Any time a student of color is accepted to a university, regardless of the university’s prestige, it is likely that they will encounter the argument that they were only accepted to the university in order to fulfill a quota.

Victor Agbafe, Pooja Chandrashekar and Munira Khalif were each accepted to all eight Ivy League universities this past month. All three students are also first generation Americans.

However, many Internet spectators seem to feel that these students’ first generational status overrides their incredible accomplishments.

This perception concerning the feats of students of color must change. This mentality erases the hard work minority students have put toward their educations for several years of their lives. The present disparities between white and minority graduates, in regard to social and economic status, are why the achievements of minority students must be commended, not discredited.

Khalif, whose parents are immigrants from Somalia, maintains an exceptional academic record under a rigorous course load, founded a non-profit campaign to make education accessible for East African youth and is a recipient of the United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education’s Youth Courage Award.

The failure to acknowledge her success lies in the fact that many white commentators, while trying to undermine the accomplishments of minority students, fail to acknowledge the generational privileges that have been complicit in their own individual achievements.

The disproportionate amount of power between white men, white women and people of color are present on economic, political and social grounds. The failure to acknowledge this privilege manifests itself in the fact that many white Americans do not believe that black men are being systematically targeted by police forces because of their race, but will argue that black students are admitted to prestigious universities for their minority status.

According to “Separate and Unequal,” a study conducted by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, 82 percent of white students attend the top institutions, while 72 percent of Hispanic students and 68 percent of African-American students attend open-enrollment or community colleges.

This is primarily due to the fact that white students are more likely to grow up with more opportunities and resources than students of color. This includes having a higher likelihood of being able to attend better funded K-12 public schools, learning in an environment in which they do not experience discrimination for their racial identity and possessing the resources to finance an education, such as taking unpaid internships and having access to tutors.

This presence of a white, male hierarchy at institutions of higher learning is a result of the socially maintained racial disproportionality in U.S. economic classes and the historical fact that women and people of color have been barred from many American universities in the past.

The privilege white Americans possess and the disregard they have for the accomplishments of minority students is best summed up in a tweet reposted by Anderson Cooper after the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man in South Carolina on April 4, “they will believe you got into school b/c u r black but not that u were shot b/c u r black. #WalterScott.”

For these reasons and more, the achievements of minority students should not be discredited for their racial identity, but celebrated for bringing a new perspective to historically, and predominantly, white, male colleges.

The erasure of the accomplishments of students of color only supports the idea that white Americans view the advancement and achievement of minorities as a personal attack, when minorities are just working to catch up in a race that was never fair.

Alexa Diaz is a freshman magazine journalism major. Her column appears weekly. She can be reached at adiaz02@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @AlexaLucina.

Published on April 14, 2015 at 9:14 pm