I'm often accused of being obsessed with race, but the truth is, I'm amused by race. It's my field of professional expertise. I've been following it at an intellectual level since 1972, and, frankly, I've seen it all before. The same patterns keep playing out over and over, just on a larger and larger scale due to demographic changes.
On the other hand, when I read the New York Times, I notice that an awful lot of other people actually are emotionally obsessed by race. See, I've tried to learn about race, so nothing much surprises me anymore. But, if you are good person, however, you don't learn, so that makes your life much more surprising!
Here's a new NYT story about the elite NYC public high school from which Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan graduated and where her mother taught and where her brother teaches. They're having yet another crisis over race. Kagan's brother was apparently involved in mounting a coup attempt against the principal's boss, who didn't want quotas. (Maybe somebody should have asked Elena Kagan about whether she was for or against quotas at her old high school? Nah, that would have been Too Interesting.)
Of course, this story is unfolding in a predictable, ho-hum fashion: there's a fancy NYC public high school that requires applicants to take an objective exam. Asians are coming to dominate the school, and some people are demanding quotas for blacks and Hispanics because otherwise "you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights."
It's the same old, same old.
But, to the people involved at the school, they're acting as if it's the most unique and flabbergasting events in the history of the world.
Kagan’s High School in Turmoil Over Diversity and Leadership
By SHARON OTTERMAN
With one of its alumna, Elena Kagan, poised for confirmation as a justice on the Supreme Court, it should be a triumphant season for Hunter College High School, a New York City public school for the intellectually gifted.
But instead, the school is in turmoil, with much of the faculty in an uproar over the resignation of a popular principal, the fourth in five years. In her departure speech to teachers in late June, the principal cited several reasons for her decision, including tensions over a lack of diversity at the school, which had been the subject of a controversial graduation address the day before by one of the school’s few African-American students.
Hours after the principal’s address, a committee of Hunter High teachers that included Ms. Kagan’s brother, Irving, read aloud a notice of no confidence to the president of Hunter College, who ultimately oversees the high school, one of the most prestigious public schools in the nation.
The events fanned a long-standing disagreement between much of the high school faculty and the administration of Hunter College over the use of a single, teacher-written test for admission to the school, which has grades 7 through 12. Faculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work, in part to increase minority enrollment and blunt the impact of the professional test preparation undertaken by many prospective students.
Eliminating the test, essentially unchanged for decades, is not on the table, said John Rose, the dean for diversity at Hunter College, in part because it is an integral part of a school with a stellar college admissions profile — about 25 percent of graduates are admitted to Ivy League schools — and outstanding alumni like Ms. Kagan and Ruby Dee.
Actress Ruby Dee graduated from this high school pre-Pearl Harbor, so Hunter High doesn't appear exactly to be keeping up with today's youth.
... As has happened at other prestigious city high schools with only a test for admission, the black and Hispanic population at Hunter has fallen in recent years. In 1995, the entering seventh-grade class was 12 percent black and 6 percent Hispanic, according to state data. This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students classified as multiracial. The school system as a whole is 70 percent black and Hispanic.
When Justin Hudson, 18, stood up in his purple robes to address his class in the auditorium of Hunter College, those numbers were on his mind. He opened by praising the school and explaining how appreciative he was to have made it to that moment.
Then he shocked his audience. “More than anything else, I feel guilty,” Mr. Hudson, who is black and Hispanic, told his 183 fellow graduates. “I don’t deserve any of this. And neither do you.”
They had been labeled “gifted,” he told them, based on a test they passed “due to luck and circumstance.” Beneficiaries of advantages, they were disproportionately from middle-class Asian and white neighborhoods known for good schools and the prevalence of tutoring.
“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.”
The entire faculty gave him a standing ovation, as did about half the students. ...
In a sense, Mr. Hudson’s message came from the faculty. To ease the pressure on its students, the school does not name a valedictorian; instead, it invites seniors to write graduation speeches and a faculty committee selects one to be read. This year, it chose Mr. Hudson’s, to his surprise.
