Posted on 11/25/2015 2:34:48 PM PST by billorites
Why are some of the most privileged students in the nation plunging into a racial grievance culture and upending their campuses as though oppressed by Halloween costumes they don’t approve, imagined racial slights, portraits of Woodrow Wilson, a tiny handful of real racial epithets, and the like?
The reasons are of course multifaceted. But one deserves far more attention than it has gotten: Many or most of the African-American student protesters really are victims — but not of old-fashioned racism.
Most are, rather, victims of the very large admissions preferences that set up racial-minority students for academic struggle at the selective universities that have cynically misled them into thinking they are well qualified to compete with classmates who are, in fact, far stronger academically.
The reality is that most good black and Hispanic students, who would be academically competitive at many selective schools, are not competitive at the more selective schools that they attend.
That's why it takes very large racial preferences to get them admitted. < SNIP>
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.org ...
I’ll never forget sitting in on a diversity program for high-achieving seniors at a local high school run by a hard ass black counselor who was a retired Navy petty officer.
At one point, he sat down the 20-some kids in a circle and had them tell him which college they were going to.
The white kids all said they were going to state schools.
The black kids gave lists of the schools they were accepted to and were considering, Columbia, Georgetown, Stanford...
The kids were not expecting him to use this to point out how unfair it was that the minority kids had greater opportunities than their white peers.
Okay, I'll have to stop here and make a comment. This is a very well-intentioned article, but having been a public school teacher for 11 years, I have to tell you... in my own humble experience, these kids have no idea what constitutes "heroic struggle" and "doing well."
First of all, if they grow up in a predominately-minority school, they have no idea how far the bar gets lowered. It's not even that teachers mean to do it, it's just that most of us find out very early on that if we try to hold them all to the actual grade-level standards, only about 6% will pass (with a C) and the rest will get an F. You do that and your career as a teacher is over very quickly. You learn to give points simply for "participation" and "showing up" and "copying this down" and "reading a paragraph out loud."
Most of them do not grow up with any books in the house. They do not read books on their own. I usually meet 2 kids per year who actually read. Maybe 3. I mean, read novels. Three per year. And not "three per class," I mean three in all my classes combined.
Secondly, their idea of effort is "I showed up." And if it rains (in Southern California at least) a goodly percentage do not show up. It's raining. They might get wet between mom's SUV and the door. I grew up in the Midwest. We stood in freezing sleet for 20 minutes waiting for the bus at 6:20am. These kids? Not on your life. They (and their parents) do not put up with the slightest discomfort, nor do they have any interest in putting forth much effort for anything. That's weird. Sit back. Chill! Relax!
I have an Honors class this year, and from what I've seen, "Honors" means they don't lose things, and they don't talk back. That's kind of it. So I'm sorry, but these kids' idea of an "Heroic struggle" means they went to 90% of the classes and did some of the reading and some of the homework, and studied not at all, and played with their phones in class, and now want to know why they are getting bad grades and have no idea what the white and Asian kids are talking about.
I know this sounds horrible and racist, but I think it's culture, not race. But either way, only certain cultures take a real pride in struggle. Other cultures consider struggling a sign of failure somehow. Like you weren't smart enough to game the system and slide through with a big smile. White people will brag about how hard they worked. A lot of minorities would rather give the impression they are too chill to lift a pencil. Just asking them to TAKE OUT A PIECE OF PAPER reveals this. It's amazing how many kids sprawl out, blink sleepily around, and wait for someone to give them a piece of paper. Then, if someone does, they smile like they just got one over. Just won a small victory for... something. I don't even get it. It's a different mindset and no, it does not prepare them to compete with kids from cultures where they would be embarrassed to be caught unprepared.
Your question presumes that they don't realize what's happening. My thought is that they do realize it fully; they just don't care about the students that they're harming. (To leftisrs, only intentions count while the easily predictable results can be blissfully ignored.)
The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. Every one of those students is acceptable collateral damage if images of their dead bodies on the evening news helps the revolution. They're disposable grunts in an ideological war.
Not only are they accepted into more difficult schools, but many of these young athletic African-Americans are used for their prowess on the field and then forgotten; and many of them probably suffered from concussions that adversely affected their academic performance. I had one student who had done well in one of my courses years ago; he took another one a few years later and couldn’t cut it. He dropped the course. I often wondered if he had suffered so much from concussions that he couldn’t handle the academic work any more. What a loss.
The other thought is that this kind of affirmative actions works for Asians in reverse. They need higher scores to get into the more elite colleges, and therefore they may be apt to succeed at very high rates. I met an Asian professor this summer and he was irate that his hard-working, bright daughter did not get into MIT because there was a quota so that all the students would not be Asian.
If blacks really wanted equality they would earn their way into colleges instead of taking a handout.
So frustrating about the poor Asian kids. They need to band together and create their own schools, sort of a reverse of the historical black colleges.
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