This began with an email from a colleague of mine, Gina. She is an African American with a great deal of concern and commitment to her community. Gina knows I am interested and shared some legislation she was interested in. This legislation, if passed would allow use of State funds to help AA students attend traditional Black colleges.

My response:

Gina

Thank you for sharing this. I respect you a great deall for participating in this sort of activity.

I would like to share my own, rather negative response to this sort of legislation. Personally I would disagree with this bill and even if it were passed I suspect it might have serious constitutional issues.

A. Concerns

1. From An AA Perspective

I apologize if this is presumptuous. I am obviously not an AA. However, as it happens my life has often become intertwined with your community and I do have feelings about tha AA community. Crudely put, I admire many AA and feel an identity between the modern AA story and my own people’s story over a longer period.

a. The choice of one of these schools is something I would applaud BUT it is a very personal one. Asking the State to support it has a supplicant flavor that I think looks bad because it makes it appear as if AA wish to be treated not only as a minority but as having special needs that do not apply to other under represented minorities.

b. Rather than recognizing these special schools for their unique qualities, the act singles them out as places for dealing with a minority problem. If it is desirable for an AA t g to Morehouse, why isn't it also desirable for a Lumni person or for that matter a farmworker Hispanic kid? Or .. why wouldn't some rich white kid from the Highlands benefit as well?

2. From a WA state perspective

a. Our interests as a State should be in improving the numbers of Americans who represent our mixed heritage who want to live and work here. This does the opposite. In effect it says, we can not serve this need at home so we are sending our kids away to other states.

b. These schools are only unique because of theoir relationship to the AA community. There are other similar schools that apply t other communities. To cute an extreme example ... Dartmouth was FOUNDED esp for indigenoous Americans and still has a special scholarship for these kids. If WA state has historic ethnic debts, as we do, this has to be #1.

3. From a Jewish perspective

The term "people of color" is to me, a Jew who has been persecuted for crimes unrelated to my skin color, intrinsically racist. I feel we ... not Jews but all Americans .. need to get out of this "people of color trap." The term raises a false issue. America's race issues are NOT based on color, bigotry is a lot more complex than that and we have under and over represented groups whose prejudicial issues certainly do not reflect skin color. Here are a few examples:

a. Appalachia
The US still has not recovered from the coal-mining era. We have a sizeable community of poor whites whose children have little hope of ever being educated in a competitive way. Washington state has what I fear are the beginnings of a similar issue with the unemployed folks of former lumber areas.

b. Caribbean and African immigrants
I think you know what i am going to say. Skin color is NOT a gtood criteria for defining a deserving AA. 75% of the "black" kids at Harvard are now of non-american parentage. As an effort toward diversity, this means this group is way OVER represented at Harvard. In my experience with the STAR program, the same is true here. Of the URM students I see every summer, it is RARE to meet someone whose parents are both of American descent and frequent to find kids whose "colored" parent is not of American birth. Statistics form City College in New York also show that "colored" Caribeans and Africans folks achieves right up there with Koreans and SE Asians.

c. Hispanics

This irritates me greatly. I have met Brazilian immigrants who are receiving help because they are Hispanic. (Actually the case in my mind was a Brazilian-African). By what weird perspective are Hispanics more people of color than Italians or Iranians? Are white skinned Hispanics of US origin less deserving than dark skinned ones?

d. "Asians"

Isn't this obvious? Equating Japanese Americans with their high level of success with Pacific Islanders is absurd. The US really abused the Phillipino people. In my own lifetime, the US Navy enlisted Phillipinos as personal servants to American born (I assume this include AA) officers.

4. From the perspective of other “people of color.”

Why would this be more reasonable than supporting a Catholic American, esp. a Hispanic, in her desire to attend Gonzaga? Color is poor criteria for meeting Dr. King's dream.

