Bates College Prof Reveals Inside Look at ‘the Racial Gaming of Admissions’
“Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification.”
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Tyler Austin Harper teaches environmental studies at Bates. He is reacting to the SCOTUS ruling on Affirmative Action.
He writes at the New York Times:
I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions.
When I was in graduate school several years ago, I spent my summers getting paid to help Asian American kids seem less Asian. I was a freelance tutor helping high school students prepare for college admissions, living only a few miles from the heavily Chinese and Chinese American neighborhood of Flushing in Queens. For my first gig, on a sweltering summer afternoon, I made my way to a cramped apartment where my teenage client told me what she needed: for me to read over her college applications and make sure she didn’t seem too Asian.
I remember laughing over the death rattle of a geriatric air-conditioning unit; I assumed she was making a joke.
But she pressed on straight faced. Good colleges don’t want to let in Asians, she felt, because they already had too many — and if she seemed too Asian, she wouldn’t get in. She rattled off a list of Asian and Asian American friends from her church with stellar extracurriculars and sterling test scores who she said had been rejected from even their safety schools.
Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.
Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification. For these students, the college admissions process had been reduced to performance art, in which they were tasked with either minimizing or maximizing their identity in exchange for the reward of a proverbial thick envelope from their dream school. It was a game I was soon compelled to play myself: A few years later, as a Black Ph.D. candidate in search of my first gig as a professor, I agonized over how — and whether — to talk about my race in ways that would mark me as a possible diversity hire. It felt like cheating to check the box and like self-sabotage not to.
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Comments
LOL! Environmental studies Ph.D! On par with “Gender” Studies, Basket weaving “doctorates.”
Bet he ticked the box. But now he feels better about it because he admitted his guilt feelings.
This ugly pandering is what the left wants more of. They are livid at SCOTUS for saying it must not be required.
Since the woke viewpoint is that race is simply a “social construct with no basis in biology,” a student should be able to “identify” as any race he or she thinks will help him/her to get into the college.
After all, the woke viewpoint is that a student may “identify” as either sex (or something in-between), and sex is a fundamental genetic property of every cell in the body. So a “social construct” should be easier to change.
Instead of obsessing over which college to aspire to
… here’s a common sense suggestion:
Think about what you want your life to be like, say, 5-10 years from now.
What are the skill-sets that you’re going to need? in order to have that life?
It seems to me obvious that if you plan to live and work in the USA for the foreseeable future, then at a minimum:
(1) you’re going to want to have employable skill;
and (B) you’re going to want to be able to speak the language(s) of your coworkers.
OK?
Make sense?
Not so complicated.
Now, go , and carpe diem
: )
… the language(s) of your coworkers and your customers/clients.
Capitalizing black but not white is racist. Please stop.
I agree, but that’s an excerpt from the NYT.