AUSTIN, TEXAS — When 18 year old Texas student Sylvester Williams applied for attendance at the University of Texas, he believed he was a shoe-in. His grandfather and father had both attended UT and each had modest careers playing football at the prestigious academic institution. Even though Williams knew his 2.95 GPA in high school wasn’t going to put him at the top of his class, he believed he had played well enough in his junior and senior years as his school’s quarterback would be enough, combined with the alumni donations from his father and grandfather to get him accepted. He wasn’t wrong.
“It felt real good to have all the hard work my grandfather and father put in before I was born pay off like this,” Sylvester said, adding, “that’s the American dream right there. No hand outs. Nothing taken for granted. You just get born, live your life, throw a few pig skins, and your father and grandpa will hook you up.” Sylvester said he could “only assuminate that everyone can take that same route” he did.
Sylvester told our reporter when asked that he sympathizes with young Abigail Fisher — the white teenage girl who took her UT rejection all the Supreme Court because though the college rejected her application because her test scores weren’t up to the college’s admission standards, she felt it was due to Affirmative Action policies placing African American students ahead of herself. “I get it,” Sylvester said, “isn’t it only natural to assume your mediocre test scores should put you ahead of someone with better test scores?”
“Sure, she didn’t meet the standards of the Top 10% rule that UT uses,” Sylvester said, “but she didn’t pass the second evaluation that took race into consideration as one of several factors, making race not really the deciding factor at all, of course, but once you use the word race around a white person not getting what they want, well, you get a Supreme Court case — or two — out of it.”
“I never needed a hand out,” Sylvester said, “not since the day I was born into my white, middle class home!” Though he says his own grades haven’t been all that great and he has been put on academic probation for them, he still is glad that another student didn’t take his place. “Because my grandpa and father went here before, so my place in line was already held,” he told us before asking, “why should some other person of color get in ahead of me just because they have good grades and test scores and might otherwise be passed over because they’re black and in a group that has a major statistical disadvantage in the sheer number of people even applying?”
Mr. Williams said that when Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that maybe some black kids aren’t ready for more advanced universities, he wasn’t being racist he was “being really real,” in Sylvester’s words. “Scalia was totally right,” he said, “at least I think he is, since I don’t have any evidence in front of me, and studies tend to show the complete opposite of what he said was true. But as a white conservative, I’m told that racism isn’t a thing, and that protecting disadvantaged groups is just hippie-dippie liberal bullshit so, I dunno…”
“Why should some black kid with good test scores get preferential treatment to me, a white kid who’s dad went to the University of Texas,” Sylvester asked as the interview was ending, “I mean, all I’m asking is if helping people who might get otherwise left in the dust clime out of poverty is more important than mollycoddling a white teenager who has her pick of any number of schools, and who just at the end of the day didn’t have the test scores she needed to be accepted outright?”
