Trump is a shameful and shameless racist asshole, couching it all in the guise of “just asking a question”. There, I said it.
Well, now that Obama’s produced his long-form birth certificate and put the kibosh on the whole “birther” idiocy*, Trump’s gotta find something else to get his toupee in a wad about.
*no, I’m not naive enough to think it’s really going to go away. You could show video footage of Obama’s mother giving birth under a Honolulu City Limits sign and the whackjobs would be screaming “that was some other baby!”
Grant so, but depending on the Senator/Congressman in your district, getting that appointment (which, having done the process, is far harder than the admissions process and entrance exams) can be effectively a matter of legacy, or not. (I ultimately decided to refuse my appointment due to the limited range of jobs available for the corrected-but-legally-blind, but I got it in the first place by major sucking up to the local Rep when he was handing me some kinda one-off academic award the school district had talked him into presenting).
Another thing about law school (at least mine) is that all grading is anonymous. In our case, we got a number on a sticker in an envelope with our name on it prior to every exam. The number changed every semester. We’d put the sticker on the front of the blue books instead of our name, and the professor would grade each exam and send in the grades with the numbers. The administrative staff would then match number back up with name–they were the only ones other than the individual student who had access to both. So there was no way that favoritism could come into play when it came to grades–the professors had never had an opportunity to that point to see handwriting, since the grade comes down to the final exam. There’s no way that they could have known who wrote which exam.
Which is why every student on an Affirmative Action place was told to start each essay with, “As a black man/Inuit/woman/rich pillock riding Daddy’s coat tails, I feel…”
Sure, and to be a gold-medal sprinter, you just have to run pretty fast.
Point of clarification. Some lower tiered law schools (such as mine) still do this. The system is/was designed to flunk out 10-15% of 1Ls. The curve is set at a 2.3 to 2.5 and anyone below a 2.0 is automatically disenrolled. Presumably most law schools have stopped doing this because its friggin asinine.
/end rant
Your points are good, but I wish you’d stop saying “rich, white” and start saying “rich.” I’m sure Bill Cosby’s and P. Diddy’s kids/grandchildren, etc. will have a lot easier time getting into schools than I ever did, despite my “white advantage.”
God, I wish we could have a media blackout on Trump. Then without an outlet for his ego thumping/attention whoring his head would swell to critical mass and eventually collapse under its own weight and form a black hole which would suck all evidence of his existence from the universe.
No.
A lot of people can turn it around later. If members of one ethnic group get extra chances because their race, while members of another have to be successful at every step of the way, then Trump is justified in pointing to it as unfair.
The same would apply if a company promotes members of one ethnic group only when they actually demonstrate success at their present level, while promoting members of another group regardless.
[Note that I have no independent knowledge of what Trump’s actual point was, and in general think Trump is a blowhard, but I’m responding to your OP specifically.]
Now that is funny!
But then isn’t it unfair to not to promote them? Look, I’ll grant you that the claim: “Early-Obama was a total dumdum and people only admitted him because he was black. But then Harvard-Obama became super-smart and wrote on to Law Review.” is probably the most plausible explanation of events. But doesn’t it seem unwise to punish Harvard-Obama, in the past, by holding back Early-Obama, since we know that Harvard-Obama will be super-smart and really deserve the Law Review EIC position and the only way to get Harvard-Obama and not McDonalds-Manager-Obama he was otherwise destined to become is to promote him at those earlier stages?
Also, white people are the victims in all this.
Well, if “The Donald” has a plan in mind to eliminate favoritism from the world I’d like to hear it. Why is he being so coy about it? Pointing out one person that he thinks got an unfair advantage just qualifies him to be an angry teenager, not presidential material.
So the claim is: Obama was born in poverty in Kenya, sneaked into the USA, falsified all of his records so that even Donald Trump can’t sort it out, tricked Harvard into letting him in and letting him edit the Review and then even tricked them into graduating him with honors. He has gone on to preform many other amazing stunts, like getting nominated then elected POTUS, for example. Damn, I want that guy running my country!
But the point is that at the time you didn’t know that Early-Obama would turn into Super-Smart Obama, and he got the extra chance because of his skin color. (Assuming, of course, that the alleged facts are actually true.)
Anyone up for a bit of droll snark?
Looks Like Trump’s Right: How the Hell Did This President Get Into Those Ivy League Schools?
Twilight zone style trick ending. Still, good beat, easy to dance to, a seventy five.
The idea that Harvard isn’t especially difficult smells like bullshit to me.
As far as I know, Bill Cosby and P. Diddy didn’t go to Ivy League schools. I’m talking about legacy admissions.
I don’t know why pointing me out “white” bothers you, when my point is that when you’re white, it doesn’t matter what your grades are in the eyes of the general public. The assumption is that when you’re white you belonged at the school you were admitted to, even if you end graduating at the bottom of your class. A minority like Obama, on the other hand, can graduate magna cum laude and still there will be aspersions cast on his qualifications. This is “white advantage” in broad daylight. It’s not even about being rich.
I know Stanford is like that. Unbelievable grade inflation. Maybe that’s changed, but it was certainly that way in the 80s.
Bush did get turned down from the University of Texas Law School.
We had a huge ruckus over this when I was at law school. In the end we had a sort of three tier process for getting onto a journal - everyone who wanted on one of the journals took part in a write on competition at the end of their first year. There were 1/6 of the places reserved solely for performance in the write on part, 1/6 for performance solely on grades, and 2/3 for a blend of the two. Admittedly, those numbers intermeshed, because it likely that the top performers in the write-on competition and the top performers in the grades were the same people.
Then at the end of the 2L year, the outgoing 3Ls on law review would vote on the junior members to fill the editorial slots for the next year.
But everything was done blind. There were no Affirmative Action slots, and I am a little bit disappointed HLS has them.
I always knew there was a reason I didn’t want to go there. Well other than preferring death to living in the Boston area.