Caption: Students Kritz Eliza and Taylor Matzen, dressed as American Indians, participate during a bake sale led by the Berkeley College Republicans Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011, at the University of California campus in Berkeley, Calif. The Berkeley College Republicans have scheduled a bake sale where the price of a cookie or a brownie depends on your gender and the color of your skin. The price of a baked good costs $2 for white people, $1.50 if you’re Asian, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women get a discount of 25 cents. From SFgate.com
Wow. White girls in headdresses, participating in the bake sale. Are they trying to get free cookies or what? This is the insensitivity supported by the UC Berkeley Campus Republicans and their bake sale. From the article:
The Republican students said offering more expensive pastries to white students and less expensive ones to students of other ethnicities illustrated the injustice of any division by race. A few feet away from the bake sale, opposing groups held a “Conscious Cupcakes” giveaway, handing out their own treats for free. And around midday, hundreds of people dressed in black laid down in Sproul Plaza, silently demonstrating their support of SB185.
This come from the opposition to a bill that would allow California’s universities to consider race and ethnicity as one of many factors, like extra-curriculars, in college admissions. The bill would still ban admission based entirely on race or ethnicity.
<sarcasm> Here’s something more honest: How about you still charge the white guy $2.00 for the cookie, give him $3 to buy it, and then let him punch the Native American students in order to steal their cookies, screaming “MANIFEST DESTINY, ASSHOLES!” triumphantly? After that, how about the African-American students are forced to clean up after the bake sale, as the Campus Republicans sip mint juleps and supervise? Is that more honest? </sarcasm>
I don’t support throwing the baked goods at them, nor screaming obscenities. I do absolutely love the steps taken by the Harry Potter student group, selling “enchanted Costco muffins,” for “Two galleons to pure bloods” and “Eight sickles to muggles.”
Posts tagged race.
Controversy erupts over Campus Republicans bake sale plans ›
Campus Republicans at the University of California Berkeley have cooked up a storm of controversy with their plans for a bake sale.
But it’s not your everyday collegiate fundraiser they’ve got in mind. They’ve developed a sliding scale where the price of the cookie or brownie depends on your gender and the color of your skin.
During the sale, scheduled for Tuesday, baked goods will be sold to white men for $2.00, Asian men for $1.50, Latino men for $1.00, black men for $0.75 and Native American men for $0.25. All women will get $0.25 off those prices.
“The pricing structure is there to bring attention, to cause people to get a little upset,” Campus Republican President Shawn Lewis, who planned the event, told CNN-affiliate KGO. “But it’s really there to cause people to think more critically about what this kind of policy would do in university admissions.”
Really? By the way, you’re not even original. It was done in Florida several months ago, and several times before that. In Florida, they sold parts of cookies based on race. I bet one of Campus Republicans’ main arguments is that because we have a black president, racism is over. It’s totally true, amirite?! I mean, white folks are constantly discriminated against! Here’s Tim Wise’s thoughts:
“I get the joke. How very original. It’s been done for 15 years. The point that I think needs to be made … is that by the time anyone steps on a college campus … there has already been 12- to 13-years of institutionalized affirmative action for white folks, that is to say, racially embedded inequality, which has benefited those of us who are white. And it’s only at the point of college admissions that these folks seem to get concerned with color consciousness.”
So yes, have your bake sale, and play the victim for people being angry. It’s not this country has a pattern of hundreds of years of embedded inequality or anything. It’s
a littlequite a bit condescending to have a table full of white college kids offer a person of color (or a woman) a cookie at a discounted rate because of their race or gender, and then say, “See, that’s what it’s like when you get into college!”
My biggest problem is that there is simply no creativity in movies with black casts at all. White people are 12 year old wizards, teens with crushes on vampires and werewolves, fighting blue people, talking fish and toys, and yet the best we get is a movie about the genteel south? Someone please make a movie about two black folks falling in love at a rock concert or a feature film about Storm from X-Men discovering her power, or something, ANYTHING, that goes beyond Black Pain (TM) / White Saviour (TM) movies. Sheesh.
npr:
Experts say the Great Recession is erasing slow but steady economic gains made by blacks in recent decades. The foreclosure crisis is having a particularly devastating impact, they say, erasing years of racial progress. (via Racial Gap In Homeownership Widens In U.S. Slump : NPR)
Graphic Source: U.S. Census Bureau
Graphic Credit: Alyson Hurt/NPR
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