Author: mopress

Back to my point. If you want an admissions process based merely on individual merit then

you can’t utilize a students lineage in the process. I say we maintain alumni legacy and race in our

admission practices at N.C. State. If not, well, you’ll be seeing a lot more white on campus.

[TechnicianOnline, NC-State, “Seeing white:
Legacy admissions are common at universities,” Andrew

Payne looks at its relation to campus diversity, Jan. 15, 2004]. On a side note, former N.C. State

vice provost James Anderson became Texas A&M’s first vice president of diversity. Texas A&M is a

predominately white male campus with little racial, ethnic and gender diversity. The university’s

undergraduate enrollment is 82 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, 2 percent African-American and 3

percent Asian-American. The position was created by Texas A&M president Robert Gates to increase

minority enrollment and enhance the university’s image. In response to the new position, a

conservative student group sold cookies and other items at their “affirmative action bake sale” where

prices where based on the buyer’s skin color.[see citation

above]

The following note responds to articles that were published at CounterPunch

Dear Mr. Moses,
Thank you for

informing me about what’s going on in Texas. I do think at the heart of it is that white people do

not respect or understand black people. I’m white myself, and I see this kind of ignorance as willful

and damaging, both to whites and to blacks.
So many times colleagues of mine at the minimum

security prison where I teach refuse to open their ears to the nuances of African American

speech.
They don’t seem to understand that the experience of a black man or woman is so different

from theirs. They can accept Oprah…but to realize that a black man who has been subjected to violence

since the day he’s been born and yet can still stand in front of you and say, “I’m a man,” that

this is greatness.

Yesterday a man told me about the visions he had the two times he was

shot in the head. I tried to talk to my fellow workers about him, but they just cynically brushed off

his insights and laughed about his experiences.

We whites don’t understand the surreal

nature of American life for black people, the boundedness and lack of control that blacks are subjected

to. I learned first about all this in college, reading Richard Wright
and Toni Morrison, and then

saw their enactment when I started working in a prison. It’s not that we whites have no souls, but

sometimes I’m sure it must seem that way to blacks.

In sadness,

Nashville Scene Movement
Photos: http://www.nashscene.com/

This week’s

Nashville Scene has a portfolio of ‘movement photos’ of the Nashville movement; the online version,

which places the photos in the text, unlike the print version which bunches the photos together, as is

more typical, as a graphics mode, is more impressive, in my opinion.

The fact that this paper

has done this much is also impressive, and timely, as the Grand Opening of the ‘movement’ wing of the

Nashville Public Library celebrates its ‘Grand Opening’ on Feb. 14, 15.

As I’m

practicing law near Nashville now, (as well as keeping a place in Atlanta) and I’d like to hear from

any and all who plan to attend this function, so we perhaps can get together and chat about the next

steps of the ‘white folks project’ or the ‘Nashville-Virginia-Mississippi-Louisiana-Texas-New

York’ ongoing class in racial definitions, changes,
behaviours and admonitions, to go backward

down the alphabet.

Howard Romaine

Texas A&M Regents Say Nothing in Writing
About Race or Affirmative

Action

Texas A&M Regents were widely reported as rejecting affirmative action in

admissions. However, an examination of the four sheets of paper considered by the Regents shows that

they said nothing in writing about affirmative action policy. By making no mention of affirmative

action, the Regents simply extended the Hopwood prohibition. But the Hopwood prohibition had once upon

a time interrupted their own ‘good faith’ policy of affirmative action.

If the Regents

adopted affirmative action as a sign of ‘good faith’ in 1980, and if it was revoked by outside forces

in the meanwhile, shouldn’t they resume the practice at their first opportunity, or offer a quite

serious explanation why not?

The Grutter decision of the Summer of 2003 had restored

affirmative action to the Regents, yet they met and voted unanimously to take no notice. This is not

‘good faith.’

By doing nothing to restore affirmative action in 2003, by simply

extending the Hopwood revocation, and by offering no written explanation, the Regents have effected a

kind of ‘pocket veto’ of the Supreme Court.

When a peculiar ‘civil rights’ path has

been chosen by administrative elites, deep in the heart of Texas, without any documentation whatsoever,

and having the effect of sustaining a dead law, one feels a shudder of recognition, that this is what

‘bad faith’ looks like up close.

Philosopher Lewis Gordon could not have been more

correct when he called racism ‘Bad Faith.’

By Greg Moses
Jan. 30, 2004