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Show Tuesday, October 3, 2006' il ! Letter to the Editor: We are a salad bowl While 1 support the efforts the college iS'making to educate students about diversity, I fed I must stand up and say: stop making people fed guilty about who they are. I haw noticed a trend on campus this year to raise awareness of diversity, but I feel the college is going about it the wrong way. I support diversity in its purest form; my father is Native American and my mother is Caucasian so 1 am a mixed breed myself, but I do hot agree with this colleges current emphasis on drawing awareness to the idea of white privilege and how it is bad. Essentially, white privilege is the idea that white people are automatically bom with more options, more opportunities and are able to possess more opinions than other races. I am not in a position to deny truth in this, but I also bdieve it is not the story we should be focusing on as a student body. Tim Wise was the most recent speaker in our schools diversity lecture series. Tim is a Caucasian st speaker with a habit of inappropriate sarcasm to supposedly ease the tension the topics may cause. Many people laughed at his sarcastic jokes but they were mainly a mockery of various groups of people and I found them to be in poor taste. In his speech on Sept. 26 Wise was critical of how white people approach race subconsdously and he had a way of implying everyone who is white thinks alike, which is not the case. Ironic, considering his point was that white people try to box other cultures into their own. He never defined what white culture is either, though its apparently the culture white people force on all people of other races. From my own observation, I feel that Caucasian people who acknowledge and try to fight against this idea of white . anti-raci- privilege are trying to counter their very heritage by fightthey are automatically more privileged at birth than other ing their own race; fighting to deny the one thing about themselves they cannot change. This is reverse racism and j races and that they need to it will breed hatred within if we let it continue. This idea stop it, let's focus on ways that that we now have to fight against white privilege simply everyone of all different races can find something unique about themselves and about swings the pendulum from one extreme to the other. their heritage. We need to encourage a positive Other races and other cultures increasingly have for all groups, and this should not emphasize underrepresomething to be proud of as awareness efforts for misented or majority groups, but simply include all, and this nority groups increase. These groups are now developmeans the Caucasian race too, which can be quite diverse ing or emphasizing an authentic and tangible culture to be proud of and identify with. However, the inevitable in itself. As a collective and diverse group on campus, we need to recognize all races as being completely equal and problem that emerges from this newfound awareness is the strong idea that it is now racist to take pride if you give all races the right to be proud in where they come from without discriminating against other races or their are a member of the majority group. I feel with the rise of anti-rad- st own. Playing catch-u- p and overcompensating for discrimmovements such as what Tim Wise is a part of, many white people do not and cannotfeel inations of the past will only cause problems in the future. We are no longer a melting pot here in America; pride in their race. These movements teach that they should be ashamed for automatic privileges their skin we cannot lose our identities trying to be just the color affords them and that they need to change, even if same as every other person. We are a salad bowl, and they do not actively discriminate against other races and we need to be proud in what makes each one of us even if they are veiy open toward other races. It makes unique. No single ingredient is superior or inferior to the other; we need all of them to be whole. sense that people would attribute their negative idenself-ima- ge tity directly to the rise of pride in minority groups. I wonder if this lack of identity and this negative among Caucasian people can be directly linked to explaining the existence of hate crimes and white supremacy organizations, which provide one identity that is otherwise nonexistent for the majority group. We need to give everyone, not just minority groups, a positive message and a positive image for them to adopt Instead of telling white people on campus about how -- self-ima- ge Lindsey Christine Carpenter regrets to have used the word Caucasian incorrectly in its past issue. The term Caucasian refers to people in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East to Northern India. Caucasians are characterized as having reddish-whit- e skin and are not considered to be only to olive-broof the white race. Note from the Editor. The Forum wn Youre Better Off In Prison Why pay your tuition when bachelors and masters degrees in prison are free? In the southern valley of Salt Lake City, students make their way to classroom 2. The instructor greets them as they take their seats. They take out pens and r sharpened pencils and find their pages in textbooks and notebooks. But as these students make their way to class, they dont trip along brick sidewalks beneath oak trees. They do not pass a student union, pick up a campus newspaper, or even see a library. Instead, they walk instead on long concrete sidewalks. They pass uniformed inmates clustering around picnic tables, enjoying evening smokes. Locks and guards and chain-lin- k fences with barbed wire coiled around the top all greet them everyday. These students are participating in one of 52 college degree courses offered this year at minimum- - and medium-securi- ty prisons around the country. But " this institution Is not freer Someone has to pay their tuition, and it is not the students. Instead, the current system requires that tax payers fund their degrees. As disturbing as these arrangements seem, there are benefits to educating todays prisoners. A 1994 Arizona State study found that 85 percent of the national incarcerated population did not graduate from high school. Statistics from the US Department of Education indicate that the average prison inmate is functionally illiterate, is probably learning disabled, has not gone beyond the tenth grade, and has an average IQ, score below 75, indicating a substantially higher than average rate of mental retardation. While these bureaus and state departments may have an interest in successful correctional education programs, there is another group with an equal, if not greater interest in this system todays college criss-crossi- 4 ng two-person-h- igh Students at a minimum security correctional facility pursue their bachelor's degrees while serving time. students. The average student at Westminster College will spend over $72,000 to graduate with a bachelors degree. However, if I were to rob a neighborhood bank this afternoon and was sentenced to time in a Federal Prison, I could get my degree for free including room and board. Where is the justice in that? To make matters worse, all of us are paying for these inmates degrees with our hard earned tax dollars. Somehow, it seems as though we are getting the short end of the deal. After all, if prison is meant to hold inmates responsible for their choices, why should they be given an educational advantage? The time has come to make a change; to make prisoners responsible for the expense of their individual education. If we can accept the premise that ...see i ,, V :i 'rl - f .J - Photo by Jd.com btephem page 8, Prison j ' V; This year, minimum- - and medium-securi- ty inmates can choosefrom 52 different bachelor's degrees at no expense to them. Vblurp&XXXXi Issue 4 |