The day after the speech, Dr. Coppola, a Harvard-trained urban education expert in her first job as a principal, told the staff on June 25 that she was leaving, making it clear that she did not want to. She cited a “culture of fear” from above and “untenable working conditions,” several faculty members present said.
Apparently, Harvard-training in urban education didn't prepare her for reality.
Anyway, on and on the story goes.
What else is new? Whaddaya whaddaya?
The main thing that has changed since 1972 is the scale. Scale matters.
Anyway, on and on the story goes.
What else is new? Whaddaya whaddaya?
The main thing that has changed since 1972 is the scale. Scale matters.
"I'm often accused of being obsessed with race, but the truth is, I'm amused by race."
ReplyDeleteI think you are both, but who isn't? NY TIMES and NAACP are about race 24/7. And rap music and SPLC too. Zionism is about race too, and 'anti-racism' is obsessed with 'racism' which is same thing as being obsessed with race.
And what is wrong with being 'obsessed' with something that is so important in our lives? It would be weird for an American not to be obsessed about race. I mean what planet is he or she living on?
And those who try so desperately to go beyond race do so precisely because they and our society are so obsessed with race politically, socially, economically, athletically, musically, sexually,historically, spiritually, etc.
No way a non-race-obsessed society would have deified Oprah and Obama as has been done in this country.
"Faculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work, in part to increase minority enrollment and blunt the impact of the professional test preparation undertaken by many prospective students."
ReplyDeleteTo increase minority enrollment? It seems as though the problem is a certain minority, the Asian community, is overrepresented.
This kind of Orwellian newspeak kills me. They wanna change rules not to increase minority numbers to increase the the preferred minority numbers and decrease the disfavored minority numbers.
As for the 41% that is white, I wonder what percentage is Jewish and how representative that is of all whites in the NY area?
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ReplyDeleteIf luck is a primary factor, shouldn't there be more blacks and Hispanics? If indeed Hunter chose its students through a lottery process, there would probably be proportional representation in the school since every student in NY would have equal luck of being chosen.
As for circumstances, where does he come up with the slander that middle class kids all have tutors? In fact, smartest students don't have tutors and it's a matter of pride that they were able to master all the lessons on their own. In my own experience, tutors were hired by parents for their not-too-bright kids who generally don't make it to elite schools.
And according to this dufus, you'd think middle class people are bestowed class privilege, when in fact, many Asian, Jewish, and white people in NY actually are immigrants who arrived poor and struggled to middle class status.
Other than natural IQ, what's most crucial is the culture of values. Parents who work hard and struggle to make the social climb tend to impart their values and work ethic on their kids, and this is reflected in school work, which too is a form of work. Most kids don't do schoolwork because it's fun because they've learned from their parents that life is a struggle, an uphill climb. Also, kids watch their kids struggle and would feel guilty if they didn't show appreciation by trying to do well in school and making something out of their lives.
But this dufus slandered an entire community by saying they all just got to where they did by luck and circumstances.
And does this dufus not understand that people are not only born into circumstances but create circumstances--good or bad--around them? Jews arrived with little or nothing in Palestine which was mostly a desert but they didn't surrender to surrounding circumstances but created new conditions and new circumstances.
In short, a great people create circumstances while an ungreat people surrender to them.
Too bad no one BOOED this dufus punk. I guess Hunter, though elitist, taught its students to be PC, liberal, and guilt-ridden.
“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.”
ReplyDeleteYoung Mr. Hudson refuses to accept that! Take that, reality! Clearly, he's a devotee of the Barack Obama rhetorical style.
I propose a new Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the courage to change the things I can, the gall to say "I refuse to accept that" about the things I can't change, and the political correctness to be incapable of telling the difference.
At least the kid put it succinctly. Step one is addressing the issue. He's only 18. He is refusing to believe, but at least he is considering. I was well past that stage at 18, but I hadn't been brainwashed by as powerful of a school. There is some hope.
ReplyDelete"Hours after the principal’s address, a committee of Hunter High teachers that included Ms. Kagan’s brother, Irving, read aloud a notice of no confidence to the president of Hunter College" for not supporting quotas
ReplyDeleteJust wondering - does Irv support a quota for non-Jewish whites, or does he conveniently choose not to break out his headcount by ethnicity?
