AtomicBaboon!?!

When I was approaching the end of my high school career I applied for several of the advertised scholarships at school. I figured I would get at least one considering I was in the top 10 of my class with a GPA greater than 4.0, had built a solar car, was a member of various mathematics and engineering clubs, and at the time was a pretty nice guy (not as much of a cynical jerk as I am now).

So I wrote essays (which I was really good at at the time) and answered questionnaires like many of my fellow students were doing. During the process I noticed there were many scholarships that I was automatically disqualified to apply for. Their requirements basically being that I could not be white and/or male. This bugged me a bit but you know I'm a white male so I can't get upset by those things... "they" said so and at that time in my life I wanted to make "them" happy.

So the big night rolls around where they hand out all the scholarships at a ceremony and the people that received them walk across the stage and shake some persons hand and get a check. I can't remember now how many I applied for but I do remember that I didn't get any of them. By that point I had taken the ACT and scored high enough to benefit from one of the states socialist programs so I was in good shape. However, as far as the scholarships made available to me by my high school were concerned, it appeared to me that I had been discriminated against. It seemed that the assumption at the time was that since I was a white male I would some how automatically be able to afford to get the education I needed so I didn't need the money. This of course was not true. Had I scored a couple points lower on the ACT I wouldn't have been able to afford college. However, if I had been a "minority" or a female I would have been guaranteed money. That's the way it looked anyway. So, I decided then that when I had the money to do it I was going to start the Dan Feather Scholarship for Middle Class White Males. I figure if other racial and gender scholarships exist this shouldn't be a problem and I could at least help out one kid in the same situation.

I heard about an incident in Rhode Island a while back but didn't get around to looking it up until this morning. I Googled for "White Male Scholarship" and came up with many blog entries but I can't seem to find any national news about it. The "Cybercast News Service" has a couple articles regarding the situation here and here. It got pretty ugly for the student republican group that created the scholarship. They created it to make a statement of course. It makes me wonder how the Dan Feather Scholarship for Middle Class White Males would go over in Carthage. Probably not very well...