Is a white-only scholarship fair?

[A Tripolation]

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/02/28/texas-college-scholarship-targets-white-male-students/

 

I tend to think it is. Especially when I know how true it is that minorities do get precedence over whites in many scholarships. Being half-hispanic (It's what I list on stuff like this. I couldn't get any more "white", though.), I'm offered more in the way of financial aid and scholarships and grants than my white-counterparts.

 

Do you think this practice is fair, or should things be focused on academic performance and financial need? I understand why they used to be necessary. Are they still needed, in your opinion? And is it fair to have a white-only scholarship?

Edited March 1, 2011 by A Tripolation

[lemur]

http://www.foxnews.c...-male-students/

 

I tend to think it is. Especially when I know how true it is that minorities do get precedence over whites in many scholarships. Being half-hispanic (It's what I list on stuff like this. I couldn't get any more "white", though.), I'm offered more in the way of financial aid and scholarships and grants than my white-counterparts.

 

Do you think this practice is fair, or should things be focused on academic performance and financial need? I understand why they used to be necessary. Are they still needed, in your opinion? And is it fair to have a white-only scholarship?

I used to be concerned about fairness in affirmative action. Now I just think of it as a method of marketing higher education. Higher education is an extremely lucrative commodity. People save for years and take out second mortgages to spend on their kids' education. To maximize revenue, you need to maximize the number of people willing to save up and spend on their kids' education. So when you do a statistical analysis of who is likely to skip college and go straight to work, foregoing all that tuition-spending, you target whoever you find for discount tuition because you hope that once they "taste" your product, they will be hooked and want to pay for it for their kids as well.

 

So is it fair for whites that they are denied the discount because they are the most well represented ethnic category in higher ed? No, but is it fair that higher ed cashes in on years of savings and that college students enjoy royal treatment due to their bestowed wealth? Generally, it seems to be just a game designed to allow people in their 20s the freedom to explore every possible facet of life before they settle down and have families that prevent them from exploring as freely. What does it matter who gets more of a discount on tuition and fees, when ultimately everyone ends up paying more for their kids than they got out of the system when they were students?

 

 

 

[CaptainPanic]

The color of your skin shouldn't have any relevance at all for a scholarship.

 

However, if a government makes a decision that a certain group (*) needs to raise their average level of education (especially when they have a historical reason for being poorly educated, and the country itself is to be partially blamed for that) - then I think it's acceptable to give them a priority for a certain amount of time. This should not go on indefinitely.

 

(*) It does not matter whether the group is defined along ethnic lines, religious lines or geographic, labor class, whatever...

Edited March 2, 2011 by CaptainPanic

[timo]

It's not exactly the issue A Tripolation wants to talk about, but a question that comes up in the context: does anyone know how "being white" (or "being hispanic", or "being <current politically correct term for black>") is determined/defined? Do the grant-givers judge that from photos, do you just have to convince the grant-givers that you belong to the respective group or are there really formal/official criteria?

[lemur]

The color of your skin shouldn't have any relevance at all for a scholarship.

 

However, if a government makes a decision that a certain group (*) needs to raise their average level of education (especially when they have a historical reason for being poorly educated, and the country itself is to be partially blamed for that) - then I think it's acceptable to give them a priority for a certain amount of time. This should not go on indefinitely.

 

(*) It does not matter whether the group is defined along ethnic lines, religious lines or geographic, labor class, whatever...

Racial/ethnic identity is bound up with class distinctions that continue despite the elimination of formal slavery over a century ago. So while some people claim to want to provide better educational opportunities to certain groups, this can have mixed meanings, imo. For example, it may just be that the people who support increased education are only doing so because they want to legitimate class differences as being the result of educational achievement instead of being a modernized system of caste stratification designed to preserve class privileges across generations. If you have a working class background, regardless of your ethnic identity, you have to ask yourself whether middle and upper class people are really willing to accept it if all working class people would gain sufficient education to disqualify them for menial jobs in services and industry. After all, if everyone is well educated, who has to serve whom in restaurants, etc.? So without some broader consciousness for the relationship between education, class-differentiation, and economic structuring; I don't see how broadening educational access is going to solve any social problems.

 

However, as I said, I don't think demographic scholarshipping in higher education is really all that concerned with economic restructuring. I think the goal is simply to get people to invest loads of money in sending their kids to college and the best way to sell people on the idea of devoting much of their life to paying for such an education is to give them one for free or at a discount. The more money you give some while they're in college, the happier their experience. So when you take someone whose parents have no experience of higher education and then you give them not only free tuition but also stipends of spending money so they can live well while leisurely consuming mind- and ego- stimulating learning materials, they will be likely to devote a great deal of time and energy to making and saving enough money to give their kids the same level of college experience they had. In short, it's marketing.

