What are black college students rioting about ?

Ithaca

Power line has a post today that seems to me to be right on the topic of what these students want, which is freedom from accountability. They are afraid they are overmatched against white colleagues. They can’t hack it and want a pass. It is called “Mismatch.”

The biggest change since Grutter, though, has nothing to do with Court membership. It is the mounting empirical evidence that race preferences are doing more harm than good?—even for their supposed beneficiaries. If this evidence is correct, we now have fewer African-American physicians, scientists, and engineers than we would have had using race-neutral admissions policies. We have fewer college professors and lawyers, too. Put more bluntly, affirmative action has backfired.

Why is this ? We know that the normal distribution of IQ is a standard deviation lower for blacks than whites.

NormalCurveSmall

This is the over all curve with the distribution around an average of 100, by definition.

IQ_Bladk_White

The curve for blacks has a peak at IQ about 80. White peak at 100 to 104. Asians peak at around 106. What this means is that the average IQ is lower for blacks but this does not mean that all blacks are less intelligent than whites. At an IQ of 110 there is a large difference but the number of blacks who will do well in certain academic fields like Medicine is still significant. It would seem important to identify those blacks who will do well in fields requiring higher than average intelligence but the present system of affirmative action ignores this truth.

according to data released by the University of Texas in connection with Fisher, the mean SAT scores (out of 2400) and mean high-school grade-point averages (on a 4.0 scale) varied widely by race for the entering class of 2009. For Asians, the numbers were 1991 and 3.07; whites were at 1914 and 3.04; Hispanics at 1794 and 2.83; and African-Americans at 1524 and 2.57. The SAT scores for the Asian students placed them in the 93rd percentile of 2009 SAT-takers nationwide; the African-American students, meanwhile, were at the 52nd percentile.

There seems to be a sort of civil rights movement among black students to ignore the facts and promote “students of color” regardless of ability.

Exams are the main mechanism that, in many classes, separates high performing students from average and poor performing ones. Studying is an important mechanism through which highly capable students convert their potential into high performance.

Most colleges do what they can to reduce and mask the disparity between the performance of affirmative action admittees and their better-credentialed peers. Grade inflation means that below average performers can still get decent-sounding grades. Courses in which little more than mastery of politically correct jargon can yield an A or A-minus are offered. On a more salutary note, tutoring and writing assistance are available.

In the end, however, students admitted due to racial preferences surely understand that they are at a competitive disadvantage. This realization is likely to have adverse psychological consequences for some.

It sounds like the present student agitators are determined to overcome the mathematics of IQ.

some of the more mystifying aspects of the militant fragility become easier to explain. Why does this movement insist that its members’ mental health is in jeopardy? The fact that someone, somewhere on a sprawling campus used the “N” word seems like an insufficient explanation. The fact that these students are competing with students who have a built-in advantage seems like a better one.

Why has “white privilege” become such a catch-phrase? It’s minority students who have the privilege of attending a college that, but for their race, they would not be admitted to. For that matter, it’s minority students who apparently have the privilege of verbally abusing white students in explicitly racial terms without, from all that appears so far, facing disciplinary consequences.

To be sure, the typical white student had more advantages growing up than the typical black student, and these advantages in some cases are for life. But as I understand it, the “white privilege” mantra claims that the privilege adheres in “whiteness” itself, regardless of economic or family circumstances.

I feel sorry for these students because, due to white leftist orthodoxy, they have been placed in a situation where they cannot succeed. They know it and demand special privileges. All this does is to degrade the accomplishments of black students who are far enough to the right in the curve to succeed in math or engineering or medicine.

Biology can be merciless at times but it does rule.

41 thoughts on “What are black college students rioting about ?”

  1. “…they have been placed in a situation where they cannot succeed.”

    And, the social “good” that preferential race admissions and treatment (PRAT) seeks to accomplish is sabotaged. What concious consumer of professional services would feel that the former student that received PRAT is, all else being equal, better prepared than the former student that didn’t receive PRAT? Knowing that a high percentage of people of color got PRAT, the consumer (who is looking out for his own welfare) will certainly generally avoid dark skinned people, all else being equal, in making their selection decisions.

