Word: whiteness
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When I decided to join a final club, my mother was not pleased. Her voice tinged with disappointment as she asked how her son could participate in something so steeped in racist, elitist, sexist privilege. I countered that white skin and blue blood were no longer club membership requirements. But she wasn’t sold. What about the women? She persisted. After a few abortive rationalizations, I realized I had no good answer. I was embarrassed...
...also makes for a richer community, and this gain more than compensates for the discomfort of no longer being surrounded by faces that look just like your own. Final clubs were surely more "cohesive" in a certain sense back when they admitted only the Andover-bred scions of wealthy white families, but it was a lazy cohesion sustained by uniformity, and few express a desire to return to those days...
...December 7, 1922, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, a black Harvard graduate from the class of 1902, wrote to Abbott Lawrence Lowell, class of 1877 and the University’s 22nd President, to ask whether his son might be allowed to reside in a previously all-white freshman dorm. Lowell was a self-described "friend of the negro," but this request seemed clearly beyond the pale. "I am sure you will understand," wrote Lowell to the concerned father, "why we have not thought it possible to compel men of different races to live together...
Johnsen declined to comment to TIME beyond a statement released on April 9, in which she too blamed GOP intransigence. "I hope that the withdrawal of my nomination will allow this important office to be filled promptly," she wrote. (See who's who in Barack Obama's White House...
Some liberals who hoped Johnsen would be Obama's tonic to the office under Bush are bitterly disappointed by her withdrawal, and some accuse the White House of not backing their own candidate. But Lee Casey, a Washington attorney who was an attorney adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel in 1992 and 1993, says her nomination may have been abandoned because of a bigger confirmation fight that is now taking shape: the one for Justice Stevens' seat. "My guess is that it became a question of where do we want to spend the political capital," he says...