Ethnic centers help students; Lottery needs improvements

Editor,

Lawrence Allen makes one decent point and two completely ignorant and venomous ones in his letter to the Daily Lobo on Friday. I will leave critique of the first one to those more informed on the topic (a move Allen would have been wise to emulate), but on the second one, I understand the angst white people feel about ethnic and other support programs. The attitude taken is typically, "I had nothing to do with racism/sexism perpetrated years ago, so why should my access be adversely affected for bygone injustices?" But this ignores, or at least downplays, the nature of privilege, which compounds positively over generations and centuries for the haves and inversely compounds over the same time span for the have-nots.

These programs exist to shift America toward realizing the promise of meritocracy our society is founded on but which has been deferred and half-fulfilled for too long. Allen wants UNM to only be accessed by the best and brightest, yet he wants to eradicate the programs that help find the best and brightest who have centuries of trends and prejudices going against them. This brings me to his third and only valid point.

The benchmarks of the Lottery program are laughable, and they thwart the ideals we should be striving for. Every semester when I see how meagerly the Lottery grant covers my financial liability, I think of the students who twitter away a semester or two before dropping out, making the state's investment one with no returns whatsoever. If the standards were raised, more of that money could come the way of serious students. However, the use of the loaded word "hoodlum" is vinegar with which you will catch no flies. It's a shame Allen ended his rant with, "If you can't afford $5,000 a year for college, you shouldn't be here." It's also a shame his letter began with such obviously hateful bullet points, because if he hadn't, I am sure he would have a lot of bright, underprivileged students on his side. As it stands, I sit back, awaiting the hordes of knee-jerk lefties who will righteously and over-zealously tear him apart.

Mark Gallegos

UNM student