 

 

[A Tripolation]

It's not exactly the issue A Tripolation wants to talk about, but a question that comes up in the context: does anyone know how "being white" (or "being hispanic", or "being <current politically correct term for black>") is determined/defined? Do the grant-givers judge that from photos, do you just have to convince the grant-givers that you belong to the respective group or are there really formal/official criteria?

 

I've never been asked to prove that I was hispanic. They seem to take it on your word. Heck, I was even listed as Asian for the first year at my university because of a mistake made in Admissions. I was getting all sorts of letters from Asian groups on campus.

 

What does it matter who gets more of a discount on tuition and fees, when ultimately everyone ends up paying more for their kids than they got out of the system when they were students?

 

I have no intention of paying for my children's college. If they can't make the grades needed for scholarships and grants, I see no reason to help them. Many parents today feel the same.

 

It matters because I do not deserve more free money than some of my friends (based on my ethnicity. My Pell Grant allocation is more than theirs, and for good reason). My having a hispanic mother has not inhibited me in any way, or put me at any disadvantage. Yet, the government thinks that it has. How is this fair to the "whites"? That's what I'm asking.

[lemur]

It matters because I do not deserve more free money than some of my friends (based on my ethnicity. My Pell Grant allocation is more than theirs, and for good reason). My having a hispanic mother has not inhibited me in any way, or put me at any disadvantage. Yet, the government thinks that it has. How is this fair to the "whites"? That's what I'm asking.

It is neither fair to whites OR hispanics, to the extent that these are even mutually exclusive classifications. As I said, however, meritocracy and economic structuring is not geared toward fairness. It is geared toward generating systematic inequalities and refining inequalities in a way that makes them seem legitimate by endowing them with some institutionalized 'fairness' or something similar. What is generally fair about some people enjoying very privileged lifestyles and other people getting stuck with the jobs that perform the work of facilitating those lifestyles? Not much, but if you create a system of merit that says people who go to school and get good grades will not be excluded from highly-privileged jobs/salaries, people will accept it as a more or less natural social order.

 

There is a lot of criticism of class and ethnic privilege-differentiation, so one of the ways that the privileged classes resist abolishing such privileges completely is by "tokenism." Tokenism is often misinterpreted as a racist/bigoted term but what it actually refers to is the practice of creating diversity purely for the sake of legitimating a class of elite privilege. In other words, the economic elite believes that there is nothing wrong with maintaining class stratification as long as diversity is proportionately represented at each class level. They know that it would be economically impossible for everyone to enjoy the same elite privileges, but they don't want to abolish them completely, so they compromise by reducing or eliminating the effects of traditional preference and culture-differentiation on who attains an elite position.

 

Again, this system of stratification to preserve elite privileges is not fair to anyone so even if there were no ethnic-identity differentiation in admissions, funding, hiring, promotion, etc., it would still be unfair that some people have to work to provide privileges for others. Also, if all forms of corrected ethnic/gender/class preference were removed, this would not prevent more traditional forms of favoritism and social-cultural preferences from favoring people according to the same categories. In other words, the "ivory towers" have evolved as white cultural institutions and thus white culture tends to be preferred so they would continue to favor white students until sufficient societal resistance built up against them to either halt their funding completely or modify them into a form that favors wider demographics. People would not simply go on indefinitely supporting institutions that promote whiteness unless there was some unmissable economic value, in which case they would be maintained but taxed or otherwise burdened heavily with the task of providing for the people excluded to preserve their economic function.

Edited March 2, 2011 by lemur

[zapatos]

I don't know why it would be unfair for people to give money to any grouping they wish. It probably even falls under freedom of speech.

 

Here are some good ones:

 

"The only scholarship for left-handed students is the Frederick and Mary F. Beckley Scholarship of up to $1,000. This scholarship is awarded to left-handed students who will be attending Juniata College.

 

Tall Clubs International (TCI) offers a $1,000 scholarship for tall people.

 

The Zolp Scholarship is restricted to students at Loyola University in Chicago who are Catholic and whose last name is Zolp.

 

The Patrick Kerr Skateboard Scholarship awards one $5,000 and three $1,000 scholarships to skateboarders who are high school seniors with a GPA of 2.5 or higher on a 4.0 scale.

 

The Western Golf Association sponsors the Charles "Chick" Evans Jr. Scholarship for golf caddies.

 

The Icy Frost Bridge Scholarship at DePauw University is restricted to female music students who can sing or play the national anthem with sincerity.

