USVI: Instantly college bound

More than 20 colleges and universities courted seniors from local high schools at an annual recruitment fair at Charlotte Amalie High School on Friday.
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In fact, several qualified seniors were offered admittance and scholarships - on the spot - after filling out applications and presenting documentation of their grades and test scores.

Students also met with representatives from technical schools and the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marines, Air National Guard and Army National Guard, said Gregory Tyler, a Central High counselor who coordinates the fair. Of the 23 schools that attended, 20 are historically black colleges or universities, he said.
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Two students from Ivanna Eudora Kean High School with high grades and Standardized Achievement Test scores were offered on Friday conditional admittance and full, four-year scholarships - worth $80,000 - to Benedict College in South Carolina, according to the college's representative.

"This is my ninth year attending the college fair, and I always find such wonderful students here," said Phyllis Thompson, director of admissions for Benedict.

I need somebody to explain this to me. This: "Of the 23 schools that attended, 20 are historically black colleges or universities," and this, "Two students from Ivanna Eudora Kean High School with high grades and Standardized Achievement Test scores," and this, "several qualified seniors were offered admittance and scholarships - on the spot - after filling out applications and presenting documentation of their grades and test scores."

Are there different standards for different groups of black students amongst college recruiters? If the student is American, high grades and SATs aren't expected because, they're black, you know, and we don't expect that of them? If they are Caribbean, then high scores are because, they're coconuts*, you know, and we do expect it of them? This is inter- and intra-race racist insanity, one that has been bred by affirmative action.

I'd like us to ponder the following: What role has affirmative action had in defining expectations down with regard to black students? What role has it had to play in students deciding that, since race was enough to gain admission to almost anywhere, there was no true need for academic performance? What role has affirmative action had to play in the tainting of the truly bright kids with the incompetent brush of the slackers?

A good friend tells me I don't understand the significance of affirmative action as a tool to redress past wrongs. He may be quite right about that. Maybe I don't. Affirmative action was supposed to be about equality of opportunity to access, but it was altered, over time, to be about quotas. Where opportunity with regard to access would've required achievement to ensure access, quotas merely require that one shows up. The primary qualification is not academic but genetic, accidental.

What I do see is the evil that the change in the nature of affirmative action has done to the perception of blacks, inter- and intra-race, and to the psyche of blacks who, consciously or not, may assume a defensive posture because of the perception. How many high achievers out there have a chip on their shoulder because of having to fight the perception?

Perception is not always reality, but it is the black kids who have to live with the negative one that race signals intellectual ability. [The perception of Asian kids, on the other hand, is that they are academic high achievers.] The only way to replace the old perception with the new is to change the reality itself and demand performance of all students, regardless of race, geographic location, culture, income, parenting, and all of that. If these kids in the USVI are expected to, and can, flog the books for high grades and SAT scores, there should be similar expectations of the black ones on the mainland. Anything else is racist.

*I didn't invent the term, coconut, though I had it flung at me. It took me years to figure out what was meant. Think about what it really says.