So, Mx. Latina (isn't "Latina" a sexist gender-specific adjective?) Student, let me deconstruct, as you kids say, your statement.

"Within the first weeks of school, I told an upperclassman Latino that I felt like I was admitted to fill a racial quota. Why would they want me here? " You answered the question yourself. Duh.

"These feelings caught me by surprise as I had never known what it felt like to be the "minority" in my predominantly immigrant, low-income Latinx hometown. " In other words, you were accustomed to being surrounded by people just like you, and now you're experiencing culture shock. The people you support tell me that when that happens to while males, it's because of their genetically hard-wired racism. What is it when it happens to a wise Latina?

"I cried at the Chicanx/Latinx New Student Retreat..." A racially segregated retreat? Isn't that the sort of thing you're opposed to? Oh wait, I forgot. It's okay for your race. Just not for others. Silly me.

"Feelings of inadequacy have haunted me throughout my time at CMC..." You know why that is? Well, first of all, it's something that happens to most college freshman of all stripes. But second, it could just be that your primary schooling did not in any way prepare you for where you are. I don't know how rigorous or selective Claremont-McKenna College is. But quite possibly you would have been better off starting out with remedial classes at a community college. That's not your fault. When you were a child, you had no way of knowing that your schooling sucked. But it did, and now there's nothing for it but to fix it. You can't go back and re-do the past. You have to swallow your pride a bit and start at the bottom. Then you can work your way up to the likes of Claremont-McKenna, and go back in (if you choose to) actually ready for it.

Did the school admit you because of your qualifications as a student? Of course not. They admitted you to fill a race quota. You said so yourself. As long as your nose can be counted, the school and the government can claim that they did their job. What happens to you afterwards is really not their concern. In fact, they would very much prefer if you'd flunk out and become a government dependent, so you will be a reliable voter for bigger government, and you will have kids who grow up to be dependents and reliable voters for bigger government, etc. You want to stick it to the Man? Leave CMC, go to a community college, and start actually educating yourself. In today's world, being smart -- not lefty-trendy smart, but actually knowledgeable and well-read -- is the best revenge.

"Because attending college is a privilege not all people have. And you'd think that these idiots would figure that out and put their time into studying."

A-fucking-men!

But, then, these are most likely the same ones taking out huge loans and will be expecting Uncle Sam to "forgive" those loans when they can't pay them back.

An excellent fisking, Cousin Dave. From the student's op-ed:

Special Snowflake CM '15 is from Oxnard, Calif. She will be graduating with a degree in neuroscience and a gender studies sequence.

Unless she got grade inflation, she belonged. That, dearie, is how you know if you belong or not. I may have changed the names to not give undue notoriety to the special snowflake.

" had never known what it felt like to be the "minority" in my predominantly immigrant, low-income Latinx hometown."

Have run into that blindness a few times. People who don't understand 'minority' they see people just like them in their town all over. In their town they are the majority, on the channels they watch they are the majority, so they are confused and angry when movies/tv etc show whites as the majority, or they go into the real world outside their community and it slaps them in the face they aren't.

We're all born xeno-centric. We naturally gravitate towards people who are like us. Being free of prejudice is something that has to be learned. That's part of the human condition. The conceit these days is that some identity groups are damned -- they are inherently racist, and incapable of reform -- and some other groups are born immaculate, such that prejudice is foreign to their nature. Neither of these is true.

I cried at the Chicanx/Latinx New Student Retreat

What, they're having a big holiday sale on the letter "X"?

There was an excellent article a few years back by a guy who felt lost at MIT. He was white, but his disconnect was because he had been the smartest person in his high school and now he was surrounded by smart people. His identity as "the smart guy" was crushed. For the first time, he was facing tests and subject matter the required him to study.

So, did he cry at the Smart Guy New Student Retreat? No, he picked himself up, dusted himself off, and studied. In the article, he called his time at MIT an awakening, a discovery that other people are not stupid because they can't keep up with him in math and that he's not the only person with a viewpoint. He credited his culture shock with making him a better person.

