This letter is in response to Ashley Bell’s column on the “benefits of affirmative action,” and how it is beneficial to everyone (“Affirmative action is beneficial to everyone,” SN 2/20).

I myself am a white male, and believe I have been shorted by the concept of affirmative action.

Applying to almost all major universities in the state with an extremely good high school GPA, ACT score, plethora of extracurricular activities and early application dates got me accepted to almost every school that I applied to, save one. I have a friend who is female, who attends that university as we speak who applied after I did, with the same grades and fewer extracurricular activities- and I know of more than a half dozen friends who can tell me the same story.

While no one should ever be discriminated against based upon their ethnicity or nationality, which we can all agree on, I think affirmative action is not “further steps to equality,” but a system with inequalities tainted with sexual and minority bias. A system based on the merits of the applicant alone is the system that is equal, one that doesn’t look at gender or race at all, a system that hands awards out based on the worthiness of the receiver.

Until that day, no system will truly be equal, as affirmative action claims to be.

Doug Blocksma
engineering freshman