By Nicole Kim and Noa Schwartz
March 30, 2017
After her PSAT, Nicole Bahar ’18 marched directly to her dean’s office and burst through the door, not stopping to talk to friends or send a brief text to her parents letting them know she had finished. She was frustrated, confused and angry, she said, but not due to concerns about the test.
“On the PSAT, I remember I had checked off the box that said ‘white (of Middle Eastern descent),’” Bahar said. “It’s just not fair. I asked, ‘Why am I being generalized and put in a parenthetical?’ It was a mixture of feeling offended and also feeling like it’s unfair that I don’t get this advantage.”
Bahar said she was referring to the policy adopted by colleges known as Affirmative Action, a race-based selection process that aims to promote diversity and increase access to education for applicants of historically disadvantaged minorities, such as African, Latino and Native-Americans. The term “Affirmative Action” was coined by President John F. Kennedy in Executive Order 10925, which included a provision for the government’s “Affirmative Action” to guarantee fair employment without consideration of “race, creed, color or national origin.
Read full story on The Harvard Chronicle.
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