The Aug. 5 Mirror contains a column titled “Why I Do What I Do” by Liz Word, which attempts to address the problem of under-performance by blacks and Hispanics in post-secondary education, but it does so in a peculiar way.

Word starts by highlighting her own broken family background and eventual adoption by a loving, supportive, white, upper-middle-class college-educated couple who provide her with a nurturing, safe and healthy home environment. From there the author gets right down to the crux of her article: the reason why she successfully completed a college education was that her adoptive parents provided her with the gift of “white middle-class privilege” and all the “social capital” attached to that privilege. In other words, professor Word was given (inherited) special socioeconomic rights and advantages not generally afforded to non-white people. No mention was made of her hard work, grit and determination to succeed, or how exactly her adoptive white parents happened to achieve their own educational success — presumably, her parents were also given their privilege, handed down from generation to generation like an inheritance or a birthright.

Only after reminding us five or six more times of her “privilege” does Word provide us with her remedy for educational underachievement (and I agree it is a real problem). Firstly, to her credit, she leads by example and is “paying it forward”; that is, she is sharing with others some of the resources that God provided her with. Secondly, she is leading the effort to make college curriculum more culturally relevant to black and Hispanic students, which may or may not work in the Arts and Humanities but is irrelevant to science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curricula.

I applaud Ms. Word’s attempt at starting a discussion, but I profoundly disagree with her assessment of, and prescription for, the problems our educational system faces. I think she is sending the message to our youth that they are prisoners of their circumstances and environment that no amount of blood, sweat, and tears can overcome.

Michael Gorrie, Federal Way