You Didn’t Get Into an Ivy League — Boo-Hoo
Tis the season for college acceptance letters to be nervously opened and read by exited graduates hoping to get into a university of their choosing.
And all-over social media there are young people celebrating their acceptance letters in the midst of happy-crying relatives.
And there are young people whining about not getting accepted into the college of their choice — often an Ivy League school — and blaming it on Black people.
Since the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, non-Black students are being faced with a sobering reality: They didn’t get in based on their lackluster application, average grades, and run of the mill extracurriculars that match thousands of other students who submitted the exact same qualifications.
You wanted merit-based only and the Supreme Court gave it to you.
Black people have long recognized that the people who benefited the most from Affirmative Action were white people, but no matter how much we said it, mass media and republicans convinced millions that every Black student was only in college due to affirmative action.
You didn’t get in and now you no longer can place the blame on Black people.
A person thing whining online about her “nephew” not getting into an Ivy League school is like so many Americans just can’t do simple maths.
97% who apply to Ivy League schools don’t get in. Applicants are competing against American and foreigners, as this thread highlights:
They also accept so few because they want to keep their brand intact and that means basic-Declan from a basic private school with hundreds of other basic Declans simply do not stand out.
That’s why there are, surprise, other schools.
Some of the anger really baffles me. Like, the realization that you bought into superiority then got rejected really makes them hate…Black folk even more.
Why?
Why is the default for these folk always to hate BLACK folk, specifically, more?
We don’t control Ivy League schools or admittance rules. As with everything in this nation the system/process is run by white men and a small percentage of white women. But every single time some privileged family’s little genius doesn’t get that coveted spot they blame that one Black student who got in. They don’t blame the legacy white kids who take up most of the slots, or the wealthy donor kid who paid their way in, or the foreign non-Black kid who excelled and got in.
Nope, they blame the few Black kids who also excelled and earned their way in. Only now, they can’t angrily toss out Affirmative Action as an excuse and boy are they mad.
The schools have so many admittance rules they can be hard to navigate if one isn’t wealthy or a legacy. The person who whined about her nephew not getting in even included the fact that his father was an alumni. So she was both complaining about Black folk getting in, her nephew not getting legacy, i.e. affirmative action, and that he, and not those who got in, “deserved it.”
Even Hollywood actors figured out that in order to get their nepo-babies into one of those coveted slots, they had to pay to play.
And many Asian families are finding out that the efforts they took to end Affirmative Action are backfiring — as Black people told them it would.
It’s not only schools where Black people have to deal with this type of racism. It’s that one job, that one head coach, that one District Attorney, Senator, police chief, school superintendent or principal, or that one judge.
Or it is where you work and that one supervisor, one project manager, or team lead. When they’re Black there’s always someone mad about it.
And let’s be clear, that type of questioning is always based on racism. This is the same person whining about people of color getting into an Ivy League school and not her nephew.
She’s calling the Black Vice President and Black elected officials “Criminal scum who do not belong in the White House.”
It is the same racist insults Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Fulton Country District Attorney Fani Willis, and New York Attorney General Letiticia James receives.
They “Don’t belong there.”
Oh really? Then where exactly do we “Belong?”
Belong.
Ruminate on the evil that word evokes.
We don’t belong in the White House we literally built, protected, died for, fought for, and got elected to.
We don’t belong.
Where do we belong in a country our people built and made wealthy?
Do we belong in your fields? In your kitchen? Or nursing your kids? In your military?
People rarely acknowledge the affirmative action of hires like Lee Roberts who is the new University of North Carolina interim chancellor:
“Lee Roberts will be UNC’s interim chancellor, beginning Jan. 12. Roberts is on the UNC Board of Governors and worked as state budget director under Republican Gov. Pat McCrory. He has no professional administrative experience in higher education.”
People crying about not getting into Ivy League schools believe they have the right to decide where Black people can be.
It is the foundation of redlining, sundown towns, HOAs, segregation, discrimination, back of the bus, and No Negros Allowed signs that draped American cities and businesses for the majority of this nation’s history.
It is in the foundational DNA of this nation that owned our bodies for so long that far too white Americans feel they inherited that DNA power.
Guess what? We belong where we stand. We belong where our ancestors are buried on nameless lands and unmarked graves.
We belong at the same Ivy League schools who survived financial crisis by selling our ancestors.
When you’re left to face the unfairness of America without the crutch of Black people you should finally understand what we have said for 350 years -that unfairness to us is unfairness to everyone, eventually.
You always have had next. Now you’re experiencing it.
We told you.
One day Americans will realize the fault placed on Black people for everything wrong with this nation has been nothing more than a distraction and deflection from fixing the sickness that permeates public and private life.
Look in the mirror, American, and you’ll see the problem.
In any case, I don’t care where your nephew, your son, or your daughter gets into an Ivy League school or any other university.
I do care that if they go they learn real American history, and that life has far more educational opportunities than any school.
Maybe they will learn what so many did not: Black people aren’t to blame for your life or your failure to achieve your goals.
