Thursday, October 11, 2012

Is It Racist to Focus on Race? | Mother Jones

Is It Racist to Focus on Race? | Mother Jones: Three white lawyers argued before a mostly white Supreme Court on Wednesday about whether the University of Texas-Austin's admissions process—designed to diversify its student body—discriminated against a white applicant.

Abigail Fisher, the 22-year-old who says she was denied the education she wanted because she is white, wouldn't have gotten in anyway—her grades and scores weren't good enough, at least according to UT. Fisher graduated from Louisiana State University earlier this year, but she still wants her UT application fee back because, her attorney argued, her rights were violated by a process that saw her as a racial category rather than a human being. Fisher's tale doesn't exactly have the gravity of Linda Brown walking a mile out of her way to attend school because the state of Kansas saw black people as racially inferior to white people, but for some critics of affirmative action it's almost the same thing. After all, half of white people in the United States see racism against whites as just as much of a problem as racism against minorities.