"Affirmative Action Should Be Based On Socioeconomics, Not Skin Color."
That's a quote from John McWhorter -- and an opinion I've long shared.
I went to high school in the Detroit suburbs with two very smart, high-achieving black twins. They lived in the neighborhood where the very wealthiest families lived, and I think they might've gone to Harvard. Someplace Ivy, anyway.
They didn't need anybody's pity or a handout to get in. But how rotten to be a high-achieving black person and to have countless people assume you got in because of your skin color.
That's just one of the gifts of racial preferencing -- instead of what really makes sense: Give special help to kids who come from economically disadvantaged families. Help those kids get into college and then give them support to succeed.
McWhorter writes at The American interest of how demeaning and damaging racial preferences for certain people are -- based on their mere skin color:
One of the most pernicious aspects of the culture of racial preferences is that it has taught all of us to think of black people as inherently less intelligent than other people. Oh, not overtly, of course. But the problem is clear in assorted cultural tropes that could owe their existence to nothing else.Consider the conception of "welcome" that has become so entrenched in these discussions. "If you don't admit me, then it means you don't like me," we instruct the young black student to think. This notion of welcoming would make sense if it were done after actually comparing people with the same grades and test scores. But when the "welcoming" is amidst changing qualifications for brown people, then it can only mean that the whites "welcome" people despite their lesser dossier stats--with the implication that this lesser performance is eternal, an inherent facet of the body of black and Latino students.
This is, quite simply, calling brown students dim. Yes, Lyndon Johnson said, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say 'you are free to compete with all the others.'" But ladies and gentleman, is this quotation not now a bit elderly? It works beautifully today for a brown student who grew up disadvantaged. But only a small fraction of today's black and Latino students at selective universities grew up in anything like poverty, as we know from endless reports of how grievously few poor people of any kind gain admission to selective schools.
More:
Even sadder is that this sense of blackness and school has percolated into too many black Americans' sense of themselves. On schools like Stuyvesant, a black New Yorker casually tells the New York Times that "the exam is built to exclude blacks because it's heavy on math and black people can't do math." In academia, some black professors have been arguing that fields requiring heavy-duty quantitative analysis are racist in failing to hire or promote black professors whose work eschews numbers, the idea being that non-quantitative analysis constitutes a valuable alternate ("diverse"?) perspective. Again the idea that it is somehow logically impossible for black people to be number-crunchers. A hundred years ago civil rights leaders would unhesitatingly have sought to get black people the skills they needed to break in, not indignantly demand that the powers that be change what they think of standards.And then, there is the tendency for black teens to associate doing well in school with "acting white."
...However, the nasty truth is that racial preferences, in being maintained so far past their sell-by date, now maintain rather than break with toxic preconceptions we should be long past. To wit, lowering standards for black and Latino applicants is now a retrogressive rather than progressive approach.
Or, racist, at least. I know of no more vivid indication of racism today than the idea that brown people are human history's first who can only truly compete under ideal conditions. I know of no more vivid hypocrisy on the part of those who style themselves black people's fellow travelers than to earnestly dismiss claims that black people's average IQ is lower than other peoples' while in the same breath nodding vigorously that a humane society must not subject the same people to challenging tests. Moreover, I know of no more tragic indication of a people's internalization of the oppressor's racism than a bright black NAACP lawyer arguing with proud indignation that if black people don't do well on a test it's society's job to eliminate the test or make it easier.
And I just love this:
Black Minds Matter, and it's time we hit reset on how we show that we understand that. Pretending that black means poor in 2018 shows no such thing. Long live affirmative action. But let's affirm disadvantage, and stop spitting in black America's face by pretending that to be black is to be morally exempt from hard-core competition in getting into top schools even if you grew up no more "diversely" than the whites and Asians you're competing against.
via @coldxman, who's worth reading and following on Twitter.
I am routinely cursed for insisting that individuals be treated as individuals - when it would cost them "free" stuff.
