We are all familiar with the traditional history and forms of racism. Name calling, discrimination and a lack of political representation.What is more insidious is the new racism, a form of preferential treatment that maintains a sense of patronage and benevolence on the part of white progressives for the benefit of minorities.

In the name of diversity, many initiatives were instituted to gain minority participation in business and college education.

These measures are met with controversy, both sides self interested in either maintaining the status quo and thus power or gaining more financial and educational benefits.

The belief that minorities deserve special treatment because of the color of their skin, gender or religion is as racist as using racial epithets. It promulgates the belief that the white race is superior, if for the simple fact that white students and workers do not need help in gaining access to schools or jobs, while minorities do need such aforementioned assistance.

Fostering diversity is repeatedly emphasized in business classes in the Love School of Business. However, this brings up a quandary; isnt hiring someone simply because of the color of their skin as great a disservice to the individual as it is to not hire them because of the same criteria?

According to the Feb. 20 edition of the Daily Tar Heel, Brendan Brown reports that the Boston University branch of the College Republicans has offered a whites only scholarship. This act was protested by the NAACP as racism, hatred and bigotry rearing its ugly head.

Why must this act of protest be immediately dismissed as racism? Are we to assume that simply because one of the requirements for the scholarship is that a student must be white, that it is immediately racist? Are we to make the same assumption with minority scholarships, which require that students be of a particular race? Is this not racis as well?

Perhaps it is because white males are not allowed to talk about discrimination in any dissenting way. Any discussion that criticizes affirmative action immediately leads to the detractor being called a racist, even when the detractor is black.

During the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s George S. Schuyler, a black journalist, warned of the danger of being accepted simply for the color of ones skin. He believed that using a modifier of being a black artist allowed racists to dismiss ones work as simply good for black art.

Schuyler felt that being defined by ones race led to a discrediting of ones works and achievements as either outright flukes or dismissed in the context of ones ethnic background. Countee Cullen, a Harlem Renaissance poet was quoted, I want to be remembered as a great artist, not a great black artist.

He was criticized by his contemporaries, such as Langston Hughes for such sentiment.

Does this new phenomenon of advancing people based solely upon their race strike anyone else as fundamentally racist? Shouldnt candidates be chosen regardless of race, but for their abilities, not an arbitrary trait of their biology that no one has control over? We should judge potential students and employees based on their abilities and character, not upon their region of ethnic origin or color of their skin.

Opinion Editor: Bryan Ray - 02/22/07