When I was young I had a very negative opinion toward diversity scholarships. Like most people of color, I felt like I wanted to get in on merit and f getting a handout blah blah blah.
But now that I'm older and have actually been at an elite institution, both as a student and teacher, I see how many of my colleagues really had access to things that meant they didn't have to work one tenth as hard as I did to get where I'm at. Doors just opened for them and oftentimes when they tell their life stories it's amazing how many taken for granted bits of preparation and support they got.
I tend to believe awards and acceptances should be based on class rather than race, but oftentimes race blind programs tend to still reproduce an overrepresentation of whites because of network effects. In other words, in some cases a poorer white person can be closer to information networks that alert them to the opportunity or have references deemed more credible by institutional biases. But at the end of the day, I don't care if elite institutions are darker, just that they're more representative of humanity as a whole across class, race, gender etc. In fact, then their status as elite itself would likely begin to change, which I'd welcome.
All of that said, while those are my politics, I spent a summer studying at Oxford. I love its Harry Potter vibes and if someone said you can come here full time due to your ancestry, I'd be on the next plane like toodle pip old chap.
