minority “beat the system.”
  
  It is infuriating.
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  whatsapplemollymlf05
  6/28/16 5:13pm
  YES. The burnt orange/maize and blue/whatever color college paraphernalia around suburban white upper-middle class households is just straight nauseating.
  
  OK so this article (and the excerpt above in particular) raises an important ethical question: If the UT Austin admission criteria were entirely race blind and based only on standardized test scores (which are objective between different types of high schools), would Abigail have gotten in? And if the answer is yes, should we as a society punish Abigail by allowing UT Austin to use the 7% rule for admittance (and thus deny her entry) even though she was in no way directly responsible for the wrongs that we’re trying to make right?
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better red than deadJia Tolentino
6/28/16 5:14pm
I didn’t even apply to UT with a much better argument for admission - it’s the best school in Texas by a couple of leagues and even 15 years ago admission was pretty much a foregone yes/no conclusion for in-staters on the basis of GPA/class rank/SAT.

It’s not a little liberal arts college where a home run essay or recommendation can sway someone with real power to intervene.

The answer to all the problems (aside from mass executions of rich white people) is to not have UT be the only shining beacon in Texas (aside from A&M for some people aka Republicans who dress more than 60% of the time in camo). UT-Arlington and UTD are well positioned for climbing the ranks and both have become much more respectable over the years but there’s not a chance in hell of the UT Regents letting them become something approaching a challenge to the mothership’s dominance.
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  I'll Be Bachbetter red than dead
  6/28/16 10:42pm
  Not to be argumentative, but I assume you mean UT is the best public school in Texas “by a couple of leagues.” Rice is most likely the finest university in the state.
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  kiisselibetter red than dead
  6/28/16 11:58pm
  Hey I’m going to single you out semi-randomly for this question I have about the American college system. I get that the UT campuses (of which I’m assuming Austin is the main/best one) are ‘state’ schools. What, then, are schools named [state] Tech? E.g. Texas Tech, Virginia Tech, etc. I was under the impression that Texas Tech was also good....but does it not count as a ‘state school’ for some reason?
  
  Up here in Canada our universities are almost all decent, and then the good ones are very good. Also, we call them universities. We’ve got ‘college’ too, but ‘college’ up here is what I think is called ‘community college’ in the States....less academically vigorous, more oriented towards practical applicability? The nomenclature of higher education is dumb.
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