By Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr, excerpts of review by Robert VerBruggen.
“ ... Mr. Sander summarizes the excellent research he’s done on law schools, for example. Black students admitted under racial preferences tend to drop out at much higher rates than black students who attend schools that match their qualifications, and black law school graduates are far more likely than whites to fail their bar exam. ... A similar effect also seems clear in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math).
“The authors also take a look at the effects of Proposition 209, the California ballot initiative that briefly eliminated racial preferences in the University of California system. (Prop 209 is still in effect, but schools have found ways to get around it. [bold added])
“Mr. Sander and Mr. Taylor, of course, have their share of critics, and “Mismatch” will not be the last word on this subject. But they have put the nation’s universities in a put-up-or-shut-up situation: They can either admit that preferences do harm, or they can release the data that prove otherwise.”–Book Review, Robert VerBruggen, Washington Times, 10/29/98
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/oct/29/book-review-mismatch/#ixzz2Aj79JCIY
Several things revealed by this review, some unintentionally:
(1) Although it is clear that affirmative action, discrimination against whites, hurts many blacks, its overall impact has probably provided enough of an unfair boost to blacks that it is the largest factor responsible for the growing black middle class. For one thing, think government workers.
(2) This anti-white discrimination in school admissions and job hirings goes much farther than many National Review-type “conservatives” want to admit. To put it starkly, let’s say you are a professor or a small businessperson and out of the people in your charge, only one is failing miserably, and it just so happens he is the only African American in the bunch. Most whites are going to think once, think twice and then think again before jettisoning that person. Besides any potential legal hassles, most whites would be thinking, “God, I don’t need this--how is this going to look?!” Whereas a failing European American would have long since been sent trundling out the door.
(3) In a very real way, liberals and neocon National Review-type “conservatives” conspire to prop up this false PC nightmare world the rest of us are forced to dwell within. Liberals pretend that the gravy train we supply to minorities merely corrects centuries of injustice and sets things on an even playing field. On the other hand, neocons are always propagandizing that the glaring dysfunctions, at least to white eyes, of majority non-white cities and nations are 100 percent due to liberal social programs. Apparently years and years after slavery and segregation, liberal social engineering still has every majority black city and nation in the world tightly in its evil dysfunctional grip. Obviously utopian liberal programs have made these things worse, but that doesn't mean that without these polices, such places like inner-city Detroit and Port-au-Prince would be shining examples industrious free enterprise.
(4) The reason that neocons harp on the liberal programs issue is not just because what they say is true in their determinedly nearsighted view of things, but this approach allows them to skirt inherent racial IQ and crime differences. After all, the races upon the earth did evolve separately for thousands of years. It would be more than astounding if there were no inherent meaningful differences. Yet such subjects are taboo in respectable society. But this isn't about one people being ‘supreme’ to another in some cosmic sense. Being white, I am part of a people who, as a group average, have an inherently lower IQ and probably higher violent crime inclinations than some population groups in Asia, but that information doesn't make me want to run screaming into the night nor demand special child-booster-seat treatment in education and hiring.
(5) And what to say about the endearing naivete at the end of the above review: “But they have put the nation’s universities in a put-up-or-shut-up situation: They can either admit that preferences do harm, or they can release the data that prove otherwise.” Really? If they don’t, what happens then? Maybe we can outlaw affirmative action nationally, like California’s Proposition 209 that “schools found ways to get around”? Let’s not kid ourselves, ending affirmative action will be like trying to take a favorite playtoy away from T. rex.
(6) Affirmative action is the foremost example of the victorious march of the Cultural Marxists through the institutions of the West. This huge bizarre ungainly superstructure has been bolted into place by the Left and their ethnic pets, their moral power source, using brute force, dishonest maneuver, and by social and career sanctions against those who speak out against it–and by neocons who provide a fig leaf by implying that 100 percent of the disproportionate minority dysfunctions are explained by daffy do-gooder liberal programs. If only.
(7) Finally, how pathetically worm-like have we whites become that the only way we can object to our own grandkids having the door slammed in their faces when lining up for competitive college and job opportunities is to try to prove that affirmative action hurts minorities? Wait, I’ll take that back. Even earthworms don’t proudly offer up their offspring to the nearest hungry robin.
Posts