I'm guessing he probably doesn't want to get that specific. How convenient for him.
Faculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work...
In other words, get rid of (or downplay) the one objective criterion for admitting students and rig the system so administrators can let in the "right" kinds of people - in the same way that Harvard rejects otherwise qualified JROTC and FFA participants. Wouldn't want to let any conservatives through on a fluke.
Mr Hudson is right--neither he nor the others deserve the gift of high intelligence. We're not providing a top notch education for those smart kids for *their* sakes, but for *ours*. In the best case, we will mercilessly exploit their gifts, driving many of these students to years of grinding hard work doing law or medical school, phds, postdocs, residencies, building high tech startups, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe uneven distribution of those gifts sucks, like childhood cancer, or war, or any number of other ways the universe
isn't fair. But there isn't anything his highend school can do to fix that.
can do to fix that.
Celebrate differences.
ReplyDeleteJust don't notice them.
That committee of faculty who picked that kid's speech out to be ashamed of themselves...picking his speech to do their dirty work for them. Total farking bs.
ReplyDeleteProfiles in courage - ladies and gentlemen, your sinecured government educators...who have the greatest teaching job in NYC, teaching the brightest and best while also procuring state union pay.
Of course, no demands the NBA or NFL have "diversity" programs to make sure under-represented groups such as Whites, Asians, and Mexicans are made the highest level superstars!
ReplyDeleteLet's replace Kobe Bryant and Lamar Odom with 5'3" guys from Chiapas, and they'll do just as well. "I refuse to accept that athletic ability is not evenly distributed among all races (and genders)! Lets have an all Latina Lakers!"
Nope, don't see that speech being given. Not at all.
"Of course, no demands the NBA or NFL have "diversity" programs to make sure under-represented groups such as Whites, Asians, and Mexicans are made the highest level superstars!"
ReplyDeleteWell, why not? HBDers would get more traction with stunts like picketing NBA games than commenting among themselves online.
What an innocuous turn of phrase!
ReplyDeleteTo turn your racial-obsession into some neutral "amusement."
Who are we kidding?
There are many ways to look at a story, you chose to emphasize the racial angle.
Not just ANY racial angle, but from the angle that always seem to fit a certain narrative---we know what that narrative is. I won't rehash it.
Those of you guys who cannot resist teasing Jews need only point out that the land of Israel is undoubtedly in Asia, so that Jews should be classified as Asians when the quotas against Asians are imposed.
ReplyDeleteIn all fairness, some people like myself like to focus more on IQ rather than race. Race is important only insofar as there exist differences in the distribution of IQs amongst different races. However, it's irrelevant to me whether a high IQ person is black or white. I think this is what distinguishes me from Steve and many of the other white nationalists here. In fact, we know that high IQ people generally tend to exhibit positive traits, regardless of their race. I suspect that many of the differences in behavioral disposition, such as the propensity for crime, that we observe amongst different races are probably a mere reflection of the differing IQ distributions of the underlying sub-populations at large. I'd like to see Steve embrace more of the HBD side of things and champion the importance of IQ, rather than place more of his focus on championing for the interests of whites. There's no need, for instance, to privilege low IQ whites over high IQ blacks in our intellectual discourse, if what we care about is the improvement of humanity at large.
ReplyDelete"The entire faculty gave him a standing ovation, as did about half the students."
ReplyDeleteCan you guess which half?
Hint: "This past year, it was 3 percent black and 1 percent Hispanic; the balance was 47 percent Asian and 41 percent white, with the other 8 percent of students identifying themselves as multiracial."
"Irene Kwok, a graduate who was a co-president of the Asian Cultural Society, said she had heard more negative than positive comments from her friends afterward. “Some of my friends felt the reference to their neighborhoods was insulting,” she said. “They felt like their admission was an individual achievement, not because of some racial community they belong to.”"
ReplyDeleteAt least some people have a little more common sense.
Interesting twist: Gifted black student refuses to accept that he is gifted. The entire faculty applauds.
ReplyDelete“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.”
ReplyDeleteROFLMAO, a Leftist refuses to accept reality, what else is new?