B. An Alternative

I think the AA community has not yet understood one wonderful change. Many Americans regard the AA as leaders. Barack Obama is not an aberration nor is his success simply an issue of his being African/American vs. the descendent of an AA family. In many ways, AA have taken on the mystique of Asian immigrants and before them of my people. There is an intrinsic American respect for a people whose immigrant vigor drives them to success. This is the clear message of the silliness of the reaction to Senator Biden’s words. What I am sure he meant to say is that Obama, along with Mfume, Bill Gray, Condy Rice, Norm Rice, Duvall Washington, Ron Sims, and others of their generation have climbed to a new level. Unlike previous African descended Americans who we see as heroes because of their are fights as blacks or for blacks, these are all folks admired by other Americans because of the values of an African heritage. This is similar to Asian and Irish and German heritages of similar folks in the past ..it makes these people better Americans. I believe all these Americans represent the success of Dr. King’s dream speech.

The contrast with previous Black candidates for President is obvious. Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson were articulate candidates. But their candidacies were not seen as credible in the sense that no one took the possibility of Jesse or Shirley seriously. There as no one who wondered, would ALL Americans benefit from Jesse or Shirley’s backgrounds? I won’t mention Sharpton. As someone who identifies more than a bit with your community, he is an embarrassment.

Let me give you some historic examples form other peoples, Brandeis is widely seen not only as a great Justice but as having brought his heritage as a Jew, our struggle and beliefs, to the Supreme Court. The elder Kennedy brothers are seen asparadigms of the contributions of the Irish to America. Thurgood Marshall is seen as much more than the first AA Justice, he brought his experiences to the court in a way that served all Americans.

What I am trying to say to the people behind this legislation is that they diminish themselves by trying only to serve the needs of AA kids. I would propose something like the following instead:

Realizing The Dream in Washington State

In the years since the Dream Speech, America has come a long way toward achieving Dr. King’s vision. Today’s Americans treasure and benefit from cultural diversity. This is especially true of the contributions to all of us by underprivileged groups who have had to transcend the prejudices of our society based on differences in religion, race, or ethnicity.

Washington State has, in some ways, not had the full benefit of these changes because our ethnic mix does not represent the mixture of all Americans. At the same time we have our own unique history due to the recent advent of non native peoples in the Northwest. It is in all of our interests, as citizens of this state, therefore to seek cultural diversity in education. The purpose of this Act is to develop a pilot program designed to increase the diversity in our institutions of higher education by supporting exchange programs between our State institutions of higher education and American schools with traditional focus on minority groups that are under represented or underserved in our State. Our hope is to encourage attendance at these other schools by Washington State students fro all ethnic groups and to encourage students form those institutions to attend Washington State colleges and universities.

To achieve this end, we will establish a fund to support Washington State Dream Scholarship Grants. Any Washington State Institution or group pf Institutions may apply for one of these grants along with a participating traditional minority school located in another state or territory of the United States. Institutions applying for these grants must agree to accept exchange students from the partner schools with full academic credit for course work completed at either site.

Sister institutions participating in this program must agree to accept tuition as paid to each other as covering the full non residential costs of education during the exchange.
Washington Sate students participating n the State prepayed education program would be
free to sue those funds to apply for positions in the exchange program. Degrees will be
awarded from the sponsoring school.

Use of Dream Funds:

Programs will be developed at the discretion of the partnering institutions subject to the following guidelines:

a. Priority for financial support for students while in the Dream program, must go to students on the basic of financial need. This is intended to allow those students
not in need of additional support to participate in the exchange. b. Funds may be used to cover costs of tuition differences between institutions as well as travel and housing costs incurred by students during the exchange. c. No more than 20% of the entire fund may be used to administer the program including fund allocated to faculty exchanges ot promote the interaction.

d. The Dream program will not include institutions explicitly religious intent that would violate the Washington State Constitution.

e. The Dream program may be used for professional education including the health sciences, law, business, and technology lading to advanced degrees.

f. Priority will be given to a matching fund meant to assist Washington State and the partner institutions raise private funding to support the Dream effort.