Heh 
<bows together with Herrlurp>
As a former admissions counselor wrote, if two people are compared who are borderline and one is a minority, then if the minority is better than, equal to, or only several steps below the points of the other guy, he is in.
The logic given on why USNA does affirmative action is NOT based on poverty or hardships like other schools give. The basic reason given for racial selection in the USNA in all the sources I have ever read is to increase the diversity of Officers so that enlisted, many of whom are non-white, know and see non-white Officers once in a while, which is a good thing for morale.
The problem with that is clearly that.. color is what is important and not whether that person actually had hardship, poverty, etc. But hey, it boosts morale, right?! Well, it also decreases accomplishments of the tons of outstanding minorities who beat out white candidates, as they of course do all the time, because everybody will consider they were some of those that got in because of color with disregard to hardships or family status.
Now I am not here to argue for or against this, I just shared the above to setup a question. If 8% of our Navy is FOREIGN BORN, should 8% of each class (100 people) be foreign born as well? Or maybe 15%? Having 15% of each class born in a different country just so that eventually the officer makeup fits with the enlisted makeup of foreign foreigners would actually MAKE MORE SENSE than affirmative action does right now. For one, there is probably 1 foreign born officer for every 1000 foreign born enlisted sailors. The status quo of this is worse than the ratio of minority officers to enlisted sailors, so the foreign born situation should have more priority, right?
Two, with 42% of all military foreigners serving in the Navy instead of another branch, there ARE a lot of foreigners. (By foreigners everywhere in this post I mean former foreigners btw.) About 70% of the foreign born lived in Latin America and the Carribean. So, 70% of 8%, or about 5% of all the servicemen in the Navy, are ARE NON-WHITE WHO WRITE AFRICAN AMERICAN OR ANOTHER RACE WHO DO NOT ACTUALLY SHARE ANYTHING IN COMMON WITH WHAT WE KNOW AS "MINORITIES".
So at the minimum, these 5% of the Navy would have a higher morale from BEING AROUND IMMIGRANT officers INSTEAD of around MINORITY officers, whether the IMMIGRANT officers are from europe or asia or africa. But the Navy probably just looks at the race card and says, "these are minorities, and we need minority officers" instead of the real messsage, that these are not minorities but are IMMIGRANTS who couldn't care less about minorities but who would have high morale if they knew immigrants were officers all the time. That's my third point.
So my second point was, if the Navy's reason for affirmative action is to bring equal representation of races compared to the way they make up the enlisted, then what about the 8% who are foreign born? Should 8% of each class be foreign born as well? Now you can see how ridiculous this all is getting, and how affirmative action is being applied with no clear cut goal or purpose. Basically, if you're going to have a goal of having an identical makeup to the service, then what about the foreign born and other qualities of people that group them? Why only RACE? And why is COLOR so important regardless of poverty or hardships, just b/c it will help enlisted to know that there are minority officers out there?
I am not for or against affirmative action. I just want to see what you guys feel and to spark some conversation! Thanks!
