I don't know about the political ethics or math skills of the UC Berkeley students who came up with the idea for an Increase Diversity Bake Sale, but they certainly know how to draw a crowd.
The student Republican group that sponsored a race-based bake sale set to be held on the campus today must have been counting on raising more than just the cookie dough.
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The bake sale creators have no understanding of how race works in America.
In a country whose earliest beginnings relied on an economic system that placed a price tag on the value of a black man, and carried out genocide against its native inhabitants, you would have to be tone-deaf to promote such an idea. Unless of course, all you really wanted was some attention focused on your cause.
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There is a distinct difference between criticizing an idea in the public marketplace, criticizing a public figure and criticizing a group based solely on an ethnic, religious, social or economic difference. Rich or poor, white, black, Asian or Latino, it doesn't matter. You can only meet people one at a time.
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If enrollment was based solely on scholastic merit - and did not include financial concerns - it would soon be white students clamoring for affirmative action alongside other "disadvantaged" groups. Consider this: Asian freshman students at UC Berkeley in 2010 made up 46 percent of the student body, while white freshman students constituted 32 percent. And those figures come after a 9 percent drop in enrollment among Asian students.
Read more:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/26/BAQA1L9OHM.DTL