Originally Posted by Xurtio

Racism is bad and it does go both ways and yes, whites aren't immune to racism, etc, etc, blah blah...

However, as a white male in a society run by white males, I can't deny that it's one less strike against me. Not due to any conspiracy, it's just the basic human fact that people are inconsiderate. For instance, even today, the field of medicine still has traces from when it was male dominant: for example, the history of "hysteria" is interesting. Likewise, birth practices developed by males in the last century can be very traumatic for women compared to births in birth-centers developed by a larger female community.

Obviously, a white kid in a black neighborhood is going to be the minority, so it's not really about race in absolute terms, it's about being the minority, no matter what your race is: your interests are going to be under-represented when you're the minority. It so happens that black neighborhoods in white-run USA have a history of being subject to state-sanctioned discrimination (racial profiling by police, for instance) due to their interests being under-represented.

So scholarships targeted at minorities (for instance) serve a real, functional purpose that helps overcome real discrimination. It would be nice to see a description of minority that is dependent on local population though, not national population, so that a white kid in a black neighborhood could be considered a minority.