By Monir Khilla –

When I do leave my office and decide to take a walk around, I enjoy noticing the skittle-colored campus (with the occasional white skittle here and there). What I always find myself wondering, however, is if Affirmative Action (AA) has played any part with it. With me.

I’m a middle-class minority student, but my race and economic class shouldn’t matter when it comes to my academia. The entitlement system known as AA has made minorities such as myself look ignorant, pathetic, and incompetent. According to it’s proponents, we, minorities, are too stupid for college. We need a dummy scale.

Through its crusade in search for the Holy Grail of “diversity,” AA has failed on all scales. It has failed students, parents, and teachers. It lets down the students who are in debt from wasted years of college, parents who are also footed with the bill, and professors who now have to lower standards because there are unqualified students in class.

Students shouldn’t be allowed to go to college because of their skin color, but because of their merit. Some may argue that less fortunate people don’t have access to the same resources that the rich do and that affirmative action “levels” the playing field. Boo hoo. Cry me a river. Putting an underprivileged kid with sub-par grades into a good school will only set him up for failure. If he couldn’t keep up with his classwork in high school, who the hell thinks he can do it in college?

If economics is an issue, then why not let destitute whites into college ahead of rich and middle-class blacks (let’s not pretend like they don’t exist.)

Read Atilla Azami’s opinion of Affirmative Action.

I don’t care for diversity. Rather, I don’t care for controlled diversity. We’re not guinea pigs being used in an experiment so see if one group gets along with others. If diversity is going to happen, let it be destiny. Let it be because fate deemed us as academic equals who meet due to chance. Let us get to know each other because we want to, not because there’s no one else around.

Furthermore, I see no academic value in “diversity.” Can anyone tell me why diversity matters in a math or science class? According to proponents of AA, we’re all racists. This is why we need racism to combat racism. Yeah, that’s smart.

I can’t help but look at President Obama and wonder if he is a product of AA. He may not be. Who knows? Because we have this system in place, we will always question the integrity of every colored person with a degree. They may have worked hard and earned it, but our trust in their expertise may have been diminished by their skin color.

I may have been a product of AA before I transferred to NJCU. I failed out of my last college, maybe due to laziness and hard classes. If I got into NJCU because of AA, then I suggest they throw me out now. The only way to stop racism is to stop discriminating. I’m sorry I didn’t use any statistics or big words. I had to dumb-down my writing; there are

AA students who probably couldn’t read it.