Fight The Good Fight Against Affirmative Action

22 Mar, 2004 by John Hawkins

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I have to give a big RWN salute to the college Republicans at Roger Williams University for helping to expose Affirmative Action for what it is — a vile, discriminatory, practice that is every bit as immoral as Jim Crow laws were even if it does nowhere near the same amount of damage. Here’s what they did and a little sample of the furor it caused…

“On the sleepy coastal campus of Roger Williams University, a small liberal arts school unaccustomed to student activism, the College Republicans are reveling in the debate they’ve kicked up by offering a scholarship for whites only.

The $250 award — which required an essay on “why you are proud of your white heritage” and a recent picture to “confirm whiteness” — has invited the wrath of everyone from minority groups and school officials to the chairman of the Republican National Committee himself.

….(Jason Mattera), who is of Puerto Rican descent, said the scholarship was a parody of minority scholarships. Mattera himself was awarded a $5,000 scholarship from the Hispanic College Fund, he said.

“Those who come from white (descent) are left to find scholarships on their own,” Mattera said.

The whites-only scholarship generated national publicity, which angered university officials and many students who worried their school was being labeled as racist. Minorities make up less than 10 percent of the 3,400 full-time undergraduates.

….The scholarship was criticized by the state Republican Party and Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee. In a Feb. 17 letter to Mattera, Gillespie said the scholarship conveys a “message of exclusion” that doesn’t represent the party’s values. He suspended the group’s right to use the party’s symbols.

(School President Roy Nirschel), who says he’s eager to attract more minority students and faculty members, called the scholarship “repugnant” and convened a town meeting on campus he said attracted more than 500 people.

The meeting, he said, was the first of its kind in the university’s history.

His commission on civil discourse includes faculty and student members and has already decided to organize a debate team and create a journal. “This has caused me to redouble our efforts to make the campus open,” Nirschel said.”

Like those race based cookie sales that have sprung up at colleges around America, this scholarship exposes the Affirmative Action for sham that it is. Too often today, we’ve allowed race hustling, poverty, pimps like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Julian Bond, & Kweisi Mfume to define “fighting for Civil Rights” as discriminating against people based on race. We should have stood up against that practice as a society and said that it was wrong a long time ago.

For example, today in 2004, how in the world can we justify telling a dirt poor white kid without a racist bone in his body that he’s not allowed to compete with Michael Jordan’s son for a scholarship because his skin is the wrong color? How do you look somebody in the eye who was born in 1982 and tell him that he can’t have a job he’s the best qualified applicant for just because he’s white?

Affirmative Action is an ugly product of a bygone era that should have no place in 21st century America. Race based discrimination is wrong no matter what color it’s aimed at and it’s great that the college Republicans up at Roger Williams University found such a creative way to get that message across.