Beware Of The Drum Major Instinct

Let me ask you this, how many of you believe that a student who came from a good strong suburban school with an SAT score of 1450 would have gotten the same score on the same exam, if she had gone to a poor inner city public school? No doubt her intelligence level and potential for doing good in society would have been just as high, even though her SAT score may have been lower. So if an inner city student scores 1050 on the SAT and a suburban school student scores 1150, who is really the better student? The answer is, “we don’t know.” Therefore let’s remember Micah’s call to love mercy.

People today talk about Dr. King’s call for us all to be treated as equals and that’s why affirmative action is wrong. I am all for abolishing affirmative action in colleges today, if we get rid of all affirmative action in the college admission process. Most people don’t want to do that because it takes away some unfair advantages for certain students.

No college should be allowed to see a student’s name, nor should the college be allowed to know a student’s parents name. This is a hidden affirmative action plan for the children of the important members of the community. You see if you just happen to be the son or daughter of the governor, or of the President of the United States, your chances of being admitted go up drastically. It has nothing to do with your intelligence ability or SAT score. You just come from the right background.

What college in its right mind would turn away the children of Bill Gates of Microsoft just because their SAT school didn’t quite measure up. Let’s also bar the names of prep schools on applications. The students going to those schools were placed their because of their parent’s drum major instinct, and to allow the schools names on the applications would be an affirmative action plan for students from prestigious prep schools.

California is a state in which affirmative action is a really bad word. It was ironic that a group of families there, opposed naming a school Martin Luther King Jr. High School for fear that college admissions staff would think it was a black school. We claim Dr. King is a national hero, but I’d love to know how many predominantly white schools bear the name Martin Luther King Jr. High School.

Let’s also bar colleges from asking whether or not your parents or family members were alumni of the college. The preference of giving extra weight to children of alumni is called legacy programs. This is an affirmative action plan for those whose ancestors were more likely to have gone to college. Yes if we want college admissions to be equal, let’s give every student a number for their application, and allow them to only list their states so that the schools could achieve a diversity from around the country.

The truth is, this will never happen. Why? Because the majority of Americans want to have a means to further the drum major instinct on behalf of themselves and their children. It does not matter what the color of the person is, the drum major instinct inside of us is part of the reason Jesus came and died for us. It’s hard to walk humbly before our God when we have the opportunity to get ahead first. The drum major instinct keeps us from admitting, Dr. King’s dream has not fully settled itself into the hearts of most Americans.