I starting replying as a comment to the great article Julia wrote about affirmative action, if you haven’t read it you can find it here . Julia has such a great perspective on life, and I loved her article. I also love the ending line (sharing a strong opinion is liberating).
Seeing as I am neither black, nor grew up in a poor family with only 1 parental figure I am confident that I’m woefully unqualified to pass judgment on affirmative action, however I feel that both affirmative action & the bit on female rights that Julia touched on fall under the bigger umbrella of “fairness” which I would like to share my perspective on.
Julia touches on a very sensitive subject with her paragraph on female sexual abuse. I agree with her 100% that blaming the victim is the exact opposite way to go. Women should feel comfortable wearing whatever clothing they want too, and no one should ever make a sexual comment or advance towards a women that is unwanted. That being said I would like to see women (and men) everywhere take their personal protection into their own hands. This is one of the biggest reasons that if I ever have a daughter I will be teaching her martial arts. The world is a hard, unfair place. People everywhere will take advantage of you if you let them. Women especially need to empower themselves to defend themselves if/when necessary. This does not nessisaraly mean physical conflict, but the confidence to assert yourself verbally starts with the knowledge that you can physically defend yourself. The best way I can explain my point is to use the words of my Kempo instructor in.
“You need to define your personal line of comfort for all social interactions. The line is completely your choice. It does not have to be related to the law, or any external view point what so ever. Its your line, and your line alone. If your line is someone putting their hands on you without your consent, then when that line is crossed you execute your game plan and that’s all there is too it. No hesitations, no guess work. No should I do x,y,z. Your line is crossed, and there is a consequence for whoever crossed it. Which brings us to the next point, you have a simple “go to” game plan for any situation where your line has been crossed. Again there is no guess work on what you will do, you have a simple plan, you execute it and the conflict is brought to a conclusion. But the biggest thing I want to stress is that our own personal safety is OUR RESPONSIBILITY, no one else’s. Of course we strive to live in a society where bad things like female sexual harassment don’t happen. But the facts of life are you control whether someone takes advantage of you. If you don’t stand up for yourself, no one else can.
Affirmative action for college entrance is an extremely complicated situation. Ultimately I think something needs to be done to help even “the playing field of life” for kids. Many people are born into basically impossible situations. 1 or no parent, no social support system or extended family, not enough money to live adequately. For someone like that to prosper they need to have some advantages pointed their way. In lew of college entrance I think we would be a lot better served a society if we tried to help kids sooner. I think once they hit college age that its too late. I’d love to see something done much earlier, but again I’m not sure what this would be exactly…. I think I will give it more thought and maybe discuss with Julia to try and form an idea for something better than the current system we have in place.