Replies

She’s bitter because she knows she didn’t earn on her own skills and intelligence anything she has in life - her education or her job. She knows she only has them because of her skin color.

Thomas Sowell wrote a good piece on why affirmative action harms the recipients, and she’s a poster child for his words.

http://www.popecenter.org/recommended_reading/article.html?id=1329

In general, Sowell writes, preferential admissions mismatch the minority student with the university, creating an artificial failure.

This phenomenon has several effects. First, quite competent minority students are admitted into schools whose normally admitted students’ learning paces are somewhat beyond their own, resulting in what Sowell calls “wholly needless failures among highly qualified students” in the name of racial representation. Furthermore, as is stated in a Wall Street Journal article excerpted by Sowell, it leads to “a widespread if rarely stated perception that black students somehow lack what it takes to make the grade.”

As top schools overdraw their available pool of minority students, they must dip into the students credentially suited for lower-tier colleges.

“The problems of mismatching and artificial failing proceed on down the academic pecking order,” Sowell writes. “Nationwide, 74 percent of black students have failed to graduate, five years after entering college.” Sowell argues that most of those failures are artificial, caused by affirmative action’s mismatching the students with the schools.

When some schools recognize this problem, Sowell explains, they seek to rectify it with grade inflation (which he calls “affirmative grading”) for minority students. This move leads to the perception mentioned in the Wall Street Journal and also causes highly qualified minority students to defend their academic reputation needlessly to teachers and employers.

• High attrition rates of minority students on “white campuses” is evidence of racism. Again, Sowell points to mismatching students with the university’s standards. At Berkeley, Sowell found that only 22 percent of Hispanic students admitted under preferences had graduated five years later, whereas over half the Hispanic students admitted normally had graduated in the same period. He found similar figures for black students. “If the all-purpose explanation is racism,” Sowell asks, “then why did this racism have such radically different effects on people of the same race with different test scores?”

• Tests such as the SAT do not measure minority students’ abilities fairly, so basing admission on them unfairly discriminates against minority students. Sowell explains that this argument is 20 years old, thus there is empirical evidence by which to judge it. Examining that evidence, Sowell finds that “SAT scores have in fact proven empirically to be better predictors (of academic performance) than high school grades for blacks.”

• The “new racism” that started cropping up in the 1980s and ’90s means affirmative action is even more necessary because without it minorities might be further discriminated against. Sowell posits that the “new racism” itself is a derivative of affirmative action and the double standards (i.e., “affirmative grading”) of which “neither black nor white students are unaware.” According to Sowell, the double standard created resentment among whites and blacks, and even campuses with no history of racial unrest were suddenly inundated with waves of tension and activism. Relatively poor academic performance by the mismatched minority students served to instill them with a sense of intellectual inferiority, and colleges unwilling to admit their culpability blamed the “vestiges” of racism. Sowell shows that many graduating seniors reported increases in racial tensions over their years on campus. Saying that a “growing vestige” is a contradiction in terms, Sowell explains that colleges “wholly ignore the very possibility that the policies and practices of the colleges themselves may have been responsible for the hostile racial climate on campus.”

She does seem like a weak mind and an “affirmative action” baby, no matter how much that may upset the politically correct liberals to hear it. From what Christopher Hitchens describes of her undergrad “theis” it was atrocious (he described it a “unreadable in any language”) yet somehow she was passed onward and upward to law school. Looking at some of her statements and speeches, I have to wonder if she is even a high school graduate..... yet she managed to be admitted to Princeton (passing over many more qualified applicants who were not of the correct skin color or genitalia). Somehow she graduates from Princeton and is supposed to be the cream of the crop, although there are countless students from supposedly “lesser” colleges who are far superior to her in intellect, judgment, and learning.

This is just anecdotal BUT it happens all the time.... In her generation (I am just a couple of years older) I know someone, a family friend, wait-listed (not admitted but given the “honorable mention” pat on the back) at Princeton (probably the same year she was admitted), a “white male” who was a top student in h.s., SAT scores in the high 700s range on each test, class officer and many leadership activities, etc. People like that are regularly passed over (so many top Asian students too!!) so that weak minds like Michelle (Robinson) Obama can get passed ahead for such opportunities. Of course, it happens in so many areas, at every level of society, for police and fire departments, all sorts of educational and employment opportunities..... all in the name of reverse discrimination, er, “affirmative action” as the politically correct leftists prefer to call it. All done in the name of liberal social engineering, but then they wonder why a lot of resentments and tensions build as people see bozos like Michelle Obama advanced far beyond their competence. Not saying it doesn’t also happen plenty with children of the rich and famous, politically connected, etc. but the solution is not to make society LESS meritiocratic by making our institutions more racist as well....