Steve,
ReplyDeleteAre you familiar with the ongoing research in the field?
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA425&dq=race+IQ+differences&ots=iB-ci1uoVU&sig=otVV4EOq6gJ11B1rL5dVt4yMQvo#v=onepage&q=race%20IQ%20differences&f=false
Steve,
ReplyDeleteWhy is anyone complaining. Bloomberg and Klein seem to be such a great job already....
http://article.nationalreview.com/438960/the-testing-mess/sol-stern
Here is the conflict from two different threads of our elites thought
ReplyDelete1. We are all the same and so there should be equal results
2. We are better then everyone else since we went to elite schools and therefore we should rule the world, especially if we went to elite prep schools followed by Ivy league and maybe some time at Oxford and the Kennedy school of government
DJF
Thank goodness Steve opened my eyes to the endless cycle of racial BS which is perpetuated on a daily basis. Now, at least, I too am amused more than anything by the rigamarole. I am sure this person Raab will be vilified for not applauding the boy's speech...just like the vilification of Stephanie Grace, James Watson, Larry Sommers etc. etc. ad nauseum. Like you said, Steve, it is the same old same old.
ReplyDeleteIf all of these schools are dominated by Asians, where are all the Asians? It seems like they don't end up in political or leadership positions . . . mostly in staff positions. Do we want to restrict the best schools to the people who are going to be working for the people who couldn't pass the entrance exam?
ReplyDeleteKagan's brother was apparently involved in pulling off a coup against a principal who didn't want quotas.
ReplyDeleteThis is the money quote - everything else is irrelevant.
The sole purpose of the "Civil Rights Movement" was to allow the Bolsheviks to accumlate [even more] power [than they already possessed] in 20th Century American politics.
"Civil Rights" = bolshevik-phariseeical nihilism.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Kagan's brother was apparently involved in pulling off a coup against a principal who didn't want quotas
ReplyDeleteThis is just wrong.
Is it too complicated for you to distinguish between the principal of the school that resigned and the President of Hunter College that hasn't?
And you just decided on your own that Elena Kagan's brother had a prominent role apparently just because you don't like Elena Kagan.
Probably it's just as well places like Stuyvesant and Hunter get wrecked by "diversity." All gifted students need a cold dose of reality at an early age. Nothing changes your mind about race like getting jeered at for being white or being sucker punched and stomped by a minority mob for your lunch money or having your English class constantly disrupted by cretins laughing and making unintelligible noises. I grew up in the first era of forcible integration when blacks were on their absolute worst behavior. By instinct, I don't trust a black any more than I trust a dog wandering down a street off his leash. I'm certainly not ashamed of my attitude: I consider it an essential urban survival skill.
ReplyDeleteMy Jewish friends felt the same way I did. In a touching moment of candor, one friend who went to Princeton even admitted that his aunt had been raped by a black in her apartment building, and he blithely used the N-word in describing the incident. Denying white rage at blacks, as these fools at Hunter college high school seem to be doing, is like denying the Holocaust, as far as I am concerned -- that is, pretending some bestial mass movement of injustice hasn't taken place. Here's one example. Before the Civil Rights era, black on white rapes were rare. But it can be shown using DOJ statistics that, since then, 1.6 white women have been raped or sexually assaulted by black men, a direct result of racial integration and unrestrained black hatred against whites.
Economically and socially rewarding blacks in spite of their academic underachievement and violent, antisocial behavior is pure insanity.
And you just decided on your own that Elena Kagan's brother had a prominent role apparently just because you don't like Elena Kagan.
ReplyDeleteFrom the article:
Hours after the principal’s address, a committee of Hunter High teachers that included Ms. Kagan’s brother, Irving, read aloud a notice of no confidence to the president of Hunter College, who ultimately oversees the high school, one of the most prestigious public schools in the nation.
Here's what Sailer said:
Kagan's brother was apparently involved in pulling off a coup against a principal who didn't want quotas.
I presume the "committee" did not include the entire faculty. Just a few, i.e. those who wanted to be on it. So in this sense it's not at all unfair to say that Kagan's brother was "involved", even to the point of 'playing a prominent role'.
