Opinion: Rich kid, poor kid

View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Wednesday, April 12, 2017 [NYTimes.com/Opinion »]( The guest writer of today’s newsletter is Honor Jones, an editor in the Opinion section. Fifty years ago, in the early days of the War on Poverty, Robert Kennedy was deployed to the Mississippi Delta. The malnourished children he met there were, he told reporters, “a terrible reflection on our society.” Ellen Meacham, who has lived in Mississippi on and off for 30 years, [writes in today’s New York Times]( that the same problems persist. People are still running out of food. Fortunately, they now have a safety net, in addition to innovative local nonprofits, to fall back on. Meacham moved there as a college student. “In one of my classes,” she told me, “we watched the ‘Eyes on the Prize’ documentary,” about the civil rights movement. She was shocked by the way that people who looked and sounded like her relatives were embracing these “monstrous ideologies.” “I literally wanted to run away from campus and Mississippi that very day. However, I didn’t have a car, so I had to stay.” Instead she made the state the focus of her studies. She came to see that if you only look at its history of racist oppression, “you are only telling one half of the history, and you are still, in a way, elevating the experience and actions of the white elite.” It’s another way of overlooking the African-American experience and the “ingenuity, compassion and sheer admirable endurance of so many ordinary people.” While Kennedy was stunned by the differences between Mississippi and Massachusetts, another writer in this week’s Times, the high school student Dylan Hernandez, was disoriented by a different journey, from Flint, Mich., to Exeter, N.H. In “[How I Learned to Take the SAT Like a Rich Kid]( he writes about the summer he spent on scholarship at Phillips Exeter Academy. Why were his classmates, whose parents had already shelled out $3,000 for prep courses, cramming each night? He lets us in on the secret rich kids know: exactly how much work is needed to become the perfect college applicant. The point is that a test meant to measure innate smarts ends up measuring family income instead. The essay appears in the [On Campus series]( about college life, which runs pieces from students and professors. The editor, Natalie Shutler, says that the next big subject will be graduation. She welcomes submissions on what it means to face the so-called real world, and other subjects, at oncampus@nytimes.com. The full Opinion report from The Times follows. David Leonhardt is off this week. 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Op-Art [A Eulogy for Crayola’s Dandelion]( By HALLIE BATEMAN Let us mourn the loss of the yellow crayon — and look forward to something new. HOW ARE WE DOING? We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to [newsletters@nytimes.com](mailto:newsletters@nytimes.com?subject=Opinion%20Today%20Newsletter%20Feedback). ADVERTISEMENT THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL | PAUL KRUGMAN [Europe Has Problems, But Le Pen Is Not The Answer]( By PAUL KRUGMAN Criticizing euro policies isn’t an endorsement of the FN. Letters [How Could United Airlines Do That?]( Readers fault the airline for dragging a passenger off a flight to accommodate its own employees. SIGN UP FOR THE VIETNAM ’67 NEWSLETTER Examining America’s long war in Southeast Asia [through the course]( of a single year. 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