Last week, conservative students from the University of Texas in Austin held an affirmative action bake sale, trying to make a point by presenting a tiered-pricing structure affecting different ethnic groups.
White students were charged the most, while Native Americans were offered the cheapest prices.
Here’s an idea. Just take the food the Native Americans students were carrying with them that day. Seriously, simply pull their rations away and claim it all property of the United States.
What exactly was the point here? That white citizens always pay the most? That other demographics don’t like sugar? What?
Gregory J. Vincent, who is Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement at UT Austin, felt that the bake sale was “inflammatory and demeaning,” as well as “deplorable.”
To take a simplistic forum to make a racist statement is not the best way to have dialogue on complex policy issues. It leads to cartoonish actions and hurtful interchanges.
The Huffington Post wrote:
The affirmative action bake sale, held Sept. 25, was sponsored by the UT chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas. Lorenzo Garcia, the group’s president, said he wanted to demonstrate that affirmative action is “demeaning to minorities” and creates “reverse discrimination.”
White people were charged the most for bake sale brownies, and Native Americans were charged the least.
Gregory J. Vincent, the university vice president for diversity and community engagement, called the bake sale “inflammatory and demeaning,” as well as “deplorable.”“The choice of a tiered pricing structure creates the misperception that some students either do not belong at the university or do not deserve to have access to our institution — or worse, that they belong or deserve only to a certain degree,” Vincent said in a statement. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Pavel Nitchovski, a columnist at The Horn, a local newspaper that covers UT Austin, said the bake sale “was so hopelessly, so tragically stupid that it left me in that delirious state between laughter and tears reserved exclusively for those moments when you remember that your car’s windows are down during a rainstorm.
The students who sponsored the bake sales were roundly ridiculed and condemned by both university administration and local media.
