Thursday, July 26, 2018

A Black and White World Meets Asians


The Rolling Stones wanted to paint the world black. Today’s deep thinkers want to paint it black and white.

By now, you know the narrative. Whites all profit from white privilege. They receive certain advantages merely on the basis of being white. No one ask whether they or their ancestors accomplished anything in life… the privilege is unjust, on its face.

And blacks are the objects of discrimination. They have been victimized by whites for centuries and need special privileges, in the form of affirmative action or diversity programs, in order to catch up.

Such is the argument. Yet, as David Marcus notes on The Federalist, the argument becomes dust when you consider that the nation’s overachievers are not white or black, but are Asians. And they are not wealthy Asians.  They are invariably poor Asians whose only path to prosperity involves very hard work on their studies. 

Now that higher educational institutions have discovered that a disproportionate number of Asians are outcompeting both whites and blacks, they are trying to do something about it. They are discriminating against Asian applicants. Harvard University admissions departments concocted a personality test, according to which Asian students with less than scintillating personalities were considered less desirable applicants than cool kids from minority groups.

Marcus explains:

Historically the basis and justification of race-based admissions was that white students benefited from centuries of racial injustice in myriad ways. As a result, affirmative action was meant to redress historical imbalances and level the playing field for minority students. But now that we see race-based admissions are disadvantaging Asians more than they are whites, this basis simply falls apart.

It is farcical to imagine that somehow centuries of systemic white supremacy are benefiting Asian students, many of who are first-generation Americans or even immigrants themselves. Moreover, there is no plausible way to suggest that these recent arrivals had any hand in creating the systems that disadvantage other minority groups.

True enough, it is absurd to blame white supremacy for the achievements of poor Asian students. This proves that it’s not a black and white world.

Marcus also addresses the larger argument in favor of affirmative action, namely that diversity is its own reward. He quotes the newly woke Max Boot:

Boot’s second argument, and the one more likely to gain purchase on the Left, is that diversity in student bodies is its own reward. He writes: “You learn more about life if you go to class with people who are different from you — who have different abilities, different geographic origins, different social classes, different sexualities, different religions, different political views and, yes, different ethnicities. You don’t necessarily want a student body made up entirely of bookworms.”

Yes, but… Boot and other proponents of diversity-as-its-own-reward forget one salient fact. If you admit students who are vastly underprepared to do the work, you will need to dumb down the curriculum. Otherwise they will be totally lost in class and will all flunk out. The argument arose in New York City when the new school chancellor decided that there was something wrong with New York’s most prestigious public schools, Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science. The problem: too many Asian students and too few minority students.

Now the chancellor and the mayor are trying to admit more students who cannot do the work. To which teachers and alumni responded that you cannot teach multivariable calculus when a tenth or so of your students cannot do algebra. Or some such.

The American university system has been using diversity quotas for decades now. The courts and the bureaucrats mandated it. Do you think that the generally inferior education students are receiving in universities derives from the fact that more and more students cannot really follow the material as presented, and that professors are now required to dumb it all down, to prevent the diversity programs from being exposed as failures.

8 comments:

  1. Well, we know that "science" says, at least according to Drs Hong and Page (discoverers of a "theorem" popular among Western Baizuo), "diversity trumps ability".

    From that, one may infer, and even cakalate using maff, that the Manhattan Project (or the Apollo 11 moon shot, the invention of the integrated circuit, the design of packet-switched networking, the discovery of cosmic background radiation, etc etc etc) would have been faster and more successful had it been staffed by the correct numbers of randomly selected blacks, latinos, etc., balanced by 50% womyn, all sifted appropriately to represent the visible and invisible sexuomagnetic gender "spectrum".

    Because, "Ultimately, the gain in individual abilities is more than offset by the functional diversity of a group of randomly selected people."
    QED

    You can read the source of that quote, the maff-intensive, highly scientifical, Hong and Page paper here:
    http://www.pnas.org/content/101/46/16385

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  2. The Left hates achievement because it hates standards. It hates standards because Leftists either (a) cannot achieve the standards themselves, or (b) don’t have the courage to uphold the standards. What stands in the way is emotive oppression, and they take no responsibility for their emotions. They project this emotional circus on everyone else in order to gain power over others. So it’s someone or something else’s fault. The race thing is a useful tool in the hands of a destroyer. That’s just who Leftists are: destroyers.

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  3. And...they seem not to be interested in actually educating our African-American students to the level that they can do well in elite/expensive colleges.

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  4. Trigger is right. They’re control freaks... idealists who cannot bear failure. Achievement is not random, it it intentional. Diversity, as they describe it, is some mystical, desirable state of equilibrium. That’s pure nonsense. Life is not an equal distribution of categories. Achievers disrupt because of ontological desire. You know, the realm of soul and spirit. But you can’t categorize that, can you? That’s why demographic selection based on immutable characteristics is a fool’s errand. What else is today’s university but a gaggle of fools running silly errands? The shoe fits.

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  5. Hong and Page: "Ultimately, the gain in individual abilities is more than offset by the functional diversity of a group of randomly selected people."

    More nonsense. Randomness yields a norm. A norm is an even distribution. An even distribution yields a mean. A mean is an average. There is no gain, by definition.

    Nothing great was ever created by averageness. This is self-evident to anyone without a PhD. in statistics supplemented by an unhealthy dose of social science idealism. Add arrogance and groupthink. Stir.

    These sentimental notions fall on their face.

    FAIL.

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  7. Most importantly, this kind of thinking is how you get preposterous assertions like “You didn’t build that.”

    Now I understand, having had my eyes opened by these sage minds. I guess it stands to reason that randomness built that.

    Wow.

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  8. Truncated GK Chesterton:"...will believe anything".
    Will ideate for food...errr...social acceptance.

    - shoe

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