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The group, called the Former Majority Association for Equality, was started by Colby Bohannon, a student at Texas State University. He's an Iraq War veteran who decided to return to school and said he had trouble finding college scholarships for which he qualified. He found many programs willing to grant money to female or minority students, but not white males like himself.
"I felt excluded," Bohannon told The Austin American-Statesman. "If everyone else can find scholarships, why are we left out?"
So Bohannon and some friends founded the FMAE group, which plans to begin handing out $500 scholarships this summer. Only white men with at least a 3.0 grade point average can qualify.
"We know that we're going to be receiving some vicious attacks from people claiming that we are racists or promoting some bigotry-filled agenda," Bohannon also told Reuters. He said he's just trying to help students who may have been a majority in the past, but are no longer as America's demographics change.
"If you're not a male, and if you're not white, you're called a minority," Bohannon said, but "I'm not sure white males are the majority anymore."
He's correct about his home state of Texas, at least. Non-Hispanic whites are now a minority there, according to U.S. Census figures released earlier this month that show they make up about 42 percent of the state's population, down from more than half 10 years ago.
Bohannon has since been forced to qualify his group's scholarship requirements after receiving requests from some students who are of mixed race or ethnic backgrounds. He now says students are eligible if they're a quarter non-Hispanic white.
"We're not looking for blond-haired, blue-eyed, stereotypical white males," he told Reuters. "My feeling is that if you can say you're 25 percent Caucasian, you're Caucasian enough for us."
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The group was formally incorporated in Texas last March, and is currently accepting applications for fall 2011 scholarships. It "has no political aspirations, financial agenda, or radical social philosophies whatsoever," the group said in a statement on its website."I believe in equality for everyone, as well as being a strong believer that everyone should have an opportunity to attend college no matter who they are or where they come from," Calysta Spence, FMAE's fundraising coordinator, told The University Star, a student newspaper at Texas State, where Bohannon is a student.
The school's vice president of student affairs, Joanne Smith, said the FMAE scholarships are no different from others offered to students from different ethnic groups or backgrounds. "From the university's standpoint, we can't take issue with a scholarship offered to a certain group," Smith told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
FMAE isn't the first group to offer college scholarships exclusively to white men. Republican student groups in Rhode Island and Massachusetts offered similar scholarships in 2004 and 2006.
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