The sad thing is, many mutt people are intelligent but growing up in circumstances where they don't know it.

In the case of my father, he'd made up his mind from early on that he would have a family, that he would never desert them and that he would never be a drunk. He was a dropout with nothing going for him but he made good choices. Not easy choices but ones that paid good dividends provided you survived them and learned from them. He ended up a retired automotive engineer--a knack he picked up from his days helping to rebuild Japan. He learned how factories and conveyor belts and motors and pulleys and assembly lines worked.

My ex-brother-in-law, like my father went to a one-room schoolhouse and lives in a cabin in the Tennessee mountains. His family has a history of law-breaking and violence including murder. But he reads Scientific American and has a fascination for gravitational lenses which he understands at least as well as most astrophysics majors. He can talk about relativity and quantum theory. Although I haven't him in a while, I'll guarantee he's boned up on string theory and supersymmetry to a depth that even most college graduates don't bother to pursue. His favorite books I recall were The Right Stuff and Asimov's Foundation trilogy. He's strong as an ox from chopping and stacking cordwood all his life and he is a countryboy I mean to tell you. Southern boy, as southern as they git.

I remember serving with a lot of these mutt people. But I found a lot of him were great guys to hang with. Admittedly, I felt a certain kinship with them and never had any problems that I remember. I remember one guy, total redneck from the Georgia woods. He showed me pictures of his hometown and it really did look like something out of Deliverance. One day I walk past his rack while he was showering in the head and on his mattress lying facedown open to wherever he left off was Goethe's Faust, which I discovered he was an extreme fan of.

Other mutt boys I knew though were just fuckin troublemakers. Amazingly able to get into huge but needless trouble. When they leave the ship, they go out and raise hell--period. That's life for them and they weren't about to change it none. I remember two of them coming back to the ship drunk and bragging how one pissed into a beer bottle and they took it into a 7-11 and emptied the contents into the nacho cheesedip.

So, I don't know, but it does seem we are losing some bright and productive people by neglecting the intellectual development of this class. Either we educate these people and learn them some manners nd let them contribute meaningfully or we can sit around wondering why these nachos we just bought taste so damn funny.

My fault with the opening post is that while white people are diverse in America, so are Jews, so are blacks. No one is more diverse than Asian-Americans or more stereotyped as being all the same. And who decided that blacks deserve affirmative action but that Asians don't? Have you ever seen a Vietnamese, Cambodian, Filipino or Hmong community? You talk about poor, umemployed, gangs and they have no hope of going to college because even though they're non-white, they're the wrong kind of non-white. They're the kind of non-white that isn't even socially perceived as American and is called a model minority because the higher classes of Asian-Americans as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc are passed off as the reality and totality of Asian-American life--they're good and smart and love to marry with whites so they don't need affirmative action. Consequently, the lower class Asians may as well be illegal Mexican immigrants instead of the full citizens most of them are. Then there are Indian-Americans were are neither recognized as Asian or American.

The bottom line is that affirmative action would be infinitely more preferable to me if were class-based instead of race-based. By taking the best and brightest from the poorest communities and educating them for free and grooming them for important jobs, they can serve as examples to their communities. But to tell an impoverished Laotian family with bright kids that they ain't black enough to get affirmative action while some middle class blacks kids get preference for some kind of perceived suffering they aren't actually undergoing does not make sense to me.

America's priorities and intentions seem hopelessly out-of-whack.