Sunday, September 25, 2011

Native Americans get the cheapest cupcakes and college tuitions?

There is no mention of why the Native Americans pay the least amount in today's news.  Also, this is not the first time that someone has done something like this to stimulate race conversation:


SMU halts race-based bake sale
Anti-affirmative action group used ethnicity, gender to set prices
08:51 PM CDT on Wednesday, September 24, 2003
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/988931/posts


Bucknell Race-Based Bake Sale National News
by LA SHAWN BARBER on 06/23/2009
In April, Bucknell University deans shut down a racial preferences bake sale that a conservative student group hosted to illustrate the unfair and demeaning nature of lowered admissions standards based on race. 



Berkeley College Bakesale Incites Debate Over Racism

PHOTO: Berkeley College Bakesale Incites Debate Over Racism
By OLIVIA KATRANDJIAN  Sept. 24, 2011
An "Increase Diversity" bake sale planned by a group of students in Berkley, Calif., in which the price of baked goods will depend on the buyer's gender and race is drawing cries of racism, which is just what the organizers say they wanted.

The bake sale, run by the Berkeley College Republicans, was created in reaction to SB 185, a bill currently being considered by Gov. Jerry Brown, which would authorize California public universities to consider race, gender, ethnicity, and national/geographic origin in the admissions process.

"The Berkeley College Republicans firmly believe measuring any admit's merit based on race is intrinsically racist," reads the description of the event on its Facebook page. "Our bake sale will be at the same time and location of a phone bank which will be making calls to urge Gov. Brown to sign the bill…The pricing structure of the baked goods is meant to be satirical, while urging students to think more critically about the implications of this policy."

The price of a baked good is $2 for white people, $1.50 if you're Asian, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans, the original Facebook event read. Women of all races get a discount of 25 cents.

According to the original event page, the pricing structure was put in place "to ensure the fairest distribution, and make sure that there are a DIVERSE population of races of students getting BCR's delicious baked goods."

"Hope to see you all there! If you don't come, you're a racist!" the original event page read.  The page has since been taken down and replaced with less controversial text.  Shawn Lewis, the president of the Berkeley College Republicans, planned the bake sale.

"The pricing structure is there to bring attention, to cause people to get a little upset," Lewis told ABC station KGO-TV in San Francisco. "But it's really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions."

Lewis said several members who created the event on Facebook have been threatened or received nasty comments.

"It certainly is stirring emotions, and that's what we want," Lewis told KGO-TV. "But we certainly don't want people to think that we're making fun of racial issues or laughing at them because that's not the message of the bake sale."

But Campus Democrats president Anais LaVoie has asked for an apology.

"The way they made the statement, the words that they used, the fact that they humorized and mocked the struggles of people of color on this campus is very disgusting to me," LaVoie said.

One student looked at the situation more humorously.

"Being black, this whole event is even irritating for me because now everyone wants me to buy them cupcakes at a discount," Raymond Stone wrote on the Facebook event page.


http://abcnews.go.com/US/berkeley-college-bakesale-incites-debate-racism/story?id=14597584

1 comment:

  1. Spending most of my life (20 years) in Sacramento area, it is very common for the average middle class kid to think that programs that favor certain people are unfair. None that I have ever met ever hung out in rough 'black' parts of town, or went to reservations to see the conditions that people are forced to live in.

    I used to think it was unfair too, until I saw the scary amount of facts about how people (certain races) were treated and then left to starve. Africans, one of the many, were forbidden to educate themselves or teach others. Once slavery was abolished most were tossed out on the streets to fend for themselves. We basically created a society of people that were not educated and couldn't teach themselves anything, and furthermore were often banned from public places and schools.

    Several generations is not enough time for African Americans to go from completely uneducated and unable to read to the expectations of affording a normal life and education that many others were given from their upbringings.

    Should these benefits continue forever? No, but that doesn't excuse the fact that they are needed in order to attempt to bring equality to everyone.

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