Recently I've been thinking a lot about Barack Obama, Donald Trump... and Christopher Abreu.
OK, Trump and Obama you probably know about. But who's Christopher Abreu? He's a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, about to graduate this spring with honors. But last week, he wrote an op-ed in the Daily Pennsylvanian newspaper in which he made disturbing allegations about a late night incident on the West Philadelphia campus.
"I was heading home at 2 a.m.," he wrote, "which meant that students were stumbling out of bars and making their way back home as well."
He says a drunk student asked, "Where can I get some fried chicken?... You look like someone who knows where you can get fried chicken."
Abreu writes that he suggested they "try Wawa if you're hungry."
The white student yelled out to his friends, "I'm gonna go get some fried chicken! This n----- just told me where it's at!"
If those words weren't chilling enough, they remind me of something that one of the school's most famous alumni, billionaire Donald Trump, who received an undergraduate degree from Penn's Wharton School in 1968, also said this spring.
"I heard he was a terrible student, terrible," Trump told the Associated Press in an interview, a claim he's made in the past but one he doubled down on by suggesting he's probing that area of the president's life.
"How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I'm thinking about it, I'm certainly looking into it. Let him show his records," he said, without providing backup for his claim.
Trump added, "I have friends who have smart sons with great marks, great boards, great everything and they can't get into Harvard."
Let's be honest here: The bozos who harassed Christopher Abreu and Donald Trump were saying exactly the same thing. Which is: How the hell did this black man end up on an Ivy League campus? The only difference was the Trump had the extra "maturity" to leave out the stuff about the fried chicken and the N-word.
This is your post-racial America?
Look, racism is always horribly wrong, and it's always with us. It does seems to get worse in tough times, when getting a job or getting into an elite university is even harder than usual. It's sad but not surprising that opposition to affirmative action first spiked off during the stagflation years of the 1970s, or that in the ashes of the Great Recession in 2011, some people think a supersmart kid like Christopher Abreu -- or the first black president of the United States (whose flaws do not include a lack of brainpower) -- only got there because of affirmative action. (The facts? Abreu is a cum laude student at Penn, while Obama was magna cum laude at Harvard Law and president of the law review.)
But one of the few things that's worse than raw, rank-and-file racial prejudice is supposed leaders who fan the flames of ignorance for nothing more than their own ambition, which is exactly what Donald Trump has been doing for the last two months. Make no mistake, Trump has had pitch-perfect instinct since Day One of his presidential flirtation of knowing what dog whistles can be heard by the far-right.
In spending a year amongst the Tea Partiers while researching my book, The Backlash, I saw time and time again how the belief that America's first black president was "fundamentally not American" and possibly not even a legitimate U.S. citizen was part of the movement's DNA. All those crazy Internet "facts" about Obama's supposed ineligibility to serve as 44th president are a way to justify the sorry emotional response that Obama doesn't "look" like he belongs in the Oval Office.
Just like someone thought Christopher Abreu didn't look like he should be strolling down Locust Walk.
Trump -- with his bizarre allegations about Obama's citizenship and his college grades -- is hardly the only political figure letting his post-Obama-but-not-post-racial inhibitions run wild these days. In Oklahoma, a state legislator named Sally Kern voted for a bill to end affirmative action in state government; she said she's seen "a lot of people of color who didn't study hard because they said the government would take care of them." This kind of hateful talk is in the atmosphere. It's almost certainly not Donald Trump or Sally Kern's fault that those Penn students tossed around the N-word -- but the next time it happens it may very well be, because that is where our so-called "leaders" are leading our young people.
We don't know the name of the students who verbally assaulted Christopher Abreu, but we know how and where to find Donald Trump, and society needs to make a statement that his racially-tinged, fact-free statements about the president can't be tolerated. NBC should cancel his show The Celebrity Apprentice, and if they don't, sponsors should be ashamed of associating with him. TV producers should maybe start thinking that a candidate with fringe views is by definition a fringe candidate, no matter how famous. The cauldron of racial hatred is bubbling way too high in America right now. Donald Trump is a good place to start turning down the heat.
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The Cons want to get rid of the poor/lower middle class. Their budget reflects just who they want to prosper (the already rich) and remove the safety net from the people in these classes.
