Saturday, July 26, 2014

Twisted admissions

Dennis Saffran has stood as a Republican candidate in New York and has written columns for City Journal - so he is somewhere on the right of the political spectrum.

He has had a column published in the New York Post regarding the racial balance in the eight elite specialised high schools in New York.

It's an interesting case study in the way that race is spoken about now.

Entry to the high schools is by a competitive examination:
But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil-rights complaint challenging the admissions process.

Here is the first point to note. It is true that black and Hispanic enrolments have fallen. But the most notable decline in enrolments has been amongst whites:
white enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech has plummeted as well, dropping from 79 percent, 81 percent and 77 percent, respectively, in 1971 to just 22 percent, 23 percent and 20 percent today.

So why not be up in arms about the decline in white enrolments? Why the concern only for blacks and Hispanics?

As it happens, Saffran does not want the exam to be dropped. He argues that this would be unfair to the Asian community which now dominates these high schools. Asians are 13 per cent of the New York population but 73% of the specialised school enrolments.

Now, if whites were 13 per cent of the New York population but 73 per cent of the elite high school population, you would never hear the end of it. There would be talk of privilege and racism. And Saffran does seem to believe that he needs to justify the discrepancy. So he makes the claim that Asians are poor and therefore, unlike privileged whites, deserving of the high school places.

He makes this argument despite admitting that:
True, Asians nationally have the highest median income of any racial group, including whites — and in New York City, their median household income ranks second to that of whites and well ahead of blacks and Hispanics.

So Asians in general are the wealthiest (and also the best educated); however, Saffran provides some welfare data suggesting that some of the Asians attending the specialised schools are from poorer families.

This may well be true, but let's face it - poor whites are never given such consideration. If you're white you're considered privileged no matter what; a struggling white family will be thought more privileged than someone like Oprah Winfrey.

I'm not writing any of this to have a go at Asians; it is an aspect of Asian culture that the young are pressured to compete academically for entry to elite schools.

But again, if white families value education more highly on average than black families and have better educational outcomes for that reason, nobody says they achieved that on merit, it is assumed to be an aspect of racism.

It's that idea, again, of whites being exceptional - in a negative way. It is assumed that whites created systems of oppression and injustice, and therefore the worst is to be thought of them, even to the point that Asians, who do better on average than whites on most social indicators, get to be praised for achieving on merit, whilst the poorest of whites are advised on ways to confess and to overcome their privilege.

I don't write this with the intent of further demoralising those white people reading this, but to try to make clear how lacking in credibility the whole approach to race is. There is every reason for us to treat it as lacking in credibility and to dismiss its moral claims.

4 comments:

  1. "I don't write this with the intent of further demoralising those white people reading this, but to try to make clear how lacking in credibility the whole approach to race is. There is every reason for us to treat it as lacking in credibility and to dismiss its moral claims."

    Exactly right.

    What the anti-whites have now is the advantage that they own the megaphone and they can shout you down and shut you up (sometimes). They have the habit of insulting their opponents with sarcasm and straw-man arguments. They have no credible arguments at all. The facts are not with them.

    It's appropriate for non-self-hating whites to dismiss their claims without further consideration. After all, the anti-whites have been exercising a monopoly on public discourse for fifty years, and in that time they have achieved results of positively Soviet dead-endedness while failing to come up with a single credible argument. They don't need another hearing; they need a hook to get them off the stage.

    It only matters that ordinary, decent, non-self-hating whites remain positive and not get demoralized by how much the anti-whites own and dominate and how long they've been able to rule the West with, intellectually speaking, nothing but anti-white bias masquerading as a system of dogma.

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  2. Mark, you have the best analytic mind that I "know". This is a ball of twine that needs more unraveling. All I can come up with is that Leftists believe that African-Americans are being actively discriminated against by the establishment. I believe this is false. In fact, just the opposite. But I believe this is true to an extent on a non-institutional level. For example, Whites are more cautious approaching African-Americans on the street. A small business owner might be less likely to hire an "equally qualified" African-American candidate than a White one. But most decisions these days are made at the institutional level.

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  3. White will get justice only by sticking together, and by forming white interest groups and communities.

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