Not necessarily. Just because you oppose something that you see as anti-white, does not automatically make you anti-black.
If academic standards are lowered to increase the number of black college graduates, then it’s perfectly reasonable to infer that a black graduate is, on average, academically inferior to a white graduate. I don’t consider that to be racism, because I tend to view racism as irrational beliefs about people of other races.
You could apply the same concept to the workforce–if standards are lowered for one segment to artificially increase their presence in a certain position, then, members of that segment in that position are probably inferior to those who were more qualified for the position.
**Metacom. ** You have not described a perfectly reasonable inference. That’s a palpably prejudiced deduction. Until you compare the actual academic records of two groups of black and white graduates, where the black group was admitted under lowered standards, yet received the same training and level of instruction OVER A FOUR YEAR PERIOD – you can’t make any informed prediction about what the END result will be on the black collegians based on the color of their SKIN. You have no idea what what drive, ambition, hard work ethic and talent those blacks have. There’s plenty of gifted students who crack under pressure and wash out of school. That kind of lazy sloppy bigoted thinking purporting to be truth IS often very racist because of the damage it causes in unjustified discrimination and racial bias.
Damn, that was disappointing to read.
Right, I’m assuming that standards were lowered throughout their college education because that’s what Bloom said.
Do you have any evidence that what he said was or is now incorrect? An unbiased study comparing the intelligence and level of knowledge possessed by black and white graduates from an institution that uses affirmative action in its selection processes?
I wasn’t talking about their drive, ambition or work ethic. I was talking about their academic ability and intelligence.
(I should have pointed out that I deliberately said “intelligence and level of knowledge” instead of “academic record”. If standards were lowered for a demographic segment, you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to have a worse record.)
Original post:
Modified quotation:
brickbacon, you will NOT modify the text inside the quote tags, even when you admit having done so. If you feel the need to paraphrase another poster, find another way to do it. We do not permit this sort of manipulation of actual quotations.
[ /Moderator Mode ]
Do you have any evidence that what he said was correct at the time he said it?
Aside from AA Division and higher athletic scholarships (purportedly in the bad old days), I am unaware of any schools that reduce the qualifications for course work. In fact, the earliest criticisms of scholastic quotas was that it resulted in far too many kids flunking out because they were unprepared. Students that made it through the four year program were of roughly equal achievement, regardless of race.
Bloom might have been correct, but I am hardly going to take his word for it without actual evidence.
… I can’t refute that. I have no proof. I just doubt that to my very bones. Or at least I WANT to. That’s fucking horrible. It just doesn’t make sense to me. WHY would any college be in the business of deliberately producing an inferior-trained student just because they’re black? What’s the sense in being judged in class by a separate criteria and a less demanding rubric? Better still, why allow yourself to be judged by a lower bar? Lowered admissions to attain racial diversity I can see, just not the lowered standards throughout.
… but then, black college athletes take joke courses toward useless degrees all the time, with professors giving them unearned grades, just to keep the school competitive in the NCAA…
Based on my misunderstanding of your point about standards being lowered throughout their college education, I’ll grudgingly back off. I may look into it, though.
Yeah, I got that. But drive, ambition and work ethic help you refine your academic ability and help your innate intelligence and mastery of your skills and knowledge of your subject matter grow. It’s part of this thing called “scholarliness.” That’s innate. Has nothing to do with skin color.
This is why this little topic went up my nose.
Look, I went to a black high school and a historcially black college. But in 1999 I took a six week summer journalism course at the USC in Columbia as part of an internship I landed at the behest of my faculty adviser for the hours I put in on the school newspaper, where I largely earned stuff by trial and error.
It was a minority internship. There were seven of us. We took courses from one of the old journalism professors on campus – real legendary type, worked at the Chicago Sun-Times, drank with James Dickey and all that – who was famously a bear about AP newspaper style guides and quoting from Strunk and White and correct use of sources and even paste-up font sizes for newspaper headlines – but at the end of the class, all our tests, papers, clippings and projects were supposed to be graded by the teaching assistant assigned to lead our little group, instead of my professor. The professor graded the papers of the 40 (white) students not in the program.
No disrespect to the TA, because he and I got along swell, but this was a kid two years younger than me who had none of the experience, presence and authority the professor did. By the middle of that first week, I decided I wanted my work graded by the professor. The professor looked at me like I was crazy.