Apparently there are more idiots in the world than just the applauding ones on that school's faculty.
And how or why would a committe read something aloud?
I showed that the test for Stuyvesant followed the same exact 1 stndard deviation gap that all other cognitive exams follow:
ReplyDeleteStuyvesant and Fundamental Sociological Constant
It would be weird for an American not to be obsessed about race.
Agreed. We're "obsessed" with it because it's such a salient feature of every day life, especially in America. It's an almost deterministic indicator of large group behavior and this affects almost everything we do.
"Kagan's brother was apparently involved in pulling off a coup against a principal who didn't want quotas"
ReplyDeletePredictable outcome: Kaga's brother appointed next principal of Hunter Colleg High School.
Dear Mr. Sailer !
ReplyDelete1. I greatly (and humbly) appreciate your work, especially on
"I'm often accused of being obsessed with race, but the truth is, I'm amused by race. It's my field of professional expertise."
2. In _this_ connection I am very much interested in your opinion about the movie "Precious".
Respectfully yours, Florida resident.
Gifted blacks need to study, too.
ReplyDeleteRead the autobiography of Thomas Sowell.
He almost got bounced out of university because he did not apply himself at first.
He's been on overdrive ever since.
If all of these schools are dominated by Asians, where are all the Asians? It seems like they don't end up in political or leadership positions . . . mostly in staff positions. Do we want to restrict the best schools to the people who are going to be working for the people who couldn't pass the entrance exam?
ReplyDeleteBJ, the Asian domination is both pretty recent and geographically restricted. 20 years ago there weren't enough Asian children to make up ~40% of whatever school. Asians at the top might be a lagging indicator.
If (I said if) Asians are less creative than whites, they will always be be a relatively small chunk of multi-millionaires.
I don't know if say mid 30's Asians actually are a smaller chunk of rising stars than their intelligence would predict. There aren't many Asian actors or musicians, but I don't know what C-level management in the fortune 500looks like.
Asians will always be under-represented in law and politics because they have a comparative advantage in spatial/quant fields even if they had an absolute IQ advantage in verbal intelligence as well.
Asians are probably concentrated in heavily Jewish areas, so they have both an absolute visuospatial advantage and an absolute VIQ disadvantage vis a vis their competitors.
ReplyDeleteFaculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work
These are all things that parents can help their offspring greatly with.
That African-American boy "refuses to believe.." and you all criticize him for that but in what sense is his belief different from yours?
ReplyDeletehe has it on faith that there are many untapped potential in his black/latino community. he can't prove it.
but neither can you.
aall YOU have to go by is your statistics taht slow one standard deviation but those sstatistics do not explain teh reason why...
u say it's bioology
but he can just as well say it's upbringing..!!!
u can't prove him wrong.
There's no need, for instance, to privilege low IQ whites over high IQ blacks in our intellectual discourse, if what we care about is the improvement of humanity at large.
ReplyDelete===============================
despite his protestions, Steve is indeed a race-warrior.
This racial achievement gap stuff is true in almost any big city in America and has been the case for as long as I can remember. There a a few changes that seem to have occured over the years though.....
ReplyDelete1.) Due to the effort to promote smart and academically driven minority students, at least the top 10-20% of the NAM population is benefiting a lot.
2.) As Charles Murray has indicated, the black-white gap may have narrowed slightly. So I suppose all the money spent is having yields - just really low yields. Of course that's better than going backwards. When you consider that lower IQ women tend to have higher fertility, maybe we are are making some progress...
3.) The huge growth of the Asian student population means a lot more competition for whites and NAMs, but for some reason nobody ever notices them. The way people talk, you'd think it was the year 1960 and everybody was black or white. Latinos don't discussed that much and Asians hardly at all, despite most of the student population growth coming from these 2 groups.
4.) Due to the huge growth in NAM population, the scale will just continue to get larger - and larger. You could cut off immigration for a while so we could figure out how to deal with all this, but we won't. Not without some tough on borders conservatives in the Congress and White House.
5.) As the Asian and Latino population grows, you will increasingly see the extreme ends of the bell curve grow. At the higher end, the competition to good universities and grad schools will continue to get even more intense, due to growth of the Asian student population. At the lower end, we'll see a lot more dropouts and underperformers, due to Latin immmigration/fertility.