Maybe Miss LatinX should look around and consider her time in CMC an education and a chance to mingle in a different world, one more diverse than her ethnic cocoon at home.

he had been the smartest person in his high school and now he was surrounded by smart people. His identity as "the smart guy" was crushed.
_______________________________________

In the book "Cheaper By the Dozen," all the kids were pushed to skip grades as often as they could - because their efficiency-engineer dad, especially, wouldn't settle for less than their best effort in everything. So they were certainly surrounded by kids just as smart and accomplished as they were, in a way, from the start.

Charles Schulz was bright and hard-working enough to skip at least one grade as well. This did - and didn't - work for him; he suffered terrible feelings of insufficiency in school, which became fodder for "Peanuts," later on.

I wasn't the smartest person in my high school, but by the time I got to college, I had had a lot of rather varied life experiences, so I didn't feel particularly out of place. I just assumed I knew more about the real world than my double 800 SAT classmates who didn't know how to drive or open a beer bottle. If this person had any guts, she would have dumped her Latina label and made her college accept her on her terms, not some box to be checked.

In the book "Cheaper By the Dozen," all the kids were pushed to skip grades as often as they could - because their efficiency-engineer dad, especially, wouldn't settle for less than their best effort in everything. So they were certainly surrounded by kids just as smart and accomplished as they were, in a way, from the start.

Well, when your Dad, and your Mom, are hard driving, world renowned efficiency experts, you're bound to pick up some smarts along the way. The kids were always surrounded by smart people, but they were also fairly insular and not exactly social butterflies, if I remember the book (haven't read it in years). With 11 brothers and sisters and a long list of chores that often involved caring for the next younger child, the kids usually ended up finding companionship amongst their siblings rather than the other kids in the neighborhood. Yet they made the best of it and didn't spend their time whining. The book shines with enough humor to show they made the best of things; it's not a Mommie Dearest hit piece.

Peanuts was so much more than a comic strip, a little angst, a little humor, and a little a morality tale - all in three panels a day. If you like the Peanuts and are ever in the Bay Area, check out the Charles Schultz museum in Santa Rosa. The mural's worth the price of admission.

Being an outsider can be an eye-opening experience, a catalyst to creativity, or an excuse to whine.

Sad trivia note: There never were a dozen kids at the same time. I may not have the timing exactly right, but, IIRC, by the time the seventh child was born (the fifth girl), one of the older girls had died of diptheria, at age four.

BTW, I mentioned that business of skipping grades at alt . obituaries, when Ernestine Gilbreth Carey died in 2006. Charlene responded with:

"I went through that. I wouldn't recommend it. It doesn't help kids avoid overconfidence - it gives them a raging sense of inadequacy and underconfidence, because even if they are intellectually ahead of their old yearmates they're always one year emotionally and mentally behind their new ones. Gifted classes are the way to go."

Before that, I said:

Some practices would be great to have around more often in modern families, such as the parents' firm expectations of the acceptance of rules not always understood, despite the family size. However, it's a bit hard to imagine kids accepting the math drills at the dinner table today - that is, it's one thing to have to memorize the multiplication tables up to 12 x 12, but memorizing anything more rigorous than that today is likely to elicit the rant from the comic strip character, Heart: "Why do we have to learn (long division) anyway? That's what calculators are for! If I want to know what TIME it is, I
just LOOK at a clock - I don't need to understand how a clock WORKS!"

(And, I fear, many kids will soon demand to know why ANYTHING needs to be memorized when we have Google.)

Not to mention that when the kids in CBTD try to get out of the math drill, Dad suggests they leave without eating dessert, which happens to
be apple pie. Nowadays, that's likely to get nothing but a shrug from the average kid, since it's a notorious, well-known fact that if kids
can't trade the fruit from their brown-bag lunches with other kids in the cafeteria, they often throw it out. (This was mentioned in "Family
Ties" once.)