Affirmative action must right past wrongs
By Daily Bruin Staff
May 7, 1995 9:00 p.m.
Affirmative action must right past wrongs
By Aisha Jones
When are white people like Marina Bogorad ("College admissions
must consider ‘hard brain work,’" May 1) going to get off the tip
that affirmative action programs assume "people of color are
intellectually inferior"?
Bogorad, your intellect is in question, first-year student,
because you have failed to grasp that affirmative action was
enacted with the belief that Europeans, Africans and other ethnic
groups, such as Mexicans, are all of equal intelligence.
The only difference is that throughout history these groups, in
the case of African Americans, have been subjected to segregation,
lynchings and unequal protection under the law, and did not have
the right to vote. They have also been subjected to the injustices
of red-lining, environmental racism and police brutality in the
post-civil rights years. Affirmative action recognizes these wrongs
and the damage they did to an entire group of people.
Mexicans, for example, may not have experienced the brutal
depravity of slavery at the hands of white people, but rather, they
experienced a violent invasion and robbery of their land. They have
experienced and continue to experience many of the other past and
present injustices African Americans have endured.
It is you, Bogorad, who assumes that some ethnic groups are
intellectually inferior. Although your first name sounds
suspiciously feminine, I’m going to assume you’re a man. The reason
being is that in the April 25 piece on affirmative action by Lisa
Martinez ("Anti-affirmative action camp’s emotional arguments lack
merit") in which you so weakly attempted to attack, you failed to
address one major part, the part about white women being one of the
groups who have benefitted most historically from affirmative
action.
If you were a white sister, I’m sure you would not have remained
silent on this issue. You would have owned up to the fact Â
and I do stress fact  that there’s a good chance that YOU got
in the doors at UCLA because of your gender and perhaps partly due
to that impoverished background you spoke of. You see, social class
is also considered in admissions. And as far as that 4.0 GPA you
talked about, that’s all hot air as far as I’m concerned. I’ll
believe it when I see your damn DPR.
But no, Marina, you can’t be a woman, or you wouldn’t have gone
there … you wouldn’t have messed with a sister of color.
Jones is a third-year student majoring in African American
studies.