 

The Coven of the Sacred Waters offers two scholarships for Pagan and Wicca students."

 

http://www.finaid.org/scholarships/unusual.phtml

[rigney]

It is neither fair to whites OR hispanics, to the extent that these are even mutually exclusive classifications. As I said, however, meritocracy and economic structuring is not geared toward fairness. It is geared toward generating systematic inequalities and refining inequalities in a way that makes them seem legitimate by endowing them with some institutionalized 'fairness' or something similar. What is generally fair about some people enjoying very privileged lifestyles and other people getting stuck with the jobs that perform the work of facilitating those lifestyles? Not much, but if you create a system of merit that says people who go to school and get good grades will not be excluded from highly-privileged jobs/salaries, people will accept it as a more or less natural social order.

 

There is a lot of criticism of class and ethnic privilege-differentiation, so one of the ways that the privileged classes resist abolishing such privileges completely is by "tokenism." Tokenism is often misinterpreted as a racist/bigoted term but what it actually refers to is the practice of creating diversity purely for the sake of legitimating a class of elite privilege. In other words, the economic elite believes that there is nothing wrong with maintaining class stratification as long as diversity is proportionately represented at each class level. They know that it would be economically impossible for everyone to enjoy the same elite privileges, but they don't want to abolish them completely, so they compromise by reducing or eliminating the effects of traditional preference and culture-differentiation on who attains an elite position.

 

Again, this system of stratification to preserve elite privileges is not fair to anyone so even if there were no ethnic-identity differentiation in admissions, funding, hiring, promotion, etc., it would still be unfair that some people have to work to provide privileges for others. Also, if all forms of corrected ethnic/gender/class preference were removed, this would not prevent more traditional forms of favoritism and social-cultural preferences from favoring people according to the same categories. In other words, the "ivory towers" have evolved as white cultural institutions and thus white culture tends to be preferred so they would continue to favor white students until sufficient societal resistance built up against them to either halt their funding completely or modify them into a form that favors wider demographics. People would not simply go on indefinitely supporting institutions that promote whiteness unless there was some unmissable economic value, in which case they would be maintained but taxed or otherwise burdened heavily with the task of providing for the people excluded to preserve their economic function.

 

I'm just the messanger! but I remember when intergration actually meant something. My God, it was a big thing some years ago. Happened to me in the military, to my children in school, and is happening to my grandchildren and great grandchildren as I speak. C'mon let's knock this benevolent B.S. off and get back to living. Sensible Blacks, Whites, Hispanics and whom ever, have come to realize that no one owes anyone a living today. Yes, there was a time when America was not fair to certain ethnic groups. And yes, we can put Blacks at the top of the list, after we acknoledge the desimation of an entire Indian Nation. I saw it and lived with it, but was too ignorant to understand it. That was sixty, seventy years ago. But then, when is enough; enough? When do we as a united nation say, "it's over"????? Edited March 2, 2011 by rigney

[Marat]

The basic idea of substantive due process is that distinctions can legitimately be made among people only if there are objective reasons which justify those distinctions. Thus a system which only provides health care for the sick, only provides scarce educational opportunities for the smart, or only provides free athletic training for the strong and agile is making fair distinctions, since these differences are relevant to the benefits granted or withheld. But a system which grants benefits based on race where this is irrelevant as a personal criterion for success or benefit in the opportunity offered is prejudicial. Our whole system of liberal government developed out of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, whose central political premise was that distinctions of birth were illegitimate reasons for privileging certain people over others. The new system of affirmative action, however, has created a new nobility of birth for minorities whose ancestors suffered discrimination -- but who of course have never suffered discrimination themselves, but only special advantages. So how does it make any sense to 'compensate' the grandchildren of those victimized by historical discrimination for a discrimination they never experienced themselves?

 

If the effects of earlier discrimination were inherited, then an argument could be made, but we know that this isn't true, since many groups which were severely discriminated against in the past, such as the South Asians, the Jews, the Irish, the Italians, the Japanese (interned during World War II), have all become quite successful only a few generations later.

 

Also, the fact that affirmative action ignores the enormous effect of poverty in denying people opportunites makes it an entirely illegitimate system. It winds up disadvantaging poor whites because it is stupidly but officially imagined that they were 'privileged' and it assumes that racial minorities, who might well have grown up wealthy, were from the start disadvantaged and now need some extra support in compensation.

 

The conflicted attitude of the country towards this whole issue can be seen in some university application forms, which state that no student may submit a photo with the application since this is necessary to avoid the possibility of racial discrimination (a holdover from the 1960s equality movement), but then on the same form asks the applicant to check off which race or subgroup of the 'new nobility' they belong to for special privileges.

