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The Truth About Racial Preferences
In an excellent piece about "affirmative action," Stuart Taylor attempts to hold Barak Obama's feet to the fire of his own rhetoric.
Down deep in the piece is this quote from Taylor. It's money.
"For the fact is that K-12 education, especially for poor blacks, is not getting much better and in some ways may be getting worse. And there appears to be little hope for changing that -- no matter how much more money we spend on schools -- unless and until we make it easier to remove chronically disruptive kids from classrooms and to reward the best teachers and fire the worst. That would require taking on other core Democratic constituencies by cutting through the regulatory and legal thickets that have paralyzed school discipline and overriding the power of the teachers unions."
Down deep in the piece is this quote from Taylor. It's money.
"For the fact is that K-12 education, especially for poor blacks, is not getting much better and in some ways may be getting worse. And there appears to be little hope for changing that -- no matter how much more money we spend on schools -- unless and until we make it easier to remove chronically disruptive kids from classrooms and to reward the best teachers and fire the worst. That would require taking on other core Democratic constituencies by cutting through the regulatory and legal thickets that have paralyzed school discipline and overriding the power of the teachers unions."
posted by Spencerblog at
8:56 AM
32 Comments:
The benefits of affirmative action are a Liberal lie just as are the inflated benefits of all that Lib coerced “rich diversity”. Everyone knows it. Time to put a stop to this divisive and wrongheaded Lib crap.
Now, here, I pretty much agree with you.
See, that didn't hurt a bit. ;)
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Still living in the distant past, I see, Dave.
Funny how black businesses and institutions don’t feel the need to include whites in some contrived effort at diversity. I guess that’s just for whites. And once again apologists like Dave are all too willing to overlook such blatant broad black racism while pointing their guilt-ridden Lib fingers at whites. There’s that Lib Racial Double Standard again.
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Funny how black businesses and institutions don’t feel the need to include whites in some contrived effort at diversity. I guess that’s just for whites. And once again apologists like Dave are all too willing to overlook such blatant broad black racism while pointing their guilt-ridden Lib fingers at whites. There’s that Lib Racial Double Standard again.
Hey, have you found any of them "straights only" water fountains yet, Dave? (snicker)
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Uh, no, Dave. “Black businesses” is not only what I call them. They call themselves that. They even have “black business groups” and “black chambers of commerce”. And I don’t know of any white owned businesses that bill themselves as being “white businesses”. And don’t even get me started on the outdated Habitually Black Colleges and Universities. There is no HWCUs.
But you know all this. This is just more of your pro-black/anti-white Lib Racial Double Standard.
Care to try again with your dishonest apologist grasping?
You all just go on with your coffee talk. I'm getting verklempt!
I'm so proud of my boys.
Racially exclusive or racially defined in name… it comes down to intent. Just because something may be primarily white (in a country that is 70+% white, btw) this is not evidence of any inherent racial bias that needs corrective action to rectify, as the apologist Daves would have everyone believe. While clearly the racial attitudes of racist blacks are on full display and out there ready for the cowardly and confused apologists to excuse, be it in business or this election season.
Didn't our good conservative Chief Justice, John Roberts say in a recent case that the way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating?
Yeah. And the Left called him a racist for it.
A bold politician who ran on a platform of complete colorblindness in America –advocating outlawing ALL government and private business recognition and consideration of race- could do well. Although bitter blacks who have come to feel entitled to their racial spoils and set asides along with their Lib apologists would do their dishonest best to demonize such a person as being a racist, as we have seen Dave do here. (How anyone who advocates colorblindness could be considered “racist” is beyond me.)
It’s 2008 America. Blacks in America today have it far better than any other blacks on the planet. It is well past time we stop letting the racial grudge holders and guilt-ridden past-living apologists call the shots.
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Blacks don't have it as good as whites? Diano, your proof please.
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Like I said:
Although bitter blacks who have come to feel entitled to their racial spoils and set asides along with their Lib apologists would do their dishonest best to demonize such a person as being a racist, as we have seen Dave do here.
Dave never disappoints.
OK, Timeout!
Diano is right. It is ridiculous to suggest that, generally speaking blacks (as a group) aren't worse off in this country than whites.
(Or Asians for that matter.)
