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When I was in college I lived with a diverse group of people. My junior year I lived with some of my close friends. They coincidentally are all Mexican American. For one of them, affirmative action changed her life. No one in her family had gone to college.
Today she works as a paralegal & lives in Silicon Valley. She’s a wonderful person. She grew up in Highland Park & but for a highschool counselor she would not have gone to college. She had planned on working at Dominos to help pay family bills.
She deserved affirmative action, not because she’s Mexican American but because she comes from one of the toughest & poorest neighborhoods in LA. I use to visit her & stay with her family over the summers. 1 weekend I came she cancelled her shift @ that Dominos.
The guy that covered it was shot and killed-so I understand how violent and poor some of our communities are. I’m glad affirmative action helped her into the University of California. But truth be told, despite being smart she struggled with school initially bc of K12 failures.
She was admitted in the first class after 209 passed. 209 didn’t stop affirmative action. It stopped race based policies at UC’s from discriminating against students like me.
You know what hasn’t happened since 209 passed? K12 investment by our legislature. Those schools in highland park are still severely underfunded. That’s not 209’s fault. That’s our legislature’s fault.
Kids like Maritza deserve affirmative action, not the wealthy children of lawmakers like Miguel Santiago and Lorena Gonzalez. I spoke with Ritz a couple weeks about #prop16 & she said she is voting against it. Why? BC she doesn’t believe in discriminating against others.
