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From: Prof. Pearson
Date: 1/24/01
Time: 6:07:22 PM
Remote Name: 159.91.92.113
Chrisha raises an important question. There is a great deal of misinformation about affirmative action, and many other aspects of the history of race, class and gender in America. I came across an essay that does a nice job of deconstructing some of the distortions in the area of education. It's a tad dated (1999) but still useful.
HONOR TO THE CLASS OF ’69
REFLECTIONS ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION:
ITS ORIGINS, VIRTUES, ENEMIES, CHAMPIONS, AND PROSPECTS
by Paul M. Gaston
Thirty years ago — it was the spring of 1969 — University of Virginia students brought to a climax a new movement of positive action to acknowledge and confront the scourge of racism that tainted their university and denied justice and decent respect to their fellow citizens. Memories of that season of marches, midnight meetings, speeches, demands and counter demands, victories and compromises, came flooding in on me as I sat in a jammed-to-the edges auditorium in the spring of 1999. The out-of-town speaker condemned the University for what she called its practice of racial discrimination. "I don’t think you end discrimination by discriminating against new groups of people," Linda Chavez said. Our admissions policy, she claimed, "smacks of the kind of racism that has long plagued this nation." Then she told us that we must not "continue to judge people based on the color of their skin." Like other speakers across the nation at her end of the political spectrum, she told us that the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., was on her side, not ours.
I sank despondently in my seat, wondering how it was that this Orwellian Newspeak had spread virus-like through our culture. Looking about the room I wondered how many here had been infected by it, how many battles would have to be fought all over again. I wished for a time machine that would bring to the stage the young heroes of 1969. Their courage, clarity of moral purpose, and honest engagement with their past had broken the log jam of our common history. I don’t think the visiting speaker would have been a match for them. http://www.virginia.edu/~woodson/pubs/aa.htm