But the MAIN reason for this is no longer white racism. It used to be. But not anymore.
The main reason the black achievement deficit is cultural.
This will sound to a liberal like Diano like I'm "blaming the victim." I'm not. I'm blaming the victim's culture. It's not the same thing.
I strongly believe white liberals (and I used to be one of them) bear some responsibility for not realizing, or caring enough to confront the awful effects of long-term welfare dependence, drugs, gangs, single-parenthood, had on black communities throughout urban America.
Read Charles Murray's classic "Losing Ground," and its impossible not to grasp the preverse social incentitives created by the ever-growing welfare state.
Read Myron Magnet's "The Dream and the Nightmare."
Then read Shelby's Steele's "The Content of Our Character."
Focusing on white racism in this day and age, misses the big point. Racism still exists but it is so far down the list of the things that are keeping black kids and grown-ups from realizing their dreams, that's its almost a joke.
Bad attitudes, negative behavior, low expectations, lousy public schools, lack of an ethos of individual responsibility -- these are the things that hold people back. And while the can be found across all races are more prevalent in urban black areas.
Band-aids like Affirmative Action and "Diversity Training" created to assuage white liberal guilt actually do little to help people stuck at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. As Obama himself seems to recognize, Affirmative Action helps the already advantaged, not the disadvantaged.
David, the complaints you raise are so old, so off the point about what this country needs to be doing for kids in urban communities that it would make a sentimental man weep.
Kids, all kids, need structure, safety, discipline, protection, education, kindness and love to thrive.
And there is only so much a free society can do help grown-ups to provide these things to their children. But it can offer decent and safe schools if it has the will to. But that means empowering strong principal to fire bad teacher, enforce discipline and require learning.
Being followed around by a security guard in a department store (while it may be annoying) should be the least of our concerns when it comes to helping black kids close the achievement gap.
That's the problem. Work the problem, not the distraction, not the excuse.
But the MAIN reason for this is no longer white racism. It used to be. But not anymore.
The main reason the black achievement deficit is cultural.
It is difficult to have eternal sympathy for such self victims. (Well, except for the guilt-ridden Libs.)
Thank you for saying this, G. It's good to hear such things from a reformed Lib. But the apologist Daves will call you a "racist" for voicing such truths. After all, you are a white commenting openly on black things.
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Oh brotha... You're really grasping now, D.
Somehow it's still and always the white man's fault, eh?
David,
Judge Russell Clark felt the same way you do today back in 1984. Spend more money on a failing public school and the kids will do better, he thought.
So that's what he did in Kansas City, Mo. He took over the district after a lawsuit was filed by the NAACP. He ordered taxes raised and he literally showered the schools with cash.
As John Taylor Gatto reported:
"Suddenly the district was awash in money for TV studios, swimming pools, planetariums, zoos, computers, squadrons of teachers and specialists.
"They had as much money as any school district will ever get," said Gary Orfield, a Harvard investigator who directed a postmortem analysis, "It didn’t do very much."
Orfield was wrong. The Windfall produced striking results:
Average daily attendance went down, the dropout rate went up, the black-white achievement gap remained stationary, and the district was as segregated after ten years of well-funded reform as it had been at the beginning.
A former school board president whose children had been plaintiffs in the original suit leading to Judge Clark’s takeover said she had "truly believed if we gave teachers and administrators everything they said they needed, that would make a huge difference."
It didn't.
And in the end, after more than a decade of freely spending other people's money, Judge Clark himself admitted the more than $1 billion did nothing to improve educational chances of thousands of poor black students in the district.
Some people though, will never learn. There are ways to improve urban schools. More money CAN help but it is not nearly enough. And it is just a waste if other reforms aren't made -- like the imposition of discipline, a rigorous curriculum, and high standards.
With proof like that why then does anyone listen to the weeping Libs and keep throwing money at what is clearly a non-money problem?
Blacks don’t want to learn.
Randal,
If you are going to say such stupid things will you do me a favor and stay off my side.
Dude, chill. It was your article that said it. I just put it in plainer terms.
I was just repeating Dave anyway. At least I didn’t say that blacks can’t learn.
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Diablo,
You're the other side of the same coin. I love you both like sons.
Dad likes me better!
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