  2. I think that one of the great tragedies of our age is the denigration of a number of career paths that can lead to significant material success but require less formal education. This has led to a simultaneous shortage of welders and other tradesmun while we have an oversupply of deeply indebted baristas and other low paid retail service staff who will never recover from their failed foray into higher education. That this general tragedy of today’s america is also disproportionately screwing over blacks is just the icing on the cr*p cake.

  3. How many of the kids in that picture are majoring in chemichal engineering? computer science?

    Yeah, I know. Stupid question.

  4. I think it’s more about the Gender and Ethnic Studies departments at these schools. Those departments basically perpetuate a radical left-wing view of the world.

    Everything they do is to prevent hearing counter-arguments. They can discount anything from anyone for any reason. If you’re black and disagree, you have internalized racism. If your present studies and facts, those facts can be discounted because they were created using white, hetero-patriarchal math. They aren’t required to present evidence to back up their claims. It’s practically a religion.

    The traditional liberal arts have been invaded by these people. English seems vulnerable because so many of them can spew pages of diatribes (a double major Women’s Studies and English seems common). History is somewhat safer since it at least requires historical evidence (but here, too, the Ethnic Studies departments present their own view of history within their departments).

    These departments need to be shut down. In the short term, school administrators could make an example of some of the students and kick them out.

  5. They don’t need to be shut down, the colleges just need to be made financially liable for the loan defaults of their students. The colleges know exactly who all the losers are, they’ll shut it all down themselves.

  6. They are tired of “acting white,” desire a society where no one has to “act white” or embarrass them by “acting white,” and are actively stopping whites from “acting white.”

  7. There seems to be a sort of civil rights movement among black students to ignore the facts and promote “students of color” regardless of ability.

    The original civil rights movement was run by exceptional people (for example, James Meredith) who took great personal risk at a time when anti-black prejudice was widespread. However, after cultural and legal success the civil rights movement has become a racket run by hustlers and mediocrities who seek to 1) gin up race hatred to maintain their client base at a time when many young black people would otherwise be more interested in pursuing personal than political goals, and 2) keep the money flowing to the programs that provide their own livelihoods. There is little in this for the most competent young black people who could succeed on their own abilities but who now get lumped with the AA-aided mediocrities. There is also little in this for less-able young blacks, who as naive young people may be too inexperienced to realize that racial preferences hurt them in the long run, and that they might do better initially to attend less-than-elite colleges and universities, and to study hard topics rather than dumbed-down social science that employers know isn’t worth much.

    In these respects the modern civil rights movement strongly resembles feminism, which started as a movement to protect all women from mistreatment and open opportunities to those with talent and ambition, but devolved into a racket by which well-organized mediocrities profit by promoting destructive ideas.

  8. The high school I attended had a lot of high aptitude students. In my class of about 170 students, I knew of 9 who got 750 or above on the Math SAT. When one compares this to black scores on the Math SAT, the results are not encouraging. From The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education:

    Let’s be more specific about the SAT racial gap among high-scoring applicants. In 2005, 153,132 African Americans took the SAT test. They made up 10.4 percent of all SAT test takers. But only 1,132 African-American college-bound students scored 700 or above on the math SAT and only 1,205 scored at least 700 on the verbal SAT. Nationally, more than 100,000 students of all races scored 700 or above on the math SAT and 78,025 students scored 700 or above on the verbal SAT. Thus, in this top-scoring category of all SAT test takers, blacks made up only 1.1 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the math test and only 1.5 percent of the students scoring 700 or higher on the verbal SAT.

    ……we find that in the entire country 244 blacks scored 750 or above on the math SAT…
    On the math SAT, only 0.16 percent of all black test takers scored 750 or above compared to 1.8 percent of white test takers. Thus, whites were more than 11 times as likely as blacks to score 750 or above on the math SAT. Overall, there were more than 61 times as many whites as blacks who scored 750 or above on the math section of the SAT.

