Reductio Ad Absurdum Weblog

Half-Baked Newspaper Editors

As usual, the local newspaper (which I not-so-affectionately call the Comical) misses the point on a recent conservative bake sale held at Texas A&M:

Conservative Texas A&M University students, joining a rash of student groups around the country clamoring for attention to their stance against affirmative action, held a bake sale at which buyers were charged different prices depending on their race or gender. The students got the spotlight they craved, but the message they sent fell flat.

The A&M students, members of the Young Conservatives of Texas, sold cookies to "humans" for $2, to Asians for $1, to whites for 75 cents, to Hispanics for 25 cents and to blacks for 10 cents in protest of the new diversity office on the campus, where whites make up about 85 percent of the student population.

Actions like these reinforce the common misconception that affirmative action policies give academically unqualified minority students a get-into-college free card, and they ignore historical discrimination that denied nonwhites opportunities to be successful at any price, no matter their talents or intelligence.

That's unfortunate if that's how the editors of the Comical interpret "actions like these," because that's not the point at all. Rather, the intention is to draw attention to the fact that when the government or an institution treats some people differently because of their race, they are treating some people differently by race! How hard is that to understand? And how hard is it to understand that those of us who hold the Declaration's statement "all men are created equal" as a self-evident truth are opposed to making such distinctions based on race, whatever the intent?

Yes, the political compromises of the Founding that allowed for slavery were a shameful episode in our nation's history. But that shameful episode does not render the central teaching of the Declaration any less true. And treating American citizens differently today based on their race -- no matter how noble the intent -- is still inconsistent with that central teaching of the Declaration.

THAT is the only point being made by the organizers of these bake sales.

[Posted by Kevin Whited] [11/22/03 08:00 PM]

Trackback

No trackbacks for this item. Use this trackback url to ping. (right-click, copy link target)

Comments

When the YCT did this at SMU a few months back, it elicited the same angry response ( http://www.drizzten.com/bla... ) from the left wing. *tsk tsk*

It must really burn them to see the racism they support to be stripped of the emotional pretense of "helping others."
[11/25/03 12:58 AM] [Posted by Charles Hueter]

I prefer the term, 'The Chronic.'
[12/02/03 12:48 PM] [Posted by Daniel]

Add Comments

HTML will be stripped. URLs will be transformed into hyperlinks.

[b]text[/b] will produce bold text. [i]text[/i] will produce italicized text.