Say Wha-?

During week 5 of classes, my class read a chapter that discussed things like ability vs. effort, task difficulty, luck, and internal and external causes. Mostly, we pointed out that you can change your effort immediately, but that to change your ability it takes time; meaning, they are different. For one assignment (I don't create the assignments), they were asked to read the following poem and, in a sentence or so, discuss how it applied to the several topics or points in that chapter:

Every morning in Africa
A gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up
And it knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle
Or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter if you're a lion or a gazelle,
When the sun comes up,
You'd better be running.

Seems simple enough. I got lots of normal answers; you know, "both have to put in effort", "sometimes you may just have bad luck and jump into a hole"...you know. But then I read this:

"This poem tends to spea[k] on social darwinism through reference to actual darwinistic concepts. Our capitalist society has conditioned us to respect our financial issues as a race. Those in control will always make it to the food. As lower class people we are the food. Eaten by metaphorical inevitability. The poem argues that it is the superior group who will always triumph over weak links. In modern times it appears that the white race is the Lion and minorities are gazelles."

Uhhh...say wha-?? Now I have to figure out how to grade that. ;) Maybe I should just chew on it for awhile...