https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/diversity-is-great-but-it-doesnt
As the Supremes are about to consider taking up yet another racial preferences case – the one about whether Asian applicants are being discriminated against at Harvard in favor of black and brown ones — we are in for the usual round of endless euphemism.
Wise heads will opine as if what we are talking about is administrators working with a pool of applicants of various races with dossiers of equal grades and test scores, hoping to assemble a class reflecting a rainbow of “diversity” from among them. The rub is supposedly that some doodooheads just think it’s plain “racist” to ever make such decisions with race in mind at all.
We will be led to think – or told to pretend to think – that somebody is opposed to there being too many black kids in a class, that they want whites to retain their “privilege” in admissions, that, well … it’s not always easy to glean just what people are trying to get across. But basically, doodooheads think we should just be color-blind, out of some principle hovering somewhere between naivete and bigotry.
We are to take from this that questioning how racial preferences work renders black applicants “unwelcome.”
Just why anyone would have a problem with racial preferences other than this coded bigotry is left gingerly unstated.
If it is acknowledged that racial preference policies entail admitting black students with a lowered cutoff of grades and test scores (italics deliberate – we will return to this) …
.. then it is implied that the lowering is slight, that admitting black students is a mere matter of putting a “thumb on the scale.”
That’s a lie of long standing. I wonder if there is room for an honest discussion of the issue.
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I do not oppose Affirmative Action. I simply think it should be based on disadvantage, not melanin. It made sense – logical as well as moral – to adjust standards in the wake of the implacable oppression of black people until the mid-1960s.