Posted by Fred Scrooby on Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:56 | #

I want to know two things:  Krieger’s ethnicity and that of whoever at the newspaper ultimately decides that her stuff, in its final form, gets published.

I no longer want to know about vague miasmas such as “liberalism,” but about specifics.  I’m done with miasmas.  The people aren’t liberal.

Posted by Robert Reis on Sat, 09 Aug 2008 06:19 | #

http://inverted-world.com/index.php/blog/blog/the_affirmative_action_hoax/

The Affirmative Action Hoax
By Ian Jobling • 8/8/08
Buy The Affirmative Action Hoax
from Amazon.
Steven Farron’s The Affirmative Action Hoax is, to my knowledge, the most thorough and uncompromising exposé of affirmative action in higher education. As many other writers have done, he provides copious evidence that universities discriminate against whites on a massive scale. However, unlike most critics of racial preferences, Farron examines his subject from a race realist perspective that acknowledges the reality of biological differences in intelligence among the races. This perspective enables him to see clearly how flimsy all the arguments commonly made in favor of affirmative action are. Farron also recognizes that the dogma of racial equality that underlies affirmative action inevitably leads to the corruption of academic standards.

Farron proves through countless examples that affirmative action university admittees have been far below the white standard for decades:

In 1989, black applicants who were admitted to selective colleges scored 350 points lower on the SATs than white admittees did.1
In 1996, the University of California at Berkeley Law School accepted every black applicant with an undergraduate GPA of 3.25 and a Law School Admission Test (LSAT) score in the 70th percentile but rejected all white and Asian applicants with the same scores.2
In 2001, the average SAT score of Hispanics who were admitted to UCLA was lower than the average score of whites who were rejected.3
Similarly, for decades the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT) scores of minorities who are admitted to American medical schools have been lower than those of whites who were rejected.4
Blacks and Hispanics receive 80 percent of merit scholarships—that is, scholarships supposedly awarded on the basis of talent rather than need—at the University of Michigan, despite the fact that they have much lower test scores and grades than whites and Asians.5
Farron directs devastating criticism against the claim that affirmative action is necessary to compensate for the disadvantages suffered by American minorities, such as poverty and past discrimination. First of all, the beneficiaries of racial preferences are not poor or disadvantaged in any other respect. All studies of the subject have shown that the large majority of affirmative action admittees to universities come from middle and upper-class households.6

Furthermore, minority students do not underperform in school and on tests because of poverty, but because blacks are on average much less intelligent than whites. In fact, the average IQ of whites in the bottom half of the American income range is about eight points higher than the IQ of blacks in the top half.7 Poor whites score better on standardized tests than wealthy blacks. In 2002, the average math SAT score of whites whose parents earned less than $10,000 was 497, but the average score of blacks whose parents earned $100,000 or more was 490. LSAT scores show the same pattern.8

Some defenders of affirmative action argue that blacks underperform in high school due to low self-esteem. However, the clear conclusion of studies on this subject is that black teenagers have significantly higher self-esteem than whites. The Washington, DC school population is more heavily black than that of any state, and it also scores worse on standardized tests. Yet the students there are more likely to answer yes to the statement “I am good at mathematics” than students in any state.9

Universities are under pressure not only to admit, but also to graduate, large numbers of minorities. Indeed, in some cases, universities that do not graduate specified quotas of minorities are denied federal funding or accreditation.10 The compulsion to graduate unqualified applicants inevitably lowers academic standards.

Dr. Bernard Davis, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School, exposed this travesty in 1975. Affirmative action resulted in the admission of black medical students who were far below the usual standard for Harvard, which is, of course, one of the most selective schools in America. The average MCAT score of black admittees was in the mid-400s, which was lower than the average score of white applicants who were rejected by all medical schools in the country.

Naturally, these students fared poorly, but the school hid the disparities by lowering its standards. Harvard replaced the usual letter grades with a pass/fail system to obscure differences in student performance. Also, the medical school began offering repeat examinations for students who failed courses and lowered exam standards. Even worse, Harvard devalued its medical degree. Whereas previously Harvard had required that degree recipients do much better than the minimum national standard on standardized tests for medical students, the school began granting its degrees to all students who performed at the minimum level or above.

However, even this was not enough to guarantee passage of black students. In 1975, the dean of the medical school granted a degree to a black student who had failed to meet the minimum national requirement on standardized tests after having taken them five times. The indignant Davis made the whole mess public. In recompense for his bravery, students picketed his office, and he was denied promotion.11

The lowering of standards is responsible for the colossal grade inflation that has taken place at American universities in the past 40 years. In 2003 about half of students at the nation’s top colleges received A’s. As Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield explains:

in the late 60’s and early 70’s, white professors, imbibing the spirit of affirmative action, stopped giving low or average grades to black students and, to justify or conceal it, stopped giving those grades to white students as well.
The affirmative action travesty persists because of the willingness of university administrators and the media to deceive the public. One tactic is to simply to deny that racial preferences exist. Up until 1996, the University of Michigan administration would tell anyone who asked that they simply did not take race into account in admissions. Then a professor forced the university to disclose its admissions records through a Freedom of Information Act request, and it turned out that standards for black admittees were far below those for whites and Asians.12