The relatively homogenous, egalitarian society that historically characterized America is completely gone in a lot of the big metros. Over the years, we can expect the rest of the country to become even more stratified (if there's no immigration cut off). The sense of cohesion that one often felt in this country is going to completely break down.
Race is important only insofar as there exist differences in the distribution of IQs amongst different races.
ReplyDeleteIt's important because it's who you are. The encapsulation of all your belief systems is in your DNA, though you may think otherwise.
However, it's irrelevant to me whether a high IQ person is black or white.
It's not irrelevant to them. And they look upon you with unkind eyes.
We know that high IQ people generally tend to exhibit positive traits, regardless of their race
Some of them make nukes and have few compunctions about using them - on you!
probably a mere reflection of the differing IQ distributions.
What about that 18% higher serum testosterone level ? You think ?
if what we care about is the improvement of humanity at large
That humanity is organized into tribes who hate you. Disowning your own tribe won't make that hate go away. Not one bit.
I didn't make this world. Don't even like it. But I know what it is. I don't create nice fantasies about it.
Kagan's brother was apparently involved in pulling off a coup against a principal who didn't want quotas.
ReplyDeleteAllow me to clarify it for all of you "Wooda gutten to Huwood if hit wadn't for dem Thuh Joos" Geniuses with superb reading comprehension skills:
The principal of Hunter College High School was Eileen Coppola, who is pro-diversity, but she resigned despite the support of the faculty.
Jennifer J. Raab, the president of Hunter College, is the one who doesn't want "quotas" and she did NOT resign. Nor was she the victim of any coup. And it's rather telling that you failed to mention how she was appointed.
Of course, getting the facts straight would have made it impossible for you to fit them into your persecuted, underappreciated anti-PC iconoclast narrative.
Not to mention the fact that the urge to libel Elena Kagan's brother must have been too tempting for you to resist.
P.S. It's nice to see the acolytes here finally get that high school students join JROTC and not ROTC.
"47% Asian. Is that plausible to be purely IQ based with Asians having a 5 point IQ advantage and 1/3 the numbers of Whites population (looking at the demographics of New York on la wik and assuming a million Jews)."
ReplyDeleteIt's not. And the same situation exists in CA. White kids outnumber Asian kids 4:1, but they make up half of UC Berkeley's enrollment. Asian parents start prepping their children like athletes for admissions tests from an early age. White parents will just have to get on board with this approach if they want their kids to be competitive, or support racial quotas.
"Asian parents start prepping their children like athletes for admissions tests from an early age."
ReplyDeleteGee, as an Asian with lots of Asian friends in CA I have to say that typical parenting is about the same, maybe *less educationally intense* than in Jewish homes. Probably on par with what white professionals do with their kids.
If you google around you can find IQ (Ravens) scores for big provinces in China, and they often have averages like 110+
Also, although many Asian immigrants in CA and NYC are poor (and probably fairly representative of people in their home country), there is also another group of super accomplished types who came via PhD programs, IT, science research. If you set the bar very high (130 for Berkeley, 140+ for Hunter) you start to get sensitivity to that pool of people.
"..but I don't know what C-level management in the fortune 500looks like."
ReplyDeleteNor do I, let me just say that whoever coined the expression "C-level management" either had a fine, dry wit, or cloth ears.
Sorry for OT, but just in case anyone here thinks only iSteve-types play golf, next to me in the library is a Marin "immigration rights advocate," Asian guy, who's got his laptop open to an ebay auction for a sand wedge.
ReplyDelete"I'm amused by race."
ReplyDeleteI feel the same way. It is about the only subject that makes me feel smart. You can find some real geniuses who refuse to believe the obvious evidence or even that he evidence exists.
The discovery by some that by claiming to be concerned with "the greater good" one can more easily advance one's own interests ranks up there with the discovery by sociopaths that they do not carry the same genes as normal people (who are bound by an inbuilt morality).
