https://tomklingenstein.com/woke-equality-is-a-myth/
Editor’s Note: The woke regime, or the group quota regime, is defined by its pursuit of group outcome equality: a leveling of social and economic results across racial categories, irrespective of actual differences and the realities of the individual. Yet credible social science, especially the work of Thomas Sowell, suggests that such outcome equality is not just undesirable — a threat to the republic of liberty and merit established by the Constitution — but impossible. Variation in outcomes stems from human nature and from reality, social and otherwise. A society that ensures group outcome equality cannot possibly be one that respects human liberty.
This central insight of Sowell’s work explains, in part, the stunning radicalism the group quota regime has exhibited in recent years: Driven toward a virtually unattainable goal, the woke set themselves up in direct opposition to the natural law — and seek ever more power in hopes of overcoming its influence on American society and the American regime. That quest for power has ignited a cold civil war between the partisans of this revolution and those who still believe in the free society — even a free society marked by disparate outcomes.
This essay was originally published in the Summer 2018 issue of the Claremont Review of Books under the title “Thomas Sowell’s Inconvenient Truths.”
New York City’s vast public school system enrolls 1.1 million students, some 18,000 of whom attend nine “specialized” high schools, where the curriculum is particularly rigorous and admission is both widely sought and highly competitive. Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech are the oldest, largest, and most famous such institutions. Eight of these schools base admission decisions solely on applicants’ scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT), developed by an education assessment company under contract to the New York school system, which began using it in 1971. (The ninth concentrates on art, music, and the performing arts. It admits students on the basis of portfolios or auditions, since no standardized test can reliably identify those 13-year-olds who will, over the ensuing four years, turn out to be the most annoying.)
In June, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio called for his city’s schools to replace SHSAT with an admissions process relying on two measures: middle-school class rank, and scores on a test taken by every student in New York state. Using SHSAT is a “monumental injustice,” he contended, because blacks and Hispanics account for two thirds of all New York City public school students but only one tenth of those enrolled in the specialized high schools. For de Blasio, this gap shows that using SHSAT denies students “an equal chance to get into one of their city’s best high schools.” Under the admissions procedure the mayor has proposed, which cannot be implemented without the New York state legislature’s approval, the specialized high schools will “start looking like New York City.” Black and Hispanic students, that is, would account for about 45% of enrollment, much higher than the current figure, though still only two thirds of their numbers in New York’s entire school system.
Tellingly, de Blasio treats SHSAT’s unrepresentative outcome as proof that its use constitutes an unfair process. His reasoning applies to a specific situation the general principle recently expressed by Ibram X. Kendi: “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Kendi, a historian who directs the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University, is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won a National Book Award in 2016. He recently wrote in the New York Times that “many racist Americans” resort to what he considers the only alternative explanation for racial disparities: “black inferiority.” In the same spirit, de Blasio writes that objections that his admissions proposals will “lower the standard” at the specialized schools are based on a “narrative” that not only “traps students in a grossly unfair environment,” but “actually blames them for it.”
