Posted on 09/24/2003 9:45:14 PM PDT by Prof Engineer
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
By LINDA K. WERTHEIMER / The Dallas Morning News
The sign said white males had to pay $1 for a cookie. White women: 75 cents. Hispanics: 50 cents. Blacks: a quarter.
The event Tuesday at Southern Methodist University was no PTA bake sale.
It was a conservative student group's attempt at making a political statement, and it caused such a stir that SMU shut it down after 45 minutes.
The Young Conservatives of Texas chapter ran its so-called affirmative action bake sale to protest the use of race or gender as a factor in college admissions. Conservative groups have held similar sales at colleges around the country since February.
Group leaders say they were only making a point while exercising their freedom of speech, but a black student who filed a discrimination complaint with SMU said the bake sale was offensive. SMU officials said they halted the event because it created a potentially unsafe situation for students.
"This was not an issue about free speech," said Tim Moore, director of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created that was potentially volatile."
During the bake sale, students were crowding around the table outside the student center, and several began to get into a shouting match, Mr. Moore said.
David C. Rushing, a second-year SMU law student and leader of the conservatives' group, said the event didn't get out of hand and that at the most, a dozen students gathered around the table of sugar and chocolate chip cookies and Rice Krispie treats.
"We copied what's been done at multiple campuses around the country to illustrate our opinion of affirmative action and how we think it's unfair," said Mr. Rushing, chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas at SMU and for the state.
Chapters of the group held similar bake sales at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M University this month. Both schools allowed the events, citing free speech policies.
Mr. Rushing, 23, said the events strive to give students a sense of the inequality he says is created by unequal college admissions policies for whites and minority groups.
Matt Houston, a sophomore, said the group's sign, which listed prices for the treats by the race and sex of buyers, was not a learning tool. It was offensive, he said.
"My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students," said Mr. Houston, who is black. "They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization."
He and Kambira Jones, a 20-year-old junior, both expressed their concerns to SMU officials. "When I saw this, I was like, 'I can't believe they let you guys post this,' " she said. "I felt they were attempting to make Hispanics and blacks feel inferior. We jumped over the same hoops to get there."
SMU's freshman class this year is one of its most diverse ever – 20 percent are minorities. Overall, minority enrollment among the school's 10,000-member student body is 19 percent.
Before the bake sale brouhaha, SMU already was planning a forum so students and others could debate the aftermath of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action. The court ruled in June that universities could use race as a factor in admissions under limited conditions. The ruling changes the landscape in Texas, where universities have been banned from using race as a factor since 1996.
"We value free speech, and I think our record here shows freedom of expression is important to the academic community and especially this one," said James Caswell, SMU's vice president of student affairs.
The students organizing the SMU event said they meant no offense. To get permission for setting up, students said only that they were holding a bake sale.
For the record, the SMU sale was a flop, at least financially. The group ended up selling just three cookies, raising $1.50.
E-mail lwertheimer@dallasnews.com
ROFLOQ.
I'm rolling on the floor tyring to laugh quietly. ;-)
The group ended up selling just three cookies, raising $1.50.
3 cookies = $1.50.
That means you have a white woman, a hispanic, and a black.
Or a white man and two blacks
Or three hispanics.
The women, blacks and hispanics may have been offended, but at least some of them bought at bargain prices.
Also, were Asians not allowed to buy cookies at all? Maybe there was a separate but equal cookie table for them.
A classic Heckler's Veto. This sort of garbage is why I gave money to FIRE.
What... Don't the Chinese already have Fortune Cookies? ... *<]:|
Evidently he doesn't feel inferior if the ACLU says he's too stupid to vote with a punch card.
Zing! Just what the doctor ordered!
Hey...I have a great idea for Conservative students...Attend a "diversity" event...and shout down the people putting it on. The administration will shut down the event...(on second thought...that might not work)
Because liberal ideas can never withstand an honest discussion. As incredible as it might seem, considering how widespread this idiocy and countless more examples like it are, there is virtually NO real debate on it. NONE. First, the media will rarely allow the core points to be widely disseminated. Next, anytime a white male opens his mouth and starts trying to make a point like this, the immediate cry is "RACIST! BIGOT! HOMOPHOBE!" Pick the issue, insert the derogatory label of choice. For more than thirty years, this combination of keeping the core issue from the minds of the masses, combined with silence-the-enemy-by-attack methodology, has worked perfectly for them, has enabled liberals to take over this country.
Make no mistake: They HAVE taken it over for all practical purposes. They control the media. They control the education system. Liberalism grows by the day and SCOTUS swings more to their side a little all the time. Really brings home the old axiom that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. That's what we did for too long: nothing.
It'll be interesting to see if these little grass-roots efforts by kids and young adults continue.
MM
Stay Safe !
"This was not an issue about free speech," said Tim Moore, director of the Hughes-Trigg Student Center. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created that was potentially volatile."
What is offensive is affirmative action at the expense of white and asian students. It is an issue of free speech when students are refused the right to voice any opposition to a situation not created by them that they and any other constitutionalist finds extremely offensive and unlawful.
The hostile environment was created by the passage of such a law and the Universities decision to uphold an unconstiutional law. So basically what we have here is the denial of freedom of expression by totalitarians who do not value the civil, human rights of the individual who dares to object to unlawful and unjust laws passed by the social engineers sitting on the bench of the SCOUS, because their plight is considered unimportant as they are not of the favored color, all of whom deserve to be benched in another manner.
The more discrimination against the caucasion and asian race is ignored the more the kettle boils. There may come a day when these totalitarian currs wish for the good old days when their only worry was shutting down a peaceful protest bake sale.
My opinion? It is GOOD the handwringers at that school shut the bake sale down. Why? The more the left exposes its raw hipocracy and dualist standards the better. Serves to show more and more people every day what LIARS 100% of the left are and just what the left is pushing for.
The left has convinced most "people of color" that they are their saviours when in fact they are just surfing the "skin color thing" like a good wave on the beach. Just to attain power. Look at their tactics worldwide and it is clear to see what they are doing for anyone with a working brain.
Problem is the elitist left is so arrogant that all by itself if denigrates and "disenfranchises" people of color by acting as the sword wielding protectors of that class when in fact the left IS the force holding the "disenfranchised" down for its own benefit.... Kinda nice to see the enemy exposing itself for everyone to see. Not often that an enemy as pernicious as the left puts out markers where anyone can identify it as the enemy.
Typical Marxist logic. "Anything for the people even if it hurts them so we can gain power and show them the way". Fortunately in this case the people that is rising against the left is that sleeping giant that has put down every other tin plate fool that tried to trash the world for their weird ideology.
Bleh. We know what that logic leeds to. Just more oppression for one class to benefit another.
I prefer the American style of Democracy rather then Karl Marx's hallucinations and class based racism.
Stop racism by stopping the left.
That's what the Lefties always say when they shut down free speech.
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