Andrew Carpenter's Tuesday column, ""Race deserves no place in university admissions,"" is a poorly-argued embarrassment to the students of the UW campus. The entire piece is uncorroborated conjecture. From his opening claim that ""there are almost no students who pay any attention to race"" to his belief that ""it makes sense to expect minority students to drop out at higher rates than white students,"" Mr. Carpenter's journalistic atrocity is representative of nothing more substantive than his own speculation.
In addition to its unsubstantiated argument, Mr. Carpenter's piece also falls flat because of its implicit, racist foundation: that students of color are here by virtue of being students of color and would not have been accepted were it not for some unverified system of ""race-based admissions,"" while white students are here by virtue of their academic merit. That scores of qualified students of color are admitted to the university, along with scores of incompetent white students, goes completely unaddressed in his attempt to ""show that [he believes] race has nothing to do with a student's potential.""
This assumption also fails to acknowledge that white students receive a daily ""handout"" in the form of white privilege. White privilege is a complex concept in critical race theory, but a short description from Peggy McIntosh's ""White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack"" provides a working definition: ""I had been taught about racism as something that puts others at a disadvantage, but had been taught not to see one of its corollary aspects, white privilege, which puts me at an advantage."" If Mr. Carpenter were truly concerned about any unfair impact of race on college admissions, he would have addressed the unfair racial privileges which help to bring many UW students to and through the application process.
While Andrew Carpenter is certainly free to hold incomplete, unsupported opinions on his own time, the fact that he has taken it upon himself to express what he sees as the majority ""colorblind"" opinion is cause for concern. He does not speak for us, and we do not wish to be included in his indiscriminate generalizations.
—Ryan Adserias
Erica Andrist
Alana Keusch
Jahna Lundberg
Lia Stratton