A more common lie is that race gives applicants only a slight edge. The dean of Berkeley’s law school told a reporter in 1995 that race only comes into play when admissions committees must choose between two applicants with the same qualifications. When the law school was forced to disclose its admissions records, the enormous disparities quoted at the beginning of the article were revealed.13 Farron shows through many examples that the news media can be counted on to parrot the lies of university administrators, repeating discredited denials of racial preferences without looking into the facts.14

The Affirmative Action Hoax takes on many other myths concocted by the academic elites and their media minions to defend racial preferences. If you’re mad at what Farron labels “the vicious anti-white discrimination that has pervaded American society since the 1960s,”15 then this book is for you.

Posted by Al Ross on Sun, 10 Aug 2008 05:43 | #

We will wait a very long time for Ian Jobling to observe that, in the matter of racial representation, Jews are less than 3% of the US population but around 30% of the Ivy League student population and that if any numerical sacrifice is due then it should come from the usual suspects. Of course, it is pertinent to note that, of the section of the US population which is intellectually fitted for tertiary studies (even in these dire days of credential-stamping, academic slums passing themselves off as universities), the Jews represent a far higher figure than their pro-rata overall population share.

Posted by Robert Reis on Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:58 | #

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/columns/html/20080808T220000-0500_138829_OBS_SLAVERY_WAS_GOOD_FOR_THE_BLACK_MAN.asp

Slavery was good for the black man

Michael Dingwall
Saturday, August 09, 2008

As we celebrate emancipation and independence, we are being reminded of the horrors of slavery. According to our leaders, academics and others, slavery was the worst institution ever created. However, while it is popular for most to agree with this claim, I beg to disagree. Indeed, contrary to the belief that slavery was bad for us blacks, I believe that slavery was good for us.

Have we ever stopped to consider where we black people, especially those of us in the West, would be right now if it weren’t for the Atlantic Slave Trade? What state do you think black Africa would be in today? Do you think that we would have been better off without slavery? I don’t think so!

When the Europeans went to Africa to buy slaves, what did they find? They found a society and people vastly inferior to theirs. While the Europeans had emerged from their feudal practices, our ancestors in Africa, for the most part, had not developed for many centuries. We did not understand the concept of nation or government. Science and technology (and innovations in these areas) were non-existent in black Africa of the 15th and 16th centuries. Indeed, as a people, we had no sense of self-identity. In many respects, we were uncivilised.

Slavery was our most important contact with modernity. It is through this “most heinous system ever created” that we blacks were able to understand some of the principles of global trade. Our ancestors were introduced to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade between Europe, Africa and the West Indies. Black Africa’s part in the trade was the importation of European technology and the export of slaves. The importation of European technology was important - even though the Africans did not appreciate this importance at first. The export of slaves was also very important, especially for us in the West.

As time went on, we blacks, both in Africa and especially in the Caribbean were, in many ways, being Europeanised and thus civilised. We adopted several aspects of their culture - their systems of government, their technologies, their sense of order and their languages. In doing this, we discarded those aspects of our culture that clearly placed us at a disadvantage - like our lack of sense of self, loyalty to the tribe and our non-participation in modern technology.

Although not a believer in any god myself, the Christianity that came with slavery and European control would be of immense value to us black people. Back in Africa, we were preoccupied with the worship of animals, trees, spirits of the dead - even stones. These primitive religions that we were practising ensured that our ancestors in Africa were backward. The relatively superior Christianity, with its greater sense of order and responsibility would help, in many ways, to pull the black man out of the Stone Age. This could only have happened with slavery.

Our relatively stable societies today, especially in the West, are testaments to the benefits of slavery. While it is true that black Africa has, for the most part, squandered the opportunities that slavery offered in the past, the positive influence of European civilisation cannot be denied. The black nation states of Africa and the Caribbean have given black people a sense of nation, a sense of identity, a sense of order and a sense of purpose - things we never had before.

While we continue to demonstrate our inferiority in the areas of science and technology, through centuries of being exposed to Europe on account of slavery, we blacks are now aware of the need for us to start excelling in these areas.

Those of us who continue to see the millions of blacks who died crossing the Atlantic and the displacement of what we had in Africa as proof that slavery was a bad institution don’t understand the mechanics of human development and evolution. Similar processes had to be endured by countless peoples thoughout history. The development of the human race has always involved the need for change. Slavery was one such means, and like it or not, we blacks are the beneficiaries. It is not for us today to judge the means through which societies have changed in the past.

We blacks were changed, for the better, I might add, on account of slavery. We are a better race today because our ancestors went though slavery. The millions of lives lost were not lost in vain. The Europeans proclaimed the need for us to be civilised through slavery and though this may be hard to understand, they were right. Indeed, based on what is happening in black Africa today - slavery for us in the West was, in many respects, our salvation.

Michael Dingwall is a freelance writer.
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