The Controversy Affirmative Action Bake Sales

In the past five years, there have been new reports covering a particularly controversial form of protest known as 'Affirmative Action Bake Sales'. These are most commonly held on campus diags. Student organizations opposed to Affirmative Action hold a sarcastic bake sale that charges the highest for white students and the lowest for minorities. For example:

$2 charged for Whites
$1.50 charged for Asians
$1.00 charged for Blacks
$.50 charged for Native Americans... and so on.

thechoice.blogs.NYtimes

I personally am not a proponent or opponent of affirmative action policies because its out of my scope probably. But in my opinion, I think these forms of protests are rather heavy-handed. I understand what the message is supposed to be. It's that discrimination, no matter what race, is wrong. How can we charge the same person more or less for the same product (the cost of higher education, for example)? That's not a bad point by itself.

But there are other assumptions made in these protests that aren't accounted for. One is that the Affirmative Action Bake Sale over-simplifies the usage of race as a deciding factor in admissions. Most forms of affirmative action aren't based on a quota system in public schools, since the Jennifer Gratz case made it clear that such point-based, racialized quotas would be unconstitutional. But the protests don't account for the question of socioeconomic status, which may or may not have correlation with race (I'm not sure, I'm no sociologist). Especially at public institutions like University of Michigan or Berkeley as shown here, an affirmative action policy based on income is certainly a plausible moral question. If you are wealthy, you might not get certain scholarships to help with tuition and it might be harder for you to compete for admissions. Whether that's fair or not is up for debate. So while there may certainly be trends in socioeconomic status among race, race is just not the only thing universities consider.But that point certainly isn't going to be made in an Affirmative Action Bake Sale.

Protests like these does a sort of disservice to the real issue of diversity on campus, in my opinion. So some question whether a public institution should even value diversity or not... Fine. But we really should step back and consider why we are considering affirmative action in the first place. And no, I really don't think it's just because some people just want benefits for the sake of benefits. It just sort of says something when you have a huge sort of decline in minority enrollment in the recent years.

nativeappropriations.com

Really, I won't put any fancy sociology term behind it. It's just seems 'mean' to me. To many people and to minorities (and not necessarily in the racial sense), college is not a norm. It's a huge accomplishment to make it there and maybe these protests don't address that.