I will preview this discussion by saying that I have never considered myself to be a racist- you guys can decide if you think this is untrue. I currently live with a guy from Lesotho, and during my undergraduate years I spent 2 years living with good friends from Guatemala and Chile. I've never disliked anyone because of the color of their skin, nor have I ever jumped to immediate conclusions about someone before getting to know them because of their race/ethnicity.
I think that in theory, affirmative action is a great thing. It is a novel idea to make campuses diverse and have a mixture of people. However, in practice I believe it has truly failed. I attended Harvard as an undergrad, and so I will describe my experience there to give you all an idea of where I am coming from. I think that if two students are equally qualified for a school, giving the edge to one who is black over another who is white is not a bad thing- diversity is good. However, with affirmative action this never seems to be the case, and almost always it is a student of color less qualified getting the edge over a white/Chinese student who is qualified. A good friend of mine from California with Mexican background received a 27 on the ACT (not to overemphasize the ACT as a measure of intelligence) and was accepted into Harvard. I can honestly say that the cut-off for even considering Harvard at my high school was a 33. Now, does this have any real impact? I think yes. The students of color (Black/Latino) who were not international students (who I found to be some of the most brilliant and interesting students enrolled), as a whole performed significantly worse academically in my experience than did the non-colored students. In my freshmen year a large number of students took psychology 101, known as one of the least difficult classes on campus. That year I lived on a floor with 3 African-American students and 4 Latino students. The highest grade between the 7 of them was a B-. I can assure you that my white friends from the upper-middle class suburban town who were rejected from Harvard and ended up at a lesser school could have just as easily gotten an A in that class. Now, do students of color have significantly lower GPA's than those other students? I have not seen the data nor do I know that it exists. I would expect not, and the reason being that these students tend to (a quite surprisingly high percentage) pursue majors in Africana Studies and Latina/Latino Studies. I would be interested to see the breakdown of majors for different student elasticities. I took a class in the Africana Studies department my sophomore year and was shocked when I was one of three white students in a thirty-five student lecture. Because the professors much grade each student relative to the class as a whole, these classes tend to be incredibly undemanding and the same students who received C-s in psych 101 find themselves at the median in their Africana studies classes. I received an A in the course and can honestly say I have not done less work in a class since my early years of high school. I think that neither party (the school or the students of color) gain very much from an under-qualified student being thrown into an environment where their intelligence is in fact not comparable to the other students. The same students who were helped in because of their race were the ones complaining that they wished they had gone to state schools, avoiding any reasonably difficult class, and often feeling lost in an environment that did not allow them to excel.
As for my thoughts on racism. Racism is obviously very much prevalent in the U.S. predominantly in the South. I think often times people misinterpret many things for racism, however. During my college years I tended to find that the African American (non-international) students were more obnoxious, bothersome, and rude, as a whole. They were the ones shouting loudly and hollering across the library at late hours of the night during exam week, swearing at 2am in the student center, and generally being loud and at many times annoying. Are there plenty of white students who did the exact same thing? Yes, and they annoyed me just the same. However, the proportions were not equal, and so as a whole, during college I tended to not enjoy the company of most of the African-American students who went to my school. Did I still have African-American friends, eat lunch with them, hang-out. Yes. Not generalizing to the whole, just stating a finding that held true on average. Do I still wait to get to know anyone regardless of their race before making a judgment about them- I try my best.
