Top Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones?

[ecstatic]

This article is old, but interesting!

At the most recent reunion of Harvard University's black alumni, there was lots of pleased talk about the increase in the number of black students at Harvard.

But the celebratory mood was broken in one forum, when some speakers brought up the thorny issue of exactly who those black students were.

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them — perhaps as many as two-thirds — were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/24/education/24AFFI.final.html?ex=1403409600&en=92df04e0957d73d3&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND#

What do you guys think?

I personally can see where the critics are coming from, but the issue is complex. All four of my grandparents were not born in this country, but I do not feel any less African American and I experience the same racism that most other blacks experience in this country and abroad.

[ContraBass Black]

1. My response is simple:

I'm in college, my parents immigrated, and I'm just as black as the rest of us.






If I remember correctly, Alan Keys tried to challenge Barak Obama's "racial legitimacy" by pointing out that he was not descended from slaves.

[Brewman_Jax]

2. I read the article

the specific origins may be interesting for an anthropology or sociology research paper, but are meaningless in the general society. My grandparents are from the USA, and I'm as black, or not-white, as anyone else, and educated at a major university.