    Nine students out of a class of 170 versus 244 students out of 150,000: the comparison is not pretty.

    Making a precise comparison is difficult, for a number of reasons. The SATs were re-normed in the 1990s, which means a 750 Math SAT when I took the test in the ’60s was not the equivalent to a 750 Math SAT in 2005. It may have been that the New Math (UICSM) program I took in high school – a program which was of much more benefit to top students than to lower level students [I for one, loved its emphasis on proofs]- may have given top students at my high school an advantage over students from other schools.

    About 10% of my class got either Semi-Finalist or Letter of Commendation on the Merit Scholarship test, compared to 2% for the general population, so my school was not Lake Wobegon.

    Having taught at poverty-level schools, I suspect that the difference has more to do with culture than inherent aptitude. Others may disagree.

  9. I’m not going to do much to defend my discipline – though in the old days a rigorous and broad reading in the true canon (a canon enlarged for reasons of quality – see the discovery of Edward Taylor hundreds of years later or a broader appreciation of non-fiction) wasn’t that detrimental, indeed, could help. I see it in the richer backgrounds of MBA’s who majored in liberal arts. But yes, it has become a cesspool.(One of my colleagues, had to “edit” his dissertation for “seminal” – his director didn’t want that masculinity tainting a study of children’s literature.)

    But seldom talked about here is education – those departments produce the majority of graduate degrees; they are obsessed with wages and gender and race. In those classes Bill Ayers’ books, theories and even presence have molded thinking for forty or fifty years. Those are majors that are both practical (the possibility of a job that pays reasonably well given its 8 months a year) and ideological. I was most strongly for Walker because I thought it took a kind of courage we need: he seemed to be in a battle without respite (those people do have short work years)and he kept going, walking into a capitol filled with drum banging opponents – modeling unhelpful actions for their students.

  10. I suspect that the difference has more to do with culture than inherent aptitude.

    Bingo. These kids are screwed before they go through their first school doorway. The figures on number of words spoken to a child by affluent or working class versus welfare mothers and adults are startling. And in every other respect the deck is stacked against them. It makes Carson & his mother all the more impressive.

  11. To Anonymous – Blacks compare poorly on psychometric tests compared to other populations throughout the world. In almost all countries where blacks are present they rank on average below almost all other population groups in SES, educational achievement, etc. This is true even in countries where they are in the majority. For example in Jamaica the numerically tiny Chinese population way outperforms blacks. The historical record of cultural accomplishments in Sub-Saharan Africa compared to Eurasia or the Americas before Columbus is fully in accord with the psychometric data.

  12. “the difference has more to do with culture than inherent aptitude”: I suspect that the difference is so large because culture amplifies inherent aptitude.

  13. 1) gin up race hatred
    2) keep the money flowing

    Agreed. Almost the entirety of modern progressive agitprop is about Power and Money, specifically for those controlling and instigating the agitators. It’s a business whose product is hate and social upheaval and makes its producers wealthy and powerful.

  14. “the denigration of a number of career paths that can lead to significant material success but require less formal education.”

    I think you will find that those career paths are disproportionately taken by white and Hispanic kids who are not seduced by the college trophy mentality.

    I keep thinking of the kids I see joining the military. Blacks are a very small proportion, maybe 2% in Los Angeles. Hispanics are maybe 1/3 and Chinese and Koreans another 25 to 30%.

    Why ? Smart black kids should be seeking the military and trade schools. They don’t seem to be.

    Another factor in the IQ distribution may be the tendency for a high proportion of black children to be parented by the lowest IQ segment of that population. This is the reverse of what Charles Murray expressed concern about in the white elites in Ivy League colleges. Two distributions that are skewing intelligence in the country.

  15. Blacks hide their intelligence. It is a survival mechanism. People who are too smart get killed. People who are smart only survive by scoring 70 on IQ tests. If you score 70 you don’t get drafted; or if drafted, you get rejected. You get high grades in school.

