The story of Kwasi Enin, the Long Island teen who applied to all 8 Ivy League schools and got accepted, seems like an automatic bid for universal acclaim across the board.
That is, unless your name is Valerie Strauss and you are the education reporter for the Washington Post.
The editor, who happens to be a white, middle-aged female, scribed a thinly veiled sour, hateful and borderline racist editorial, littered with seedless facts about the competitive admission rate for the nation’s top facts and suggest we can “stop talking about him.”
Obviously that’s the reason why Enin’s big day made national news but that plane sailed way over Strauss’ head. The current headline of “Did He Apply To Stanford?” is also a substitute for the original “This Kid Got Into All 8 Ivy League Schools. Now Can We Stop Talking About Him?” after her editors probably realized the struggle they allowed to slip through the cracks.
Excerpts from the Post:
Have you heard yet about 17-year-old Kwasi Enin of Shirley, N.Y., who applied to all of the eight schools in the Ivy League and got into every single one? If not, you are, by now, the only one.
Congratulations to Kwasi Enin. Now can we stop talking about him?
It isn’t easy to get into the Ivy League, everybody knows; the admission rate this year was 8.925641 percent, rounding to the nearest millionth of a percentage point, according to this story by my colleague Nick Anderson, and the schools aren’t shy about telling the world about it. Princeton University issued a news release with this headline: “Princeton offers admission to 7.28 percent of applicants.” The lowest admit rate in the Ivy League was Harvard, at 5.9 percent, but as it turns out, Stanford University on the West Coast had an even lower percentage — 5.07 (the .07 is important), the lowest in the school’s storied history.
I know what you think: Spare me the sympathy. It still hurts. But let’s keep this in perspective. What did Magic Johnson say to the little boy who also tested HIV positive? ”You’ve got to have a positive attitude.” What happens when you don’t keep a positive attitude? Don’t ask.
There were also several commentators on Redditt who used their platform to express their disdain for “only” being accepted to one Ivy League school or their “Armenian heritage” not being acceptable for affirmative action.
Allow us to reintroduce the term “hater,” ladies and gents. It’s just not exclusive to Hip-Hop.
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Photo: YouTube
