WARNING.  Some (if not all) readers may find this offensive.  It's not intended as such, but there's the tradeoff.  But I figure if I don't write this, who will?  I've been meaning to get a good rant off about this and now's the time.

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Let's face it: colleges are getting racist.  And not in a civil-rights, keep-the-black-man-down, you-hate-me-'cause-I-have-Latino-grandparents racist.

No.  It's getting tougher and tougher for Caucasian kids to get into college.  

See, institutions have these things called "minority quotas" which they're supposed to fill, almost regardless of scholastic merit.  That means that, in a contest for the last spot in an Ivy-league college, a kid with "a diverse ethnic background" who scored a 1490 on his SAT will be sent the acceptance letter over a Polish/German closet case who busted his ass to make a 1570.  That kid now has been cheated out of his hard work just because he happened to be honest in filling out his ethnic background on the application.

Colleges have to do this.  This way they don't get sued by the NAACP for trying to be a WASP institution.  

Pardon me, but since when should your skin color make you more acceptable to colleges?  Since when did the Civil Rights Movement include using your heritage as an excuse?

And don't get me started on exclusive scholarships.  That's what they are: SCHOLARships.  Based on talent and academic achievement.  Not the family you happened to be born into.

I don't consider myself racist.  I hate using the words "black" and "white", but I hate "African-American" even more.  You're only "African-American" if you were born in Africa, immigrated to this country and secured citizenship.  But because they must have had one ancestor who hailed from the Continent, it's only P.C. to call them "Afro-American".  Why's this?  I don't go around calling myself "Russian-American" or "German-Irish-Austrian-Russian-American".  Know why?  Because that's stupid.  Also, there are hundreds of different places in Africa one can hail from.  Grouping them together is an insult.  Might as well call us "European-Americans" or "Asian-Americans".  Oh, wait, we can't do that, because there are DOZENS of countries we could hail from and to group us together wouldn't be acceptable.

Hmm.  I think someone didn't get the memo about cultural diversity within a continent.

We caucasians can't drop the n-bomb (and who would want to?), but in the great hypocrisy, they still can.  Although, to be fair, most affirmative-action A-A's don't use it, and I have uber-respect for that.

I got into college, I like to believe, on my own merit.  I made acceptable grades and I participated in enough extra-curricular stuff to make me eligable to attend a college I'm ecstatic to be going to.  I don't like to think that there are kids out there who got cheated out of a place at their dream college because some reverse-racist bleeding heart demanded that a person be let in just because their ancestors were repressed.

I don't like to think that.  But I know it's true.