SMU shuts down bake sale w/ race-based prices

[docetboy]

From Newsday.com: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationwo...tion-headlines

This is a very interesting protest...whattdya think about it???
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Texas University Shuts Down Bake Sale




By Associated Press

September 24, 2003, 11:17 PM EDT

DALLAS -- Southern Methodist University shut down a bake sale Wednesday in which cookies were offered for sale at different prices, depending on the buyer's race or gender.

The sale was organized by the Young Conservatives of Texas, who said it was intended as a protest of affirmative action.

A sign said white males had to pay $1 for a cookie. The price was 75 cents for white women, 50 cents for Hispanics and 25 cents for blacks.

Members of the conservative group said they meant no offense and were only trying to protest the use of race or gender as a factor in college admissions.

Similar sales have been held by College Republican chapters at colleges in at least five other states since February.

A black student filed a complaint with SMU, saying the sale was offensive. SMU officials said they halted the event after 45 minutes because it created a potentially unsafe situation.

"This was not an issue about free speech," Tim Moore, director of the SMU student center, said in a story for Thursday's edition of The Dallas Morning News. "It was really an issue where we had a hostile environment being created."

The sale drew a crowd outside the student center and several students engaged in a shouting match, Moore said.

David C. Rushing, 23, a law student and chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas at SMU and for the state, said the event didn't get out of hand. At most, a dozen students gathered around the table of cookies and Rice Krispies treats, he said.

"We copied what's been done at multiple campuses around the country to illustrate our opinion of affirmative action and how we think it's unfair," he said.

Matt Houston, a 19-year-old sophomore, called the group's price list offensive.

"My reaction was disgust because of the ignorance of some SMU students," said Houston, who is black. "They were arguing that affirmative action was solely based on race. It's not based on race. It's based on bringing a diverse community to a certain organization."

The group sold three cookies during its protest, raising $1.50.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled universities could use race as a factor in admissions under limited conditions. In Texas, universities had been banned from using race as a factor under a 1996 decision by a lower court.
Copyright © 2003, The Associated Press

[sugar and spice]

Originally posted by docetboy
The group sold three cookies during its protest, raising $1.50.

This is my favorite part of the article.

[bethany1982]

I think some people are offended way too easily.

So, as an Asian-American woman, would my cookie have been free?

[sugar and spice]

Originally posted by bethany1982
I think some people are offended way too easily.

I think some people are idiots.

I mean honestly, what would possess someone to do something like this? There are lots of ways to make more effective points against affirmative action. And this makes some other points that I don't think we even want to get into (like a commentary on the "worth" of people based on their race and sex?).

I'm really surprised that this has been allowed on other college campuses, if what they claim is true. Contrary to popular belief, universities (even state-run ones) can restrict your freedom of speech. And one of the things they're most likely to silence is hate speech and anything that could possibly be misconstrued as, or lead to, hate speech (i.e., experiments like this).

I think they missed their mark with this, if the point they were intending to make was that "affirmative action is bad."

Edited to add: Also, they need to do some research -- because these days white males are more likely to benefit from affirmative action than white females when it comes to college acceptance. (Excluding tech schools like MIT, Cal Tech, etc.)

[bethany1982]

Restricting free speech is always a great idea. Like I said, some people are offended way to easily. Why call someone an idiot over an opinion?

[sugar and spice]

I'm not calling them idiots because they don't like affirmative action. I'm calling them idiots because this was a horribly ineffective and verging-on-racist way of saying that they don't like affirmative action.


Universities have the right to restrict speech (generally they only use it to restrict hate speech) in order to maintain a "safe learning environment." The reason the policy was put into effect was a situation where, in a discussion section, some kid decided to rant about why black people are bad and tie it into whatever it was that they were reading, which is "not conducive to the learning environment," LOL. Schools have the right to restrict free speech if it interferes with the learning process. It might not be "fair," but regardless of what you or I think, it's a policy that's out there and invoked fairly often in cases like this.

[KSig RC]

Originally posted by bethany1982
I think some people are offended way too easily.

dude, the protest didn't even remotely invoke the way affirmative action policies work - it's not a 'free speech' issue, it's a matter of being a tool then hiding behind some sort of political movement.

[bethany1982]

I see no hatred directed towards any individuals by their actions. They were trying to make a statement about a policy. Hell, I would have only paid 50 cents for one of their cookies. In reality, many affirmative action programs do indeed examine the issue of race, granting points or preferred status to certain individuals. To me, race/gender based quotas are offensive. I guess those individuals who are offended by Affirmative Action should simply keep their non-politically correct opinions to themselves.

[sugar and spice]

Originally posted by bethany1982
I see no hatred directed towards any individuals by their actions.

I think the university chose to act before the situation reached that point . . . which it very easily could have.

The message you may have gotten from this demonstration is "Oh, affirmative action is like this cookie sale, because certain people are favored over others." The message that other people may have gotten from this is instead "Wait . . . are they saying that a black man only needs to do 1/4 the work of a white male in order to get into the same school? Are they saying that a woman is only worth 3/4 of what a man is worth?" (Actually, 7/10th according to current wages.) There are multiple other ways it could be interpreted too. Their message isn't clear and that's what makes it dangerous -- because even though it isn't meant to be hate speech, it can be interpreted as such.

The thing is, if I want to a sell a cookie to one of my friends for five bucks and give the other one away for free, I can do that. And universities can do the same thing with their affirmative action policies if they want. There's no law anywhere that says a school must accept the most "qualified" (according to the traditional scale of grades, extracurriculars and test scores -- and oh, did you know that they did a study that found that the SAT correlates better with grandparents' income than with college academic performance?) applicants, and usually they don't. Nobody whines when a school accepts a girl that published a book at age 16 but only has a 3.4 GPA over a girl who has nothing to make her stand out but her 3.9 GPA. So why should we attack schools for using their own criteria to accept students in cases of affirmative action? Schools are looking for a qualified diverse student body in terms of race, socioeconomic status, background, accomplishments, talents, gender, whatever. They don't want "the most qualified" if the most qualified means all naive white upper-middleclass violin-playing track-running honors students from the suburbs, and I can't say I blame them. As long as I student is qualified, I'm not going to argue about who is "most qualified" based on the admittedly shaky standards of SATs and grades.

[breathesgelatin]

In case anyone cares, a feminist organization on campus (that I'm President of) did this same activity last spring. Only we did it according to the male-female wage gap--so women were charged less, etc.

[lifesaver]

I find it hard to believe that anyone on the SMU campus would have any bills smaller than a $50 to buy anything.

[Imthachamp]

this is hilarious. i love the idea!

and yah. people get offended easily. its real silly!

[honeychile]

Originally posted by breathesgelatin
In case anyone cares, a feminist organization on campus (that I'm President of) did this same activity last spring. Only we did it according to the male-female wage gap--so women were charged less, etc.

Has anyone gone to one of those "Hunger Dinners" where everyone pays the same amount to get in, however, you draw a poker chip to see whether you get to eat a full dinner, just vegetables, or a cup of rice? For every 50 chips, there was one full steak dinner, 2 vegetable dinners, and the rest were rice - symbolizing what the earth's population eats like. And even at that, it should be one out of a thousand (or whatever).

I saw this exercise as the same sort of eye-opener.

[starang21]

Originally posted by OohTeenyWahine
So, as an Asian-American woman, would my cookie have been free?

probably would have had to pay like 1.25.