QUEERING THE GAME OF LIFE

"The new myth is that the world is full of black Americans prospering unfairly at white expense, and anecdotal evidence abounds. The stories about the incompetent black co-worker always leave out two things: the incompetent white co-workers and the talented black ones. They also leave out the tendency of so many managers to hire those who seem most like themselves when young.

‘It seems like if you’re a white male you don’t have a chance,’ said another young man on a campus where a scant 5 percent of his classmates were black. What the kid really means is that he no longer has the edge, that the rules of a system that may have served his father well have changed. It is one of those good-old-days constructs to believe it was a system based purely on merit, but we know that’s not true. It is a system that once favored him, and others like him. Now sometimes — just sometimes — it favors someone different."

Anna Quindlen (via wretchedoftheearth)

(via thatneedstogo)

"What my research makes clear is that we cannot blame affirmative action for the fact that professional students who are members of underrepresented minorities tend to have lower grades and professional awards. Asian students, who are considered an overrepresented minority and are not eligible for affirmative action, also often underperform during professional schooling, despite exemplary college grades, because they suffer from identity dissonance at professional schools. … Thus, affirmative action neither produces nor reduces the underperformance caused by identity dissonance. Eliminating affirmative action would reduce diversity among professional students populations, which would be unfortunate. However, the existence of affirmative action is not enough to produce racial equality in the professions—to ensure equality in professional rewards between all demographic groups, something must be done to address the problem of identity dissonance."

Cary Gabriel Costello, Professional Identity Crisis: Race, Class, Gender, and Success at Professional Schools (via feministsociology)

(via ethiopienne)

cognitivedissonance:

Caption: Students Kritz Eliza and Taylor Matzen, dressed as American Indians, participate during a bake sale led by the Berkeley College Republicans Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011, at the University of California campus in Berkeley, Calif. The Berkeley College Republicans have scheduled a bake sale where the price of a cookie or a brownie depends on your gender and the color of your skin. The price of a baked good costs $2 for white people, $1.50 if you’re Asian, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women get a discount of 25 cents. From SFgate.com

Wow. White girls in headdresses, participating in the bake sale. Are they trying to get free cookies or what? This is the insensitivity supported by the UC Berkeley Campus Republicans and their bake sale. From the article:

The Republican students said offering more expensive pastries to white students and less expensive ones to students of other ethnicities illustrated the injustice of any division by race. A few feet away from the bake sale, opposing groups held a “Conscious Cupcakes” giveaway, handing out their own treats for free. And around midday, hundreds of people dressed in black laid down in Sproul Plaza, silently demonstrating their support of SB185.

This comes from the opposition to a bill that would allow California’s universities to consider race and ethnicity as one of many factors, like extra-curriculars, in college admissions. The bill would still ban admission based entirely on race or ethnicity. 

<sarcasm> Here’s something more honest: How about you still charge the white guy $2.00 for the cookie, give him $3 to buy it, and then let him punch the Native American students in order to steal their cookies, screaming “MANIFEST DESTINY, ASSHOLES!” triumphantly? After that, how about the African-American students are forced to clean up after the bake sale, as the Campus Republicans sip mint juleps and supervise? Is that more honest? </sarcasm>

I don’t support throwing the baked goods at them, nor screaming obscenities. I do absolutely love the steps taken by the Harry Potter student group, selling “enchanted Costco muffins,” for “Two galleons to pure bloods” and “Eight sickles to muggles.”

(via shitberries)