Comments by "SepherStar" (@SepherStar) on "Why the poorest county in West Virginia has faith in Donald Trump | Anywhere but Washington" video.

  1. Angel: You are uninformed. Affirmative action was an idea tossed around in the 90s and is not in effect today. There are few full ride scholarships but the ones that exists are not predominantly nor are they exclusively for black people. Most black people who go to college have to fund their college education the way most white people do. Grants, loans, and maybe a few small scholarships and work study. The UNCF does keep a list of privately funded scholarships that may be available only to people who are ethnically African or have African heritage, however what people such as yourself overlook or are ignorant to is the fact that there are similar scholarships for people of European ethnicity or heritage. You can find scholarships for ethnically British people, people of Kossack heritage, people with French huguenot ancestry. Scholarship offerings are diverse. You can find scholarships for people who descend from revolutionary war soldiers, civil war soldiers, indentured servants, people who's father was a cop, freemason, went to X university or high school.....probably even scholarships for people who's ancestors died of dysentery on the Oregon trail if you looked hard enough. So no, there are not more funding opportunities for black people than white people based on race. Some colleges do have programs for disadvantaged students and their idea of disadvantaged does involve the idea of being a racial minority, however sometimes these programs aren't what they seem. I know this not because I was part of one, I wasn't, but because I had to sit through the info session to one of them at my university. I come from a disadvantaged background but was apparently too white to ever be invited to join this program...I was there because I had a student job and helped with the event set up. So there I was sitting there totally pissed off that I was excluded from the program because of my race, despite being from an economically disadvantaged background, until I realized what was really going on. The entire program was basically a way for the school to try to milk an extra $4,000 out of people of color who were low income....but not so low income that their parents couldn't take out loans. In exchange for the $4,000, students would be permitted to start during the summer rather than the fall (big deal, you get one or two classes out of the way...for twice the typical summer tuition), had access to tutoring (big deal, there were multiple tutoring centers open to all students), and I guess maybe someone would come along and give them a pat on the back for encouragement every so often. I left the event feeling kind of sick that the school would try to scam unsuspecting working class people like that who had spent most of their lives putting away so their kids could be the first in their family to go to college, and realized that if I had been invited to the event as a potential program participant I would have been thinking "$4,000? LO f'ing L! Bye." Anyway most Americans, black or white, are in the same boat as far as funding their college education.
    2
  2. I understand the plight of these people but, while I believe a president can certainly drive a country into the ground, I don't think a president, on their own, has the capacity to make a country great. One thing that made American great once upon a time, was the industriousness of the average person. It's a lot more difficult to take advantage of opportunities today than it was in the past, but that aside, there are differences in the mentality of our ancestors and many of the people in this town. The people who made this country great were movers. They did not allow themselves to become entrenched in one area and would move to other areas if they thought doing so could be economically prosperous. This is what drove the growth of the United States. One of my ancestors left relatively prosperous Boston and moved to middle of nowhere USA to become a farmer because he thought it would be a good financial decision. It was for a while. My grandfather thought he had too much competition in his home city to make a buck, so he moved across the country where there was less competition, and started a new trend in his industry. Some of the people in this town are there because they don't have the resources to leave. That's understandable. But some of them are there because they are too sentimental and coal mining is part of their identity.
    1