Word: self-doubt
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Affirmative action is mandated discrimination; that alone makes the program unjust. What makes affirmative action an even more insidious practice is its effect on its own recipients. Through the implementation of special treatment based on race, it engenders severe self-doubt in the hearts and minds of the very people who are supposedly benefiting from it. Shelby Steele, in The content of Our Character, eloquently makes this very point...
...recently by the minority coalition, which called for a public apology from Mansfield. Minority students charge that Mansfield questioned the legitimacy of their grades; they claim that his statements, regardless of their veracity, are hurtful on a visceral level. Yet any special treatment necessarily leads to such pain through self-doubt. Minority students are still admitted to Harvard under the misty cloud of affirmative action, which generates the widespread perception of "under qualification." And few will likely escape from this debilitating weight, an inevitable corollary to affirmative action in practice...
...unfortunate consequences of affirmative action hold true whether the criterion is race, athletic ability or legacy status. Special treatment always has and always will breed the perception of illegitimacy and self-doubt. That doesn't mean that all recipients of special treatment are unqualified, or deserve to be questioned. But damaging impressions necessarily persist. One African-American student at the Business School recently expressed his disgust with preferential treatment in a letter to The Crimson: "if the policy is different for Blacks than for whites, then whites have an excuse to cry foul and Blacks, like myself, remain chained...
Whether you are giving full scholarships or just free sweatshirts, if the policy is different for Blacks than for whites, then whites have an excuse to cry foul and Blacks, like myself, remain changed by our own self-doubt. To target the neediest qualified Black students, the school should write a set of guidlines which specifies the profile of students who deserve special treatment...
...frustration, the difficulty of achieving clarity in her work, the fear of madness, pain and death. As an "explanation" of Hesse's art, they have limited value. It's not uncommon to run across people who imagine that Hesse, a highly intelligent artist with deep wells of melancholy and self-doubt, actually committed suicide or was in some way immolated on the altars of a sexist art world. But she wasn't an art martyr, and this sort of lumpen-feminist romanticism is totally beside the point of Hesse's life. She was avid to live and knew that...