It's time to be equal

I recently saw a poster advertising that Harvard Medical School "welcomes applications from disadvantaged and underrepresented students." Countless other schools strive "to recruit and retain faculty, staff, and students from historically underrepresented groups." Everywhere I look, the world is distorted by a gigantic contradiction: The harder you work and the more intelligent you are, the more you'll succeed. Unless, of course, a "disadvantaged or underrepresented" person applies.

Throughout my whole life, from singing songs about Martin Luther King, Jr. in elementary school to studying the Holocaust in high school, I was taught that people are created equal and that discrimination based on race, sex, or religion is not just wrong, but illogical. The absurdities of preferring some races over the others were pounded into my mind. One teacher, in the earliest years of grade school, made up a story about hiring a pair of kids -one with blue eyes and one with green eyes - to rake leaves and then paying the one with green eyes double just because he had green eyes. Of course we all scoffed at this and couldn't imagine such horrible behavior in the real world. If the job is to rake leaves and two people do it equally efficiently, surely no one deserves extra.

But, 10 years later, if the job is to excel in academics, or teach effectively, or produce the most revenue, our society now considers it fair to give one group more. In the name of "equal opportunity," we ignore the actual objectives in favor of promoting a single demographic. And what happens? We pay the blue-eyed kid twice as much this time and call it even.

After years of being told that all ethnic groups are equal, I now see schools and companies all around us treating them in exactly the opposite way. Who cares if their policies can funnel wealth and education to these groups? Any position or opportunity not earned by merit alone is undeserved and insulting. The fact that AHANA students here can be just as intelligent as any white ones is so obvious that it sounds almost offensive to write. Of course the color of someone's skin doesn't affect the functioning of his brain cells. So it is unnecessary and degrading to give minority groups extra help in applying to schools and companies. Chief Justice Roberts said it best: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."

So many schools claim to be "equal opportunity, affirmative action institutions." But it is a blind world in which so many people can see statements like this and not be baffled by the contradiction. The truth of the matter is that opportunity is not equal as long as we continue to prefer one group over another just because of their ethnicity. Worse still, it magnifies racial discrimination to choose one group over another for no reason other than race. Can anyone honestly say that we are all equal when some applicants are treated profoundly differently despite any extra talent? Is it fair to let students who aren't among these lucky minorities to sit back and curse the fact that they were born into an "overrepresented" group? Everyone has disadvantages in their lives and the best people claw their ways to the top. The Civil Rights movement is over, and it is time to accept that we cannot artificially accommodate for everyone.

Tyler Hughes is a staff columnist for The Heights. He welcomes comments at thughes@bcheights.com.