Racism 101: Are you a Racist?

White Men are the new minority. They can’t get scholarships for school because of the colored and lady folk. Except, that’s not true. Not even a little bit.

Once again, because of the amount of “…but white men” complaints, a study was done on their behalf to see if there was any validity to their clams. Spoiler Alert! There wasn’t. However, the really interesting thing was that the numbers, while being kept accurate were used to misconstrue the conversation on many of the sites I found. For example, the outcome (in California)was, 43.6% of private scholarships went to white people while 55.3% went to minorities. 

If I end with the previous sentence, it sounds like white people might have a point, right? Except, nope! That didn’t stop an inane amount of web sites from using this number as proof that white people are getting discriminated against for collage scholarships though. It also was interesting to see those sites use these numbers to make their case but not the Nationwide numbers.

Let’s look a little closer at those numbers, shall we?

The study was done Nationwide over the 03/04 and 07/08 school years. Although, the numbers I just mentioned are actually from a smaller study done in California. For now, let’s talk California. The study was done for several hundred thousand students but just to make it easy for all of us, I am going to break it down in numbers out of 100,000. 

The above percentages breaks down to, White-43,000/Minority-55,300/Other-1,100. (I am not sure what “Other” entails since these numbers are race specific) Even by these numbers, if you aren’t paying attention, you could be lead to think that white people are getting the shaft, right? Well, that is what many web sites that I came across did, and did pretty well I might add. If it weren’t for the fact that I have critical thinking skills, I would have believed them too. Let’s keep going.

The trick here is the wording “Minority.” Luckily, there is more information easily found on this study. Here’s the breakdown out of 100,000 students receiving scholarships where race is a factor: White-43,000/Black-5,300/Latino-29,500/Asian-1,100/American India-2,100/Native Hawaiian-2,200/More than one race-5,200/Other-11,600. 

Remember how I said this portion was done in California specifically? Well, I also have the numbers for the Nationwide study. I’ll admit it, these are the numbers that dance in my head when I hear “White people/white men are the new minorities.” Ready? Here we go…

White: Scholarship Recipients-798,400 Total Private Scholarship Funding-$1,891 Million

Black: Scholarship Recipients-129,000 Total Private Scholarship Funding-$345 Million

Latino: Scholarship Recipients-103,900 Total Private Scholarship Funding-$236 Million

Asian: Scholarship Recipients-52,800 Total Private Scholarship Funding-$186 Million

American Indian: Scholarship Recipients-19,000 Total Private Scholarship Funding-$56 Million

Native Hawaiian: Scholarship Recipients-6,200 Total Private Scholarship Funding-$30 Million

Multi-Racial: Scholarship Recipients-40,200 Total Private Scholarship Funding-$156 Million

The study goes on to say that LESS THAN FIVE PERCENT of ALL scholarships and LESS THAT TEN PERCENT of INDIVIDUAL scholarships consider the student’s race among their eligibility criteria. Soooooooo….What were you saying about white men being the new minority?

With all this information, I was still able to find page after page of race baiting white only scholarships. The sick part is that although I was able to find many white only scholarships, I was not able to find one (at least not on any web site that I looked at) that didn’t preface the information with some form of “Minorities get everything handed to them. Now it’s our turn.”