  16. Brer Rabbit – Throughout the world today and in the past blacks have certainly been very good at hiding their intelligence. So far nobody has noticed it.

  17. It is called the victim’s privilege. Liberty is the most terrifying thing in this world because then it is all on the individual. If you don’t measure up, if you fail, it is all on you. They have opportunity, a chance to succeed. What is frustrating them is that they don’t measure up. “The status of victim is especially prized today because it allows an excuse for failure and a justification for bad behavior.”

    The enablers are not doing the kids any favor by encouraging them to buy into this nonsense. They are crippling them; programming them to fail. Society promotes and normalizes incompetence, criminality, immorality, irresponsibility, and dumb in ways my father could never have imagined. The problem is that reality is not optional and stupid has consequences.

    Victims blame others because they behave badly. Liberals blame society because victims behave badly. Criticism of victims is banned. This includes self-criticism. They will not and eventually cannot reform their self-destructive behaviors, because they have been programmed to be narcissistic.

    Liberals are their enablers. I found two definitions of enablers online: “a person who encourages or enables negative or self-destructive behavior in another” and “one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior . . . by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior.” For the clerisy the enabling of victims is their path to power and enrichment. They tell the victims it is not their fault and that someone else must fix their problem so that the clerisy can stay in power and enrich themselves. Lib/progs ignore the brutal consequences that flow from the achievement of their agenda.

    These little thugs swim in a sea of community approval.

    It ain’t gonna get better.

  18. “They are crippling them; programming them to fail.”

    I’ve sen this in a few black medical students and wonder how much they got passed along by colleges.

    So far, at least, medical school is where the BS stops.

  19. I should add one disclaimer about medical schools. The UC, Davis that admitted the black student who was accepted instead of Alan Bakke, must accept some blame for the fact that that black graduate was later convicted of felony misbehavior as a physician.

    The Dean was a big reason why Bakke was rejected.

    Dr. Lowrey, who in his report stated that Bakke “had very definite opinions which were based more on his personal viewpoints than on a study of the whole problem … He was very unsympathetic to the concept of recruiting minority students.” Lowrey gave Bakke a poor evaluation, the only part of his application on which he did not have a high score.

    I can imagine the Dean questioning him closely.

    One black student was admitted under the “white” criteria and 16 under affirmative action, I cannot find the link to the article but one of the 16 admitted instead of Bakke was later convicted of second degree murder for “gross malpractice” which consisted of several cases.

  20. “How many of the kids in that picture are majoring in chemichal engineering?” Golly, a social invariant – Chem Eng was a stereotypical Hard Subject when I was an undergraduate (along with, in those days, Mathematical Physics).

  21. “Blacks hide their intelligence. It is a survival mechanism. People who are too smart get killed. People who are smart only survive by scoring 70 on IQ tests. If you score 70 you don’t get drafted; or if drafted, you get rejected. You get high grades in school.”

    I pulled a 98.8 out of the 60s SAT test, got invited to MIT.

    The Canadian tax department thinks I am at the moron level and has been filling in my taxes for decades. They will find the best deal for me. I have done this to Unemployment Insurance in Canada as well. Nothing even remotely illegal, but they treated me well.

    Stainless Steel Rat tactics, always loved those stories.

  22. Blacks hide their intelligence. It is a survival mechanism.

    Well, it’s a pretty unintelligent mechanism, too. Make of that what you will.

  23. “Blacks hide their intelligence. It is a survival mechanism. People who are too smart get killed. People who are smart only survive by scoring 70 on IQ tests. If you score 70 you don’t get drafted; or if drafted, you get rejected. You get high grades in school.”

    Penny, dear, the draft hasn’t been in effect since the early 1970s. And before and after that, it was only in effect during brief periods during our Civil War, and again during WWI – hardly long enough to have any long-term effect on our dear citizens of dark-brown year-round tan.

    Just this very day, a woman of color — using her real name on social media, mind you — put out a call for her buds in the local area to kill Donald Trump at his scheduled appearance in her fair city of Worcester. And … much to her apparent surprise, she got a lot of interest from the Secret Service, and from her current employer, who promptly fired her. And what did she do then? Well, she called her local police department and whined about the website which had grabbed screen-shots of her original tweet.

