By Glenda Buya-ao Claborne
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 20, 1998

No affirmative action forces an

To the Editor:

The news about the decrease in minority admissions at the University of Cailfornia's Berkeley and L.A. campuses is being shared around like some warning of worse things to come. Instead, I take the news as having the potential of forcing us to take an honest look at the extent to which our ideals of equality and justice have become trivialized in our myopic focus on political and legal solutions to, what are ultimately, individual problems.

The focus on the political and legal demanded little from individuals and everything from the system. "Personal responsibility" became synonymous with "blaming the victim." Individual cases became no more than symbols, and individuals no more than poster children for the subtle paternalism (or maternalism) of those who think they know best for poor, oppressed, little you and me. In the process, both the individual and the system have been diminished.

I applied to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism two years ago but was rejected. Of course, rejection is always hard to accept but I had to submit to the fact that my GRE verbal rating of 86 percent was below their average of 90 percent and that my GPA was below the 4.0 averages of many of their applicants, many of whom were also turned down.

However valid some arguments are against standardized tests and however true that there are differences in circumstances that each person had to overcome, I had to confront the fact that there will always be people better endowed with natural talents than I am. Accepting this fact does not mean resigning myself to an inferior/superior or powerless/powerful sort of measurement nor does it mean denying the structural forces that are working to define me according to these measurements. Accepting the fact of inherent differences between individuals frees me to find and be my unique self and to see the uniqueness of other people.

Emile Durkheim wrote in 1897, in Suicide and Modernity, "A moral discipline will therefore still be required to make those less favored by nature accept the lesser advantages which they owe to the chance of birth. Shall it be demanded that all have an equal share and that no advantage be given to those more useful and deserving? But then there would have to be a discipline far stronger to make those accept a treatment merely equal to that of the mediocre and incapable."

Glenda Buya-ao Claborne
Undeclared Graduate Student