To the editors:

I am not surprised by Thomas B. Cotton's column calling for the end of affirmative action (March 18), written at a time of year when many graduate and professional school aspirants among us are receiving rejection letters from the finest and most prestigious universities in the country.

In fact, I think Cotton's remarks are, in a sense, brilliant because they restate 30 years of reactionary rhetoric against affirmative action with admirable brevity. What Cotton does not seem to understand, though, is that affirmative action is not about some amorphous thing called diversity. Instead, it is about social and political power. Simply put, the idea is that people who get more education have more say about the issues that matter to them.

When Cotton implies that the University of Texas Law School ought to admit only "academically competitive" whites, he is really saying that blacks and Mexican-Americans should be denied the social power that comes with a legal education. And when Cotton writes that the taxfinanced state school should adjust its admissions criteria to exclude minorities, he means that the school should show no social or political responsibility to the large black and Hispanic communities that help to support it.

Cotton is mistaken when he writes that affirmative action "demeans blacks and Hispanics by saying that the essence of their being is their skin color, that the diversity they bring is only skin deep" and that it "produces an artificial, superficial diversity." What is truly demeaning and superficial is that Cotton seems to think that blacks and Hispanics (like me) want to go to graduate or professional school or any school at all just to show off our skin color and/or our "quaint" food and customs.

No. We're there to guarantee that we will run our own lives our own way. JAVIER ALVILIO SANDOVAL '99   March 18, 1998