If we stick together, instead of dividing like the Cons want us to do to take the emphasis off of the more harmful economy, since that's where they want the focus to be. Take a broader view of Main Street and see who the Cons are really affecting in their so-called "budget." It's not just African-Americans; there are a lot of other people who are affected, as well.
http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/stats.php?school=u-of-texas#166_41
But, they will tell you that because the person scored 179 on the LSAT, the person deserved to be admitted. If that were to be a Black person, the Anti-Affirmative Action Patrol will be on the rampage! They have used the standardized test fraud to usurp positions they have not deserved in Ivy League Universities for a long time. It's time that we start pushing back, because the quality of what is coming out of the so-called Ivy League Universities do not reflect the hype. They have been faking it for so long, which crashed the economy. They can be trained to fill bubbles on a scantron but practical application is another matter. Look at the actions of our so-called Ivy League graduates. Most of them that I know do not want to be engaged in intellectual combat. They want you to believe that they know simply because they went to an Ivy League University. People, don't buy it. Most of them did not deserve to be there. They faked their way in with standardized test, which is the reason that, after they graduate, if they did not get a job, they are incapable of creating jobs themselves. Just look around. The ones who crashed the economy are your so-called Ivy League graduates!
If the incident with the student at Penn actually occurred , it does not reflect the student body as a whole . I lived in Philadelphia and never heard this type of language from people I knew who went to Penn.
Originated in 1948. Jim Crowe was in full force.
"African immigrants also do well in these tests. The difference? Africans also have common sense"
Are you saying African-Americans do not and that's why they don't do as well on the test? Or are you saying that African immigrants carry themselves in a way that would immunize them from the harrassment that Mr. Abreu encountered?
"There is more to intelligence than bubble-filling intelligence"
True, but what's a quick way of assessing the caliber of thousands of law school applicants?
Look no further than all the institutional segregation we have & look at the ethnic composition of our prisons...
In fact, schools today are even MORE segregated than they were before busing.
But we live in times where you cannot talk about racial issues anymore because then you might insinuate that hard-working Americans & soccer moms who take refuge in the suburbs just MIGHT be passively guilty of racism themselves.
By not talking about it & denying that it even exists, the vast majority of us get a free pass on whatever our own contributions to institutionalized racism might be.
The truth is that, if you grew up in predominantly white suburbs, you're far more likely to say or do something racist simply because you've never been exposed to any diversity within where you live. These racist attitudes pervade our everyday life hiding behind polite smiles & civil discussions over somebody's "individual freedom" in the free-market.
That's what lots of the comments being made to conservatives sound like. Of course we get angry. You would get angry too if we accused you of being a racist.
Well, I do care. And most people would.
... Thank you again for the feedback is what I meant to say. It really is appreciated.
I agree with Bill Cosby, who said that Donald Trump is just running his mouth.
Trump says that his children and other wealthy children with high SAT scores couldn't get into Harvard and they want to get into Harvard. Clearly, Harvard is an excellent university, that was able to take an obscure kid from Hawaii, poor, raised by a single parent, and honed his natural ability and skills so that he had the tools to be President of the United States.
Well, we can't lay the responsibility for producing excellence and leadership completely at the feet of one institution. There are excellent State school, schools like Berkeley, for example, who each year produce nobel prize winners, economists, politicians, lawyers, etc., yet these institutions face budget cuts and shaky support year after year.
Let's take all the resentment that Trump taps into about the scarcity of good positions at schools like Harvard, Princeton, Yale. Let's work to expand the number of seats to elite universities, both public and private. The first step is to admit to the value of education and the value of an admit to an educational experience like the one the President had.
My point is that there are many, many, many qualified people out there who are not getting the education and support they need to participate in the highest levels of social organization -- even though we desperately need such people.
So rather than fight over whether Obama's seat should have gone to Donald Trump instead, or whether Trump's admittance to Wharton should have gone to an underprivilleged kid who may have been smarter than Trump, but not wealthy enough to get in, what we should be arguing about is HOW TO MAKE MORE EDUCATION AVAILABLE OVER ALL.
Technically, it was a set aside. He received PREFERENTIAL treatment. As opposed to leveling the playing field, which AA is designed to achieve.
Trump's resentment just highlights the fact republicans so often try to ignore; education is important.