“I have 47 students in my class. This is a heavy summer schedule, and I agreed to let you other kids in as a favor to the Minority Newspaper Program. Your TA is good, very good, one of my best. What makes you think I want to grade any more papers than I need to?”
I told him: “Because I think I’d work harder for an “A” if you graded my papers. I don’t think you’re going to cut me any slack.”
He graded my papers.
I didn’t have to add, “… just because I’m black.” It was unspoken and understood.
Anyway, I busted my ass off that summer. I got the highest grades in the internship group and was the fifth highest in the class.
I know how good I was compared to the rest of the class, and I kinda resent the notion I might have been assessed by a lowered standard.
All politicians discriminate against people who do not vote for them.
Lakai. You have perfectly summed up Bush’s relationship with black America.
What happened was that, once admitted to the unversities despite not meeting their customary standards, the black students, with their frequently inferior primary and secondary educations, were getting poor grades and failing. This looked very bad, so standards were lowered.
In some cases, the students who got in primarily because of their race had an odd entitlement complex that led to some odd things happening (scroll down to the paragraph “In the spring of 1969…”). Events like that left a strong impression on Bloom.
Things are obviously a lot better now then they were then, it does seem to me like the fundamental issues that cause the lowered standards will never change until affirmative action ends, and there’s no question in anyone’s mind that a black (or female, or Mexican, or …) student is there because he met the same high standards required of the rest of the student body.
True. But if you don’t have the intelligence and education when you enter the university, you’re probably not going to be able to catch up to the more qualified candidates–it takes an AWFUL lot of drive to compensate for 18 years of social injustice during a four year period that’s designed to make-or-break people from a far stronger social position then yourself.
Are some students that driven? Of course!
But… If they really had that much drive, and ambition, wouldn’t there be lots of evidence of it prior to applying for college? Enough that perhaps that person might have got in without preferential admission due to race? And even if they do succeed, how much of an impact does their struggle with remedial concepts have on their education?
Thanks for sharing that–it puts a nice perspective on things.
My dealings with affirmative action weren’t nearly so dramatic. I consider myself Mexican (or at least “not white”), and I have a Spanish surname, but most people wouldn’t know from my appearance. I dropped out of high school, and got into a prestigious public school after a stint at a JC. I checked off “Hispanic” on my admission forms–something I feel deeply ambivalent about now–and I wonder now if that played a role in all the opportunities that my education unlocked.
Thanks. I’m always interested in hearing what changes people’s minds.
FWIW, I tend to think AA may be a necessary evil in some cases, but I have seen first-hand exactly the sort of problem you discuss here.
I’ve been teaching college freshmen for several years, and occasionally part of the job has been telling some 18-year old that she’s writing on a junior-high level (or lower). These are kids – almost all of them nice, well-behaved ones – who were passed along through the system from K-12 and told they were doing fine, and admitted into college. At which point I had to explain to them that they were supposed to have nailed down there/their and your/you’re a decade ago. As I once put it bluntly to a student “the school system lied to you.”
It didn’t make the conversations any easier that the students were almost always minorities.
Wonder what is more common … the white Republican politician who sees a black person and writes him off as someone who would never vote Republican
… or the white Dem who thinks every black person should and will vote for him.
If you believe me, I wonder why you ask for a cite. I hope you are not posting requests you don’t really mean simply to try to wear me down.
At any rate, I said I would provide some cites. Therefore, here are a few.
And, in return, perhaps you could provide some proof of the following:
Because I don’t believe you in this instance, and would like to see proof of this.
Regards,
Shodan
This whole discussion of AA, while interesting, is a red herring:
Q: Are white republicans more anti-black-racist than white democrats?
A: White democrats tend to favor AA. AA is bad for blacks. Thus, the democrats are anti-black racist.
DEBATE: Is AA really bad for blacks?
The key here, though, is not whether AA is bad for blacks, it’s whether the white democrats who support it are racist. It’s entirely possible that AA IS bad for blacks but that the white democrats aren’t racist. There’s certainly a consistent and reasonable position which holds that blacks are not inferior, but have been screwed, and that the pluses of AA outweigh the minuses. Does anyone have any reason to think that significant numbers of AA-supporting democrats do so because they racistly believe blacks to be inferior beings who need the help?