Preening self-regard pretty much sums up liberals.
American media and left did this with a white-black president and look how that is turning out.
I’m sick of commenting on this $h!t. Colleges are never going to change. They’re going to give free admission to low IQ minorities, fill them with this ‘racial oppression’ $h!t, give them grades they don’t deserve, and send them out to be hired by kiss-a$$ corporations or government agencies, where they will get a salary for being a minority.
Then our kids who paid their own college tuition and the tuition for the minorities are passed over for jobs because they are “White.”
After all that, we are called racist for breathing.
I’m sick of it.
More than likely, being an unfortunate result of a “mis-contraception”, his misuse of academic sounding words were totally “in-venereal”
The tragic figure in this story is not Kashawn. It’s the unknown Asian-American kid from Fremont with a straight-A average and very high test scores whose place at Berkeley was taken away by the self-righteous administrators, who admitted Kashawn instead to fill their quota.
My only issue on McDonald with this is dinging for counselor for advising that he accept doing his best. Hundreds of years of ‘Gentleman’s C’ college students have adjusted to mediocre grades, whether by limits in ability or effort.
I think the counselor knew what he or she was doing.
If you read the whole article in the LA Times, you will see they let in another black guy from the slums who was an a natural intellectual. He really cut lose in college, and aced all the difficult courses.
The black guy who didn’t do so well reminds me of a couple of white guys I met in college, who were just educated beyond their mental abilities. They wrote similar types of papers full of big words with no clear concepts behind them.
It's just the beginning of a long-term plan. Once they've been given a degree (that has value to those who earned it), they are placed in a government agency or private corporation or university that is seeking the same public praise of "celebrating diversity". But rather than being placed where meaningful work is performed, they generally are given high profile positions that actually require little by way of results.
After years of perfunctory, highly rated performance reviews, they build a resume that looks impressive enough that they can get real jobs; and then they flame out, some times with disastrous results.
Does the name Franlin Raines ring a bell? How about Barack Obama?
Thomas Sowell made the observation (my approximation) that it is better to graduate from a state school or community college than to flunk out of Harvard.
There are many elements in this article that are sad. One concerns writing (thinking) skills. This young man thinks he can write better by tossing in high sounding words. I think that is a common mistake that should have been addressed in high school. It seems this student is still not getting the message.
Rather than retrench and start over, writing more simply and clearly, he has the opportunity to blame “the system” or “racism” for his low grades. People often choose guaranteed short term satisfaction over uncertain longer term reward. It is more satisfying to blame others than to admit that one lags behind. If others are walking, who wants to crawl?
Perhaps “the system” really is to blame, but only for not setting this young man straight. His teachers, backed up by the school administration, should pull him aside and work on his basic skills.
But what are they to do if his performance does not improve? Flunk him? That is just the kind of result that would risk unflattering attention from liberal circles, possibly including the US Department of Justice. In our infantilized world, one must not “make Obama mad.” I’ve heard our liberal press refer to Obama’s emotions as children might refer to their father’s emotions. Something along the lines of: “Oh your in trouble now, he’s really steamed.” There was a time when we did not have to fear our Presidents.
Let’s contrast this young man’s academic failings with the success of young black men in football. College football is populated by many young men who respect their coaches. They don’t complain if he tells them to practice tackling, run laps, etc. They don’t get to blame the system. There is no heat applied to the coach or the school for cutting a student from the squad. This is a context full of short term pain, with the promise of long term reward. Everyone is judged by the same harsh standards, and young black men, often from broken homes, do just fine.
Surely someone will wonder if black’s have an innate advantage in sports and an innate disadvantage in academics. The Scottish enlightenment philosopher David Hume noted the lack of accomplishment of Africans in architecture and music. Can anyone today deny that blacks have contributed to music?
Thomas Jefferson, intellectual and broad minded as he was, tried to involve blacks in sports. With the evidence available to him in his day, he had to conclude that they had little aptitude. It is easy to be blinded by current evidence. I am convinced that each of us falls far short of our potential.
The young man who is the subject of this article can fairly blame bad public schools and affirmative action. But blame only gets you so far. Like a young athlete who wants to make the cut next year, he has work on himself and his skills. Then, as a man, he should accept success or failure as it comes to him.
What academically motivated student would want an idiot like this in his "study group?" sheesh. The entitlement bug just never quits.
The Leftist answer to this is more mandated success. Simply legislate that the same % of blacks entering college must leave with degrees as whites.
And then blame business for not hiring all of the “well credentialed” blacks.
Read this over the weekend.
There is nothing good in this all around — the qualified non-black students who were passed over in favor of a completely unprepared AA choice, the student himself who at no time was told by his school counselors or teachers that he was NOT UC material, African American studies that gave an “A-” to a student who obviously couldn’t write a term paper.
Students lacking in skills like this would be much better off at a 2-year community college out of high school instead of being set up to fail.
What a sad waste of everybody’s time and money. Liberalism has a lot to answer for.
I agree. She is one of my few ‘must read’ writers. The takedown of AA encroachment in this article is priceless:
www.city-journal.org/2011/cjc0714hm.html
Excellent as usual from MacDonald, but the most powerful critique of affirmative action is not the Mismatch theory, but rather the undeniable fact that white (and Asian in places like California) students are discriminated against. The pernicious idea that Diversity justifies the use of racial preferences is much worse than the entirely predictable situation where beneficiaries of racial preferences find themselves in over their heads once in college.
The only way racial preferences will ever end is if white voters demand it. Only the realization that their interests and the interests of their children are harmed by racial preferences, and then insistence that the worthless GOP actually do something about it, will bring an end to racial preferences. As compelling as the Mismatch theory is, it doesn’t mean that black and Hispanic Americans will refrain from demanding preferences, let alone accept them when given.
So I don’t really know who this will convince. Maybe it will persuade some white liberals to oppose preferences. Since they don’t care at all about, and in fact actively support discrimination against other whites, then maybe this is the only way to convince them.