Posted on 08/12/2008 12:27:55 PM PDT by Tolik
Maureen Dowd recently preened that Obama "didn’t even tell Harvard Law School that he was black on his application." To the extent that her own research led her to believe this, or she would know accurately, one should still wonder why in the world Barack Obama, the child of a white woman and African father, would check the affirmative action box? When he applied to law school, there was nothing in the circumstances of his birth or even his upbringing up to then that located him in the African-American experience.
Obama's recent evocation of some sort of reparations, the resurgence in talk about affirmative action, current ballot measures, etc. should remind us of how unworkable a system it has become. As a veteran of two decades on hiring committees in the CSU system, I can attest that the rules and regulations of affirmative action were Byzantine, and not always based on the presumption of a past American history of racist oppression.
Hispanic elites from Chile and Argentina often qualified, whether officially or not. Meanwhile, Mexican-Americans felt that foreigners with work visas were accenting their names and simply piling on, despite their prior privileged lives back home in Santiago or Buenos Aires. Despite Hispanic-sounding last names, no one knew what to with the Portuguese and the Basques; both groups were usually seen as more affluent than the so-called 'white' minority. A student called Joe Smith could be the son a Mexican illegal alien and still seem far less a minority than Jose Castillo, a fifth-generation Chilean alien who was schooled in the US and decided to stay on.
We had a variety of recent immigrants from the Caribbean as professors and students, almost all from affluent families. One can imagine the problems of others supposedly with 3/4, 1/2, 1/8 black or Hispanic ancestry. What qualifies as a minority, and who ascertains it in the post-Ward Churchill era? Many of our white students with parents from the Oklahoma diaspora rightly claimed American-Indian heritage, albeit in the 1/16th to 1/8th range. The Asian problem was even weirder — 3rd-generation affluent Japanese, no? But the Hmong immigrant of 10 years, yes? The recent Taiwanese arrival, no? More likely, there were de facto Asian quotas — given the ability of such minorities in many fields to outperform almost everyone else and thereby become "overrepresented" in the UC system.
Bumper-sticker identification was unfortunate. The half-Hispanic student with Wilson as his surname never could obtain the authenticity that his counterpart with a Hispanic father received. Accented and hyphenated names, and renaming, were common, in addition to occasional ethnic dress. By the 2004, I think any original justification that groups whose ancestors had suffered historical discrimination qualified for redress was dropped, and informally it became a spoils system based on faulty perceptions of race — sort of a counterpart to the legacy system of the Ivy League that helps the offspring of wealthy alumni (which oddly, or rather logically, became a 'they do it too' argument by affirmative action's desperate adherents).
The corollary argument that someone of African or Caribbean ancestry, without ancestral claim to America's purported racist past, deserves some sort of compensation in the here and now on the basis of present public racism and discrimination fails utterly. There is a variety of other "people of color" — Arabs or Punjabis for example — who may, in fact, be more readily identifiable in the public domain as non-white and yet qualify for no such exemptions. One could go on, but here we are again in another racial absurdity of suggesting that Obama at some point in his career nobly chose not to suggest he was deserving of affirmative action, when in fact there would be no logical or ethical reason why he should.
In short, the entire Affirmative Action industry, however well-intended its origins, has gone the way of the Soviet bureaucracy as a sort of arbitrary racial nomenklatura that benefits mostly elites — self-contradictory, hypocritical, illogical, and finally unworkable.
Let me know if you want in or out.
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Can I see a copy of the application to Harvard that Barry Obama filled out??? If MoDo has seen it and can quote from it, then I’d love to see her copy and what else he lied about.
Just a note for those in the know. ‘Barry’ (as he appears in his yearbooks) was a white kid until he got to Chicago and learned about black America. Talk about your ‘two Americas’, Barry had to get his Barack on real quick or he would have had no future in So Chitown. Still don’t understand why he fell upon Chicago after Harvard Law. Makes no logical sense.
Affirmative Action has always been a racial spoils system administered by white liberal guilt.
Affirmative Action is the feces in the American stew.
I hate to state the obvious, but with the name on the application being Barack Hussein Obama-Soretoro why would you need to apply for affirmative action and bring it to their attention.?
Wouldn’t that be gilding the lily-white admissions office, especially at Harvard.
“I hate to state the obvious...”
...but there are rules.
I’ll bet he checked the box that asked if he is the son of an alumnus. That led them back to everything they needed to know.
Rules are rules.
With the name Barack Obama there is no admissions officer who would assume the applicant was white, i.e. not entitled to an affirmative advantage.
Thanks. I’m satisfied...
...that proper decorum has been maintained.
He did not have to check a box ... his name said it all.
(Not that I'm complaining, you understand.)
And here’s another question, Maureen. Why did a kid who never knew a “poor” day in his life and who graduated from Harvard law, feel he had to become a creation of the Chicago Daley machine in order to make a living? Interesting, if politically incorrect to bring up is the fact that without the “assistance” of the most corrupt political organization in the US, the Obamessiah would still be Barry something-or-other and certainly not the Messiah! And without the fawning worship of a sell-out media, his presidential aspirations would exist only between himself and his bathroom mirror. Gee, what a talented guy, huh?
He was a "Community Organizer" in Chi BEFORE Harvard. He was a protegé of the Ayer family, as was Michelle, who was firmly under the wing of Bernadine Dohrn.
The Ayer family law firm employed the girls and Obama, and of course supported Ayers and Dohrn when they were on the run after their career as bombers.
Even if you don’t check the box, the colleges look for your activities and infer from that your race.
Obama running for president is affirmative action in the news.
Makes all the sense in the world.
Who was Obama's childhood mentor? Frank Marshall Davis.
Where was Frank Marshall Davis from? Chicago.
And what did Frank Marshall Davis do in Chicago? Aside from being a full-time Communist and part-time poet, he was a labor agitator and a "community organizer". Frank Marshall Davis worked with and admired Saul Alinsky.
Gerald Hallman also worked with and admired Saul Alinsky. And it was Gerald Hallman who, upon Obama's arrival in Chicago, awarded him with a job as a "community organizer".
William Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn were also part of the radical socialist scene in Chicago. And, for what it's worth, David Axelrod, Obama's campaign manager, also ran in the same circle.
Obama ended up in Chicago because that's the way it was planned.
Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but....WHO planned it?
I can see all the reasons for being in Chicago because of all the seedy corruption going on there. But why not Philly? Boston? Honolulu? Is Frank Davis alive and told Barry to go get a job in Chitown?
Also, I get all the connections you made and those are all pretty much facts on the record. But the one which I don’t have an actual source for is the first one where Barry is told to go to Chicago. Does this come from his book? (which I’ve simply not bothered to read since I’ve got 1.073 other books ahead of his on my interest list - currently).
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