I remember sitting inside homeroom my senior year and listening to the man on the morning announcements speak about a Plaxico Burress minority scholarship, opened up exclusively for minority students. Upon hearing this I looked around the room and noticed I was the only Caucasian male in the entire class. In this modern day and age, why is it still okay to have any sort of segregation against any race, white or black. If a school, or any organization were to offer a scholarship with criteria for eligibility being the applicant must be Caucasian, there would be media uproar and cries of racism. I may be white, but I am far from Rich, my parents worked everyday of their life for a living, and granted we are not poor, but the term middle class would describe us to a tee. I, as a white student from a middle class background should be judged equally with a black kid from the very same background, and our grades and personal merit should determine who is the best candidate to be awarded these benefits. In the age of Obama, where a man of African decent can be strongly favored to become the next president of the United States, I think it is time to end favoritism towards people of any color, and have us all truly be equal, or at least as close as humanly possible.
~Nathan Coflin.
Minority scholarships are allowed for the same reason women's colleges exist and men's colleges don't - underprivileged groups get special programs to balance out any discrimination they've faced, historically or otherwise. Don't know if it's right or wrong, but that's the logic.
This argument could have been used in the past, but I believe that in todays world we have come far enough to end any discrimination.
At my high school there was a scholarship for high honor hispanics, one for males one for females. Thy that got the scholarship was only like 1/8 Ecuadorian, and the girl was only 1/4 Mexican. People are using their race to get advantages, and it isn't right.
I agree with you that there are some people who use their race to get advantages, especially in high-income suburban high schools, and that's obviously problematic. But it's ridiculous to suggest that we live in a discrimination-free world; yes, things are a lot better, but minorities are still at a disadvantage, especially in economic areas, and it's reasonable to try to counteract that. Race issues never give an easy answer, but it's better to acknowledge that we still have a ways to go and do our best to fix it than to try to make school race-blind when life so clearly isn't.
The educational and economic disparity in minority communities remain a problem that creates the need for such scholarships to exist. Minority based educational facilities such as primary and secondary schools and colleges, colleges for women, religious schools that segregate males and females exist, and many other institutions continue to create equitable opportunities to fight against the institutionalized racism, prejudices, biases and stereotypes held by some that keep injustice going. Such scholarships will continue to grow, develop, and be successful because it increases the number of minority students that can be educated, rise out of impoverished beginnings and provide an example for other students in their communities to strive to do the same.
As a matter of fact, more historically black colleges have actively recruited and offered white students scholarships to attend their colleges. (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,996378,00.html )
As we saw this past June, a white valedictorian as a first for the historically black Morehouse College. We were all proud. We wish that such an embrace could be felt in colleges with smaller minority numbers. (http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/16/white.valedictorian/index.html)
Enjoy.