 

The issue of whites-only and blacks-only scholarships has been adjudicated in Canada, where a blacks-only scholarship in Nova Scotia was approved by the court while a whites-only scholarship in Ontario, dating from the 1920s, was rejected. The reasoning was that since all racial minorities must necessarily be disadvantaged, while all whites must necessarily be advantaged, as every right-thinking person knows has to be true, discrimination against whites is fine while advantaging of racial minorities is acceptable.

 

The effect of decades of this system (affirmative action began circa 1968, so the grandchildren of people who benefited from affirmative action are still benefiting from compensation for 'historical discrimination' today) and its associated ideologies is that it has become a self-fulfilling prophesy, and boys are now starting to do worse than girls in high school math courses, and male whites at universities are starting to do less well than blacks -- at least where I teach. Treating people equally is a difficult balancing act to perform, and it is much simpler just to discriminate against a different set of people than before, which is no more justified than before.

[lemur]

I'm just the messanger! but I remember when intergration actually meant something. My God, it was a big thing some years ago. Happened to me in the military, to my children in school, and is happening to my grandchildren and great grandchildren as I speak. C'mon let's knock this benevolent B.S. off and get back to living. Sensible Blacks, Whites, Hispanics and whom ever, have come to realize that no one owes anyone a living today. Yes, there was a time when America was not fair to certain ethnic groups. And yes, we can put Blacks at the top of the list, after we acknoledge the desimation of an entire Indian Nation. I saw it and lived with it, but was too ignorant to understand it. That was sixty, seventy years ago. But then, when is enough; enough? When do we as a united nation say, "it's over"?????

Your post reminds me of the Lenny Kravitz song, It Ain't Over Till It's Over. Of course everyone wants racism to be over but it is such an elaborate complex cultural institution (or set of institutionalized knowledges and practices) that has evolved in so many ways for so long that it is doubtful that it will be over any time soon. In fact, I think what most people imagine when they imagine social life free of racism and other group-based identities and privilege is actually very far from free of those.

 

Imagine yourself a person who trades in cotton clothing in the 19th century, for example. Someone tells you that the cotton for your clothing is harvested by slave labor and they want to abolish slavery. You say, "great!" since you don't like the idea of slavery - but then your wholesale prices start going up and you try to raise your prices to compensate but then you lose sales. Your are losing revenue and you don't make the connection with the increase in the price of cotton in your supply chain. Let's say you end up losing your business and you get offered a job picking cotton? Do you take it? If not, who should? Some people would claim that making former slave owners pick cotton would be reverse racism, but doesn't SOMEONE have to do that job for the economic culture of cotton-clothing to continue?

 

So ultimately I don't think racism and its healing come down to interventionary measures ending so much as a point has to be reached in socioeconomic culture where ethnicity is a random variable in who does what kinds of work, makes what kind of income, lives in what kind of house, etc. That can't be achieved by tokenism because it leads to more problems. Really what has to happen is for people to re-assess the economy and what kinds of work EVERYONE is willing to do and then reform consumption and business culture in a way that ensures no one gets stuck with undesirable work because of cultural background issues. This could mean that people have to eat out less or clean their own hotel rooms and offices, but if that would eliminate the need for certain people to get stuck doing these jobs full-time, it would be worth it imo. Everyone should have the time and freedom to pursue education and cultural refinement, imo.

 

 

 

The new system of affirmative action, however, has created a new nobility of birth for minorities whose ancestors suffered discrimination -- but who of course have never suffered discrimination themselves, but only special advantages. So how does it make any sense to 'compensate' the grandchildren of those victimized by historical discrimination for a discrimination they never experienced themselves?

This is the problem with tokenism. It promotes the assumption among whites that ethnic minorities are inept, vulnerable victims of their historical cultural dominance. Using the word, "nobility" is spot-on here because it evokes (and provokes) visions of resentment of privilege and birthright that are demonized in republican (not the party) ideology. What's worse, imo, is that by making ethnic minorities into black sheep, all the other forms of birthright and privilege are camouflaged behind the veil of normalcy/naturalness. So, for example, someone who easily succeeds in law school because their father, two uncles, and an aunt are successful lawyers who always debated with them at family get-togethers is considered to have fairly won the competition against someone whose parents were trash collector and homemaker and their kid got a scholarship to go to university. That kid might have done better relative to her parents than the successful lawyer's father did relative to his parents when he was the first generation to go to college, but people will still consider her a failure who needed affirmative action because she wasn't as securely socialized into the legal culture from a young age as the person whose parents were lawyers.

Edited March 3, 2011 by lemur

[Mr Skeptic]

I've long considered affirmative action for black people to be somewhat justified due to historical considerations -- despite it being racism. However, it recently occurred to me that historical considerations, at least financial ones, could be accounted for far more accurately by considering historical records of a person's ancestors. One could automatically do a bunch of calculations based on a person's ancestors income tax returns, for example, to calculate a specific person's historical financial disadvantage. The same could be done with the neighborhoods lived in, to account for nasty effects of gang culture or whatever. Doing it this way would have the disadvantage of being more complicated, but the advantage of being based on actual reality instead of racism.

 

As for a whites-only scholarship, I'd find it distasteful but certainly fair given that we do allow racial discrimination for scholarships.

[Marat]

I have no problem with affirmative action programs that benefit people who have unquestionably personally suffered severe disabilities which deserve being taken into account in measuring how their actual capacities may have been disguised by personal misfortunes. In Scotland, for example, there is an affirmative action program in university admissions for students whose parents had never earned a university degree, which seems fairly designed to compensate for disadvantages generated by the familial environment. No one objects to the tax free status of blind people in the U.S., in contrast to their response to affirmative action programs.

 

But ideally, rather than compensating disadvantaged people by denying access to opportunities to non-disadvantaged people, it would be preferable simply to expand opportunities for the disadvantaged. Thus if a nation were to impose a higher tax on the wealthy -- since differential tax rates according to wealth are both morally and constitutionally acceptable -- in order to buy with this special additional set-aside opportunities for disadvanged people, like an extra ten seats in every medical school class, for example, then such a system would not be racist, discriminatory, or unfair, yet it would still answer any claims to compensation for discrimination.

[rigney]

This is the problem with tokenism. It promotes the assumption among whites that ethnic minorities are inept, vulnerable victims of their historical cultural dominance. Using the word, "nobility" is spot-on here because it evokes (and provokes) visions of resentment of privilege and birthright that are demonized in republican (not the party) ideology. What's worse, imo, is that by making ethnic minorities into black sheep, all the other forms of birthright and privilege are camouflaged behind the veil of normalcy/naturalness. So, for example, someone who easily succeeds in law school because their father, two uncles, and an aunt are successful lawyers who always debated with them at family get-togethers is considered to have fairly won the competition against someone whose parents were trash collector and homemaker and their kid got a scholarship to go to university. That kid might have done better relative to her parents than the successful lawyer's father did relative to his parents when he was the first generation to go to college, but people will still consider her a failure who needed affirmative action because she wasn't as securely socialized into the legal culture from a young age as the person whose parents were lawyers.

 

Personally, as one of those white eyed bastards of whom you speak, I would much rather have been 7' 1", and in the NBA making $20,000,000 bucks a year. Or maybe 6' 3", 220 lbs. @ $10,000,000 a year as a wide receiver for the Steelers. Barring that, 6' 1", 195 lbs. with a good arm and playing shortstop for the Yankees, would have been just fine. Don't get much better than that! And we needn't go into ethnecity for such a backdrop. Just count your blessings each day. Nope!, has nothing to do with religion or science. Only "Nature".

Edited March 4, 2011 by rigney

[A Tripolation]

As for a whites-only scholarship, I'd find it distasteful but certainly fair given that we do allow racial discrimination for scholarships.

 

This is my line of thinking as well.

[lemur]

As for a whites-only scholarship, I'd find it distasteful but certainly fair given that we do allow racial discrimination for scholarships.

I could see some advantages to this. First, it would maybe help eliminate the use of covert classifications for whiteness that are perhaps embedded in other scholarships that don't explicitly mention race/ethnicity. Second, if people self-identifying as 'white' would compete for a white-only scholarship and lose the competition against other whites, they would be less likely to complain about (reverse)discrimination than when they feel excluded from scholarships or admissions due to non-qualification for affirmative action assistance.

 

The disadvantages would be that either people would get stigmatized as white-supremacists for seeking white-only scholarships OR they would actually embrace white-supremacy as an ideology legitimated by the scholarship program, though it really depends on how it would be done, I think. The problem would also be that critics of racial inequalities would say that so many formally ethnically neutral assistance programs favor whites or whiteness that a white-only scholarship only further unbalances the playing field. What would really help the whole discussion, imo, is for people to formulate and discuss visions for what it would mean to have a truly level "playing field." This would, however, bring out a lot of discussion about white privilege, historical white-supremacism, and other issues that tend to trigger white-guilt and animosities. Then, people either start getting defensive/aggressive or they start apologizing repeatedly and lamenting how terrible racism is without taking any practical steps forward.