Minorities stretching the truth
Venus Yin’s column in Wednesday’s Daily Campus presented a number of strong statements regarding the role of the Young Conservatives of Texas in the emergence of the amendment that is on the ballot in this week’s Student Senate elections. As a member of YCT since the beginning of my freshman year, I was impressed to see that she had done her research about the background of our organization but undoubtedly taken aback by some of the allegations that were made.
Ms. Yin and other members of the minority community have claimed both directly and indirectly that this amendment is the first step in YCT’s long term plan to rid the university of the Department of Multicultural Student Affairs. YCT would accomplish this by running its own members for the minority special interest seats, who would presumably win the vote of those respective ethnic communities, then propose new legislation in Senate that would eventually call for the elimination of the DMSA. Does this sound ridiculous to anyone else? This amendment may look benign on paper, but in fact it accomplishes very little. I sincerely doubt that a white student would win the African American senate seat or the Hispanic seat. The amendment will only further sharpen the racial divides that exist our campus.
Yin also cites an example from last spring to further her views of YCT’s mean-spirited agenda in which a group of students led by Asian American Senator Jason Shyung showed up at one of our meetings. I extend an apology to Shyung and those who showed up for the poor timing, but this meeting was in fact private due to the fact that Dr. Caswell was going to be speaking to our group about matters related to the university’s discrimination policies. We invited Shyung and the other students to any of our upcoming meetings at that time, but they chose not to attend.
The outrage over this amendment comes as somewhat of an irony in this year’s elections when we have an Hispanic candidate for Vice President (Rafael Alvarez) and an African American running unopposed for Secretary (Drew Washington). If Alvarez wins, two of the top three positions in Student Senate would be filled by students from the minority community. The task force claimed that most of the other senators held to the principle of “double representation” based on the fact that they were members of both the school they represented and the Greek community. There are multiple racial undertones to this belief; namely that the Greek community consists only of white students and that the senators from the different schools would only be white.
If Student Senate wants a real solution, they would eliminate the minority special interest seats altogether. A total of three candidates are up for three seats: one African American, two Hispanics, and no international students. I am not trying to deny the minority community a voice in Senate, but they would have an equal if not better chance were they to run within their respective schools. If you want proof, just look at how few candidates there are for the seats from each school. A minority candidate would undoubtedly galvanize his or her community to get out the vote. Let’s leave YCT out of this and focus on the discriminatory nature of these seats, even if we are not dealing with a traditional form of discrimination.
