Justice Scalia, Affirmative Action, and Why Shame Is Not An Option
By junior year, I was already upset at some of the shade I received at Xavier High School. Even with my 90+% GPA and excellent ranking, I still felt like my experience was undermined by people who didn’t want me to do well. My English 11 honors teacher, a longstanding priest and faculty member in the community, continued to find ways to ignore me in book discussions. Fellow students, save my real friends, whispered that I was easily one of the whiter students in a student body that was 80% white already. I assimilated with the culture because, if I didn’t, my whole academic standing felt like it was in danger.
I ate the derision because I didn’t know what else to do. A part of me knew what I represented as the only person of color in many of my classes. That’s a burden too hefty to bear for an uninformed 16-year-old.
When I applied to Georgetown University and Syracuse University, my only two real applications, I Justice Scalia, Affirmative Action, and Why Shame Is Not An Option | The Jose Vilson:
