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Affirmative action bake sale


An affirmative action bake sale is a type of campus protest event used by student groups to performatively criticize affirmative action policies by charging students different prices depending on which social or racial group they belong to.

The bake sales offer to sell cookies at different prices depending on the customer's race and sex, imitating racial and sexual orientation practices of affirmative action. A hypothetical pricing structure would be to charge $1.00 for White and Asian males, $.75 for White and Asian females, $.50 for Latino, Black, and Native American males and $.25 for Latino, Black, and Native American females for identical items.

According to one bake sale student leader, the goal of the technique is to "bring the issue of affirmative action down to everyday terms."

These bake sales have been organized at many schools across the U.S., sometimes annually. Affirmative action bake sales have also taken place at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, the latest (in 2008) having been forcibly broken up by campus security.

The bake sales have met opposition, drawing crowds of students, sometimes facing opposition or restriction from campus administrations, often being accused of racism, and sometimes even being attacked. Additionally, some administrators have been accused of censorship and inappropriately advocating a political position.

Responding to an affirmative action bake sale being attacked at the University of Washington, the school's Board of Regents President Jerry Grinstein presented the opinion of many opponents of these events when he described "the statements [...] in putting on a bake sale about affirmative action were tasteless, divisive and hurtful to many members of the university community." The student leader of a bake sale at UCLA addressed this issue of divisiveness, saying "we wanted to show how affirmative action is racial division, not racial reconciliation." Similarly, administrators at Bucknell University claimed that the bake sales violated the private university's discrimination policy.


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