    Yep, that’s some DEEPLY HIDDEN intelligence there. For grins and giggles, her name is Kalen Rahim, and the website involved seems to be sort of like Chicagoboyz, only more irreverent, called Turtleboy Sports. Kinda lends weight to the current discussion about the bell curve, and the position on it of the average IQ of our citizens of color.

  24. “I have done this to Unemployment Insurance in Canada as well.”

    Penny, I believe you about unemployment but not about MIT.

  25. “Penny, dear, the draft hasn’t been in effect since the early 1970s. And before and after that, it was only in effect during brief periods during our Civil War, and again during WWI – hardly long enough to have any long-term effect on our dear citizens of dark-brown year-round tan.”

    So then my uncles who were drafted during the Korean war were victims of a cruel hoax?

  26. “Penny, dear, the draft hasn’t been in effect since the early 1970s.”

    Yeah, Vietnam kinda took care of that. Citizen soldiers invented fragging.

    As a Canadian I never had to worry about the draft. My children as well, which really pleases me. I really don’t know, but if I had been born in America, I think I would have left by now.

  27. Another explanation for average 70 scores:

    White people almost never chased blacks through the African jungles looking to catch black slaves.

    Black slaves were bought in slave markets on the coast of Africa. The blacks in the jungle usually picked some one from the tribe to sell as slaves whenever they needed money. Or if they won a battle then they sold some of the losers in order to pay for the war.

    The ideal candidate for being sold into slavery was some one who was good looking, stupid and easily persuaded to do anything. These lucky few won a free boat ride to Europe or America.

    They bred true.

    Blacks were not the only people who became slaves. Starting in Roman times and during the Middle Ages Romanized Europe bought slaves from the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe using the same criteria (which is why Slavs are called Slavs). As a result Slavs today are very smart.

  28. Brer Rabbit, you are just making up theories and grabbing random bits of data in hopes of supporting them.

    To the rest of the thread: It is not just blackness per se. The tribes in Africa vary in IQ, and we have only begun measuring that out. The Ibo or Igbo have about the same IQ as whites, and the San people have an average that is below 70. The Igbo were a trading people, called the Jews of West Africa, and come mostly from Nigeria. There are some differences among various white, Asian, and Native tribes as well. The 106 average seems to be mostly NE Asians. The rest of China and India haven’t (yet) shown to be at that level.

    It’s a sad thing, and I don’t have a solution. I worry that this will only get worse, though the quality of adaptability is becoming increasingly important and may be more evenly distributed.

  29. “The Ibo or Igbo have about the same IQ as whites”

    Yes, and they are heavily represented in financial businesses in New York City. Back in the late 60s, during the Biafran Civil War I had an Ibo medical student on my surgical service. He was worried about his family in Nigeria.

    During the war there were great shortages of food and medicine throughout Biafra, due largely to the Nigerian government’s blockade of the region as suggested by Obafemi Awolowo who claimed that “ALL is fair in war, and starvation is one of the weapons of war and I dont see why we should feed our enemies in order for them to fight harder” . Many volunteer bodies organised the Biafran airlift which provided blockade-breaking relief flights into Biafra, carrying food and medicines in, and later provided means of evacuation for refugee children. On 30 June 1969, the Nigerian government banned all Red Cross aid to Biafra

    Basically, the northern part of Nigeria was Muslim and the southeast, Biafra, was Christian or animist. The Igbo tribe tended to be merchants and traders while the northern tribes were soldiers. Unfortunately, Nigerian oil comes from the south so the war was economic and the Igbos were subjected to genocide.

    We have seen how well the Muslim victory has worked out.

  30. Assistant Village Idiot – Measured IQ of various human populations ranges from about 55 for Mbuti Pygmy to about 112 for US Ashkenazi Jews. Social and economic development of human populations is strongly dependent on average IQ.

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