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Law in Contemporary Society
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American Nightmare-- By AshleyAyalaMendoza - 21 Feb 2025The Illusion of MeritHow Students of Color in Higher Education Reinforce MeritocracyI think these institutions, like Columbia University, prey on high-achieving students of color to push their narratives and reinforce the idea that if you work hard enough you like to be able to attend an Ivy League school. The American dream is built on the idea that hard work pays off and you can achieve anything if you work hard enough. These ideas are false. Capitalism feeds off people buying into this idea and for centuries, it has worked. Immigrants come to the US believing that they too can become ultra-rich if they work from sunrise to sunset, but the reality is that they will die without seeing much financial upward mobility. Their kids are likely to be in the same social and economic class as they were. The American dream often becomes the American nightmare. People live to work in the United States. It’s not the land of the free; its the land of the overworked and oppressed. That's the truth. The truth is you are closer to being homeless than you are to becoming a billionaire, or millionaire for that matter. That’s the truth. But, if you allow a small percentage of people of color into these spaces, you can point to them and say it’s not true. You can say that they are proof that one can move upward because they’re bright and worked hard. Hard work paid off for them and it can pay off for you. We are made examples and shown off because we are the chosen ones. These institutions point to us as evidence of their inclusion of people of color. The reality is these institutions don’t want us here. We are here as a statistic that they can hide behind. Despite having more and more people of color in places of power within these institutions, our numbers remain the same. Actually, they are lower. There are less Latino students this year than there were last year. The administration says they haven’t changed admission rubric.` It was a woman of color that called the police on students. It was a person of color who ordered the bombing of innocent Afghanistan civilians. Being in these spaces does nothing for us but tame us. I feel less confident, less energized, less active than I have felt ever. I don’t think this is a coincidence. If the hamster keeps running when will he have time to stop and think of another way of living. Columbia University wants the organizer, the radicals, the “changemakers” so they can sell this narrative to others and profit off of it. All the while their funders are continuously working to subjugate their communities. We become their poster kids for diversity and inclusion. We are no longer threats to these systems when we work within them. What does it say about us? What better way to defeat your enemy than to hire them. They say it's good to have your friends close and your enemies closer. Are we fooling ourselves into thinking that we are infiltrating these institutions to defeat them from within? Or are we upholding these institutions' credibility by continuing to be here? What if all students of the global majority and low income decided that they were not going to buy into this? The facade would fall. But we won’t. We won’t because in a way we are benefiting in one way or another. Why am I here? Am I hurting my community more from being here? What is the alternative? My parents came here to work and return home after they made enough money to build their home in Mexico. The plan was that within 5 years they would save enough and return. Reality is that it took 20 years for their home to get built. The hard work was there. There is no denying that they worked hard. So why didn’t they achieve the American Dream if they worked so hard? Because it’s all made up. Hard work matters little to nothing. If you're not willing to exploit and cut corners in this country, you will maintain the same position you are in. My parents believed the story that if you have an education you would be able to get a good paying job and be able to buy a house and take vacations and live a good life. Wrong. Getting an education in America nowadays means that you are in crippling debt for decades. You can’t afford the home anymore because interest rates are too high for you to be able to afford a mortgage payment. Debt in America is the new bondage. How do we defeat the enemy? We keep them beneath us. That is what America does. If you have hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, are you truly free? Yes, now we have an education but now we are forced to work in spaces we don’t like. Forced to take a big law job because we want financial freedom. We want the house. We want comfort. Comfort in America has a high price. Can you ever be comfortable in a capitalistic government? Our comfort means someone else's exploitation. Of course, I am a student ambassador because they need me to tell their lie. They want me to tell the world that they are not racist and classist and that they accept all students. They accept us but give us no real resources to explore our true potentials. But, I am expected to encourage more Latino students to come to Columbia because is a great opportunity. Yet they rob us. They rob us of our creativity. They rob us of our imagination. They try to take our joy. And I sit in class feeling my soul drained. I feel drained knowing that this system will not allow me to live the life I want. The system must fall. I am a problem for them because I see them. I see the way they operate. My eyes are open.You are entitled to restrict access to your paper if you want to. But we all derive immense benefit from reading one another's work, and I hope you won't feel the need unless the subject matter is personal and its disclosure would be harmful or undesirable. To restrict access to your paper simply delete the "#" character on the next two lines:
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