Affirmative Action, aka White Guilt Syndrome
John McWhorter has an excellent column today, very reminiscent of Thomas on Monday.
But it's hard to see bigotry in the white administrators so elated this week that they will be able to continue jerryrigging classes into a suitable level of "diversity." O'Connor's statement tiptoes around the elephant sitting in the middle of the room: Why is it that even well-off black students so rarely hit the highest note in grades and scores?McWhorter even brought his own Douglass-style quote along, courtesy of Zora Neale Hurston: "If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it."
The answer is a culture-internal tendency, largely tacit but powerful, to associate scholarly endeavor with being "white." This affects black students' performance regardless of class, as countless journalistic reports have demonstrated and UC-Berkeley professor of anthropology John Ogbu's book-length study of the problem now confirms. If we wish to undo that tendency, lowering standards for all black people regardless of life circumstances will only nurture it.
Amen, sister.
