[sugar and spice]

I don't think she was saying that it happens in every single case . . . just that you'd have to be naive to think that it never happens.

Like I said earlier in this thread, I did fairly well in high school, but I'm not going to pretend that it was all due to my "hard work." I had a lot of advantages that many of my classmates didn't have (parents that read to me and bought me books as a kid, parents who enrolled me in "enrichment programs" and extracurricular activities and extra classes when I was as young as 4, AP and honors and advanced classes, I was raised in an environment that made higher education pretty much a necessity and not a choice, my parents could afford to pay for me to take the SAT as many times as I wanted or run track or apply to ten different colleges had I wanted to, I had enough time that I could participate in lots of extracurricular activities . . . and the list goes on). If you'd given my classmates all the same advantages that I'd had, I have no doubt that all of them, no matter what race, could have done just as well or better than I did.

That's why this talk about "If they really wanted it, they'd bust their asses to do it" bothers me -- because I didn't bust my ass to get into college! Most of my white college-attending friends didn't either. Why should a black person have to work twice as hard as I do to achieve the same results?

You can't deny the fact that people of color are more likely to face discrimination than white people within the educational system. That's a given.