Subject: Berkeley Prof on Affirmative Action Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1998 12:45:46 -0700 From: Jackson Street Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american By JOHN MCWHORTER (7-15-98) It is taken for granted here at the University of California at Berkeley that an African-American professor such as myself considers the fall in minority admissions this spring to be a heinous betrayal. In fact, although I think affirmative action was vital decades ago, I now think it’s obsolete, at least in university admissions (I still favor it in the business realm). What troubles me is that this opinion, although hardly unusual nationwide, has not been acknowledged in the tense, bitter discussion over how to preserve diversity on campus in the wake of the California Civil Rights Initiative, which abolished race-based admissions. The pivotal fact for me is that affirmative action at Berkeley primarily benefited middle-class students not the disadvantaged the program claimed to aid. Last fall, 174 of the 257 black freshmen admitted came from homes with yearly incomes above $40,000; the parents of 107 made more than $60,000 annually. Of course, there are still wide discrepancies between whites’ and blacks’ test scores, regardless of economic status. Some argue this is because a middle-class income does not guarantee a middle-class lifestyle, especially in a group so recently freed from institutionalized segregation. However, this isn’t the norm for middle-class black families, and I suspect most black Americans would be offended if Ross Perot or Strom Thurmond claimed that middle-class black people remain in the cultural lower class. Among the middle-class, poor scores can no longer be ascribed to cultural bias on tests either. I suggest that it is instead an echo of the well-known tendency for black children of all classes to associate school with "whiteness." This has subtle psychological repercussions beyond schoolyard days, with many well-intentioned young black people sensing "the school thing" as something one visits and does not live. Preferences cannot solve this problem, which has persisted for decades regardless of class or opportunity. What is alarming is that one can sit through two-hour meetings of concerned Berkeley faculty and administrators without the merest acknowledgment of class, merit or fairness. Instead, the agenda is implicitly restricted to speculation on how to reinstate racial preferences in other guises. The participants African Americans and others are constrained from a true engagement with the issue by two poisonous strains currently rampant in the black American Zeitgeist. The first poison is what Orlando Patterson calls the cult of victimology. In the face of stark evidence that black Americans have made massive progress on all levels since the 1960s, many influential blacks insist upon reading all remnants of racism as evidence that no substantial change has occurred. Their goal has become to collect the bad news assiduously while carefully deleting the good news. This frame of mind leads many black affirmative-action advocates to interpret the ban on preferences as an attack on disadvantaged applicants, when in fact only about a quarter of black Berkeley applicants have parents who earn less than $30,000 a year. Victimology marginalizes this datum, even when most black Berkeley students obviously have had middle-class upbringings. The second poison is separatism. Instead of talking about how to improve the test scores of black students, Berkeley’s diversity advocates ignore the issue, in essence implying middling performance is inherent to the race. Ironically, this assumption prevents black students from pursuing top grades and acing placement tests. Are we possibly seeing the adult manifestation of black children’s sense of the nerd as a traitor? I recently had this creeping suspicion confirmed. An undergraduate recruiter told me the staff was leery of the black students admitted this spring without preferences, fearing they would not be committed to the black presence on campus. In other words, victimology and separatism have gotten us to the point that the black child who fulfills the goals of affirmative action and no longer needs it is a sell-out. Perhaps it’s time for supporters of affirmative action to rethink their assumptions. Mr. McWhorter is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, "The Word on the Street," will be published in September by Plenum. Subject: Re: Berkeley Prof on Affirmative Action Date: Fri, 24 Jul 1998 21:52:41 -0700 From: "Luke the Drifter" Organization: http://extra.newsguy.com Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american References: 1 , 2 cinque@viaccess.net wrote in message <35B83AD1.DF80A224@viaccess.net>... Some good points, and precisely the kind of writing that would not see the light of day over at SCAAM. "The cult of victimology" is a phrase we should all learn. As the good professor suggests, it is taught to black youth very early, at home, or even grade school. Meanwhile, Asians are not only getting top marks across the land, but getting installed in key positions as well. Polytech Institute, one of the dominant engineering schools still left in New York City now has a president with one of those immigrant Asian names, something Hui Hsing or something. A wealthy alumni died recently and left about 800 million dollars to the school. Mr. Hsing (who probably came over as an illegal working in a Chop Suey joint, saved his money and got a degree) will control this money. See how it works? Luke the Drifter: Yes. Hui Hsing is a sell out. He is playing the white man's game. He is not "down" with the brothers. ......Of course, he is also very successful. This victim fetish is really a facet of Marxist thought. Marx promoted the idea that there is something noble about suffering for the cause and eschewing bourgeois standards. African Americans who buy into this cult of victimology are, whether they know it or not, the intellectual children of this nineteenth century white man. Now, Marx himself never walked it liked he talked it. Sure his finances were in ruin, but he was well taken care of, for most of his life, by his rich daddy and by his factory owning best friend, Friedrich Engels. Marx advocated that others suffer and fail to reveal the corruption of bourgeois society - kind of like the armchair revolutionaries found on this, and (especially) that other, newsgroup. One particular SCAAM poster (who shall remain nameless), for example, absolutely insists the majority of African Americans are economic failures I suspect he has never met a negative financial statistic about African Americans he didn't like.