From 2016:
Radwaste at June 28, 2018 9:33 PM
Recently watched Tim Pool discussing this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_vPY6tjEz8
one interesting thing that come out of the discussion: Apparently a study found that Affirmative Action in University was often going to "newly" arrived Africans rather than descendants of slaves. Since they are "black" and have the grades.
The general success of newly arrived Africans over African Americans really torpedoes the idea of external racism being a factor in African American success. An immigrant from Nigeria, would face the same "racism", plus has to overcome the hurdles of a new language, culture shock, little to no community, possibly anti-immigrant pushback and other hurdles.
They are kicking the butts of African Americans who don't have these negatives, but do have the negative of low expectations and knowing who Al Sharpton is.
Joe j at June 28, 2018 10:39 PM
"Apparently a study found that Affirmative Action in University was often going to "newly" arrived Africans rather than descendants of slaves."
Never forget the hoax that public officials have promoted - nor should you fail to note that the catcalling between SJWs and their observers has NOTHING to do with the social bomb fused by said hoax.
Radwaste at June 28, 2018 11:04 PM
The best thing we could do for children growing up in welfare families is to put them in foster care. Otherwise they will learn the bad habits of their parents and have the same future -- or a worse one, a life of crime.
Only a complete idiot would want to subsidize the breeding of more people with no future.
jdgalt at June 28, 2018 11:09 PM
The answer to why this affirmative action and its twin, racial/tribal identity, are never ending is simplicity itself; "Follow the Money."
Affirmative action and race hustling (often disguised as diversity) are big business. No government bureaucracy or Civil Rights hustle group will ever give up such a bountiful profit center.
Jay at June 29, 2018 6:26 AM
You wrote that "Affirmative Action Should Be Based On Socioeconomics" was something that you agreed with.
Affirmative action is wrong, regardless what criteria is used.
Trying to correct some past imbalance and aiming for some new measure of equality is bad for many reasons.
It discriminates against one group and rationalizes the discrimination by saying that it's helping another group. In most cases, the group being "helped" is not benefiting. They are pawns in a cheap vote-buying scheme.
Affirmative action can only work when a government can coerce another group to change their practices.
How can you support any kind of "Affirmative Action"?
Earl Wertheimer at June 29, 2018 8:23 AM
I was watching a football game last year and they were talking about a player on a team who was nominated for their Man of the Year award. I forgot who the player was but he was supporting a charity to provide scholarships for foster kids. When they were talking about the charity they threw out a factoid that blew my mind away. Only 1% of foster children make it to college. One Percent. Let that # sink in. I'm not sure affirmative action is the answer but if anyone needs a break its foster kids.
Shtetl G at June 29, 2018 8:46 AM
This idea that a college should "welcome" you is absurd. I was never loved and comforted by my college--it is an indifferent institution full of administrators and profs busy trying to get ahead themselves. They don't give a flying f* about any particular student. They are not your parents.
My neighbors were 2 blacks in the suburbs. He worked his way through college by working as a night watchman. They both had good middle-class jobs but by playing it smart they retired at 57 and moved to florida. I can't retire yet. They had no interest in anyone's pity or help, thank you very much, so naturally we were good friends.
The fact that blacks from the Caribbean and Africa do better than native blacks and even better than the average white is proof that discrimination is not the problem. The problem is culture. Nothing will keep black people down like single motherhood, no books in the home, no emphasis on school, joining a gang, and going to jail.
cc at June 29, 2018 12:11 PM
Uh-oh. Is someone stepping on the toes of America's Most Persecuted? (Black people are not Americans most persecuted people, but black activists will tell you they are.) That's not something they appreciate. Ask the gay community. Every time the LGBT have an event for themselves, black activists see it as something they must take over.
Patrick at June 29, 2018 5:29 PM
I'm not sure how one might define "persecuted," Patrick, but so long as the FAS rate for Native Americans is far higher than the FAS rate for black people, the latter can't clai8m to be at the bottom, IMO. (Violence is also obviously a big problem in almost any poor community, of course.)
lenona at July 2, 2018 7:37 AM
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