Letter to the editor

Admission by skin color is racism

The submission by Karume James and Lucero Chavez,
“Diversity should be a priority for UCLA” (April 24),
only serves to perpetuate racism and ignorance.

James and Chavez write that UCLA does not have enough black and
Latino students because, according to faulty reasoning, the
entering freshman class contains a lower percentage of these two
groups than does the greater Los Angeles population.

However, the newly released UCLA admissions data also reveals
that the amount of whites that make up the Los Angeles population
is almost 50 percent, while the amount of those admitted to the
university was much lower ““ at about 30 percent.

In other words, UCLA would need to admit more white applicants
in order to be a truly “diverse” campus ““ at
least according to James and Chavez’s reasoning.

The authors need to realize that attributing academic value to
skin color is just as racist as attributing any negative quality,
such as stupidity or inferiority, to skin color.

Mark Lincoln Third-year, physiological
science