ReplyDeleteThe pre-WWII Asian immigrants were Cantonese-dialect Chinese from Zhongshan and Japanese. Both groups came as laborers, but climbed the ladder quickly and their kids went on to moderately outperform the white population academically. Professor Flynn assessed their mean IQ at 98.5, but found they overperformed. He speculated that culture, family, and better work habits were at work here.
ReplyDeleteSince present day Asian kids are disproportionately the children of educated scientists and engineers, their mean IQ must be at least a few points over the white mean. Combined with their higher level of diligence and adherence to authority, they are capable of vastly outdoing whites and competitive with Jewish-Americans (NAMs don't even factor in).
Due to the much larger percentage of Asian students and the selectivity of the recent waves of migration, Asians have become much more visible now.
In the case of the Japanese, their country and people seem pretty homogenous. Japanese in America have done about as well as Japanese in Japan.
In the case of the Chinese, however, there are some interesting regional variations. While the Chinese-Americans from Zhongshan and the Sum Yup counties were economically pretty successful, those from the Saz Yap counties didn't fare so well. What's interesting is that both the Zhongshan and Sum Yup have a long history of acing the imperial exams and excelling at business, whearas the Saz Yap were mainly farmers.
"Before the Civil Rights era, black on white rapes were rare. But it can be shown using DOJ statistics that, since then, 1.6 white women have been raped or sexually assaulted by black men, a direct result of racial integration and unrestrained black hatred against whites."
ReplyDeleteThat's 1.6 million, I believe.
I want to point out that in China poor kids usually perform better in school than rich kids because going to a prestigious college is often the only chance for the poor kids to move up in social status. So they work really hard to obtain good scores in entrance exams to schools. It is to the advantage of poor kids that middle school, high school and college admissions in China are almost solely based on entrance exams.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid, my parents pushed me very hard to study. Part of my earliest memory is my parents was telling me constantly I should study hard and get into the best college before I even went to elementary school. My elementary school was as bad as you can imagine in many aspects. My teachers were mostly middle school graduates. That's right. Most of them never had a chance to go to high school because China was a very very poor country at that time. There were not many
high schools when my teachers grew up. Anyway, my middle school was a little better. At least most of the teachers were high school graduates, and some of them even had a college degree. Then I went the best high school in the region and one of the best colleges in the nation thanks to those entrance exams. Again thanks to TOEFL and GRE,
I came to the US for graduate school and earned a Ph.D. degree in Physics.
Another example. My uncle was the first college student in my village. When he graduated from middle school in 1950s, my grandparents told him to come back home because they could not afford
to send him to high schools in cities. But he refused. He and a couple of other kids with similar situations WALKED 600 miles to Beijing for opportunities. He had only one pair of shoes, so he sometimes walked with bare feet. Thanks to the entrance exam, they
were able to get into a vocational school, which had no tuition and provided each student a small stipend. Thanks to the entrance exam again, my uncle was able to go to a college after graduating from the vocational school.
I think the entrance exam is the friend of gifted poor kids! Had the admission to my high school included extracurricular activities, such as music and sports, I would probably have no chance to get into the high school because I had never even touched a piano and a soccer ball before. I would also have failed the interview if there were one, because I spoke with such a strong accent that the interviewer would have difficulty understanding me.
I also think culture matters.
And how many of the 41% "whites" were Gentiles? Any way to see the school pictures, roster of graduates or the like?
ReplyDeleteIf white Gentiles are 60-70% of the American people, then we have a long, long way to go before Hunter High "looks like America" as the lefties say.
But of course making Hunter High "look like America" is not the point of the hysterics.
The point is to make Hunter High look like America after all the WASPs, Irish, Germans, Italians, Russians (real Russians) have been ethnically cleansed.
Come the revolution, Comrades ...
Take a page from the Jews. As we speak, they are rounding up hundreds and hundreds of little Gentile kids in Israel and shipping them back to whatever godforsaken country their mamas came from. No stupid "birthright citizenship" for Jews! That stupidity is strictly for the goyim. How else can they "preserve the Jewish character of the state".
... and how else can we preserve the American national character of our own state?
***“If you truly believe that the demographics of Hunter represent the distribution of intelligence in this city, then you must believe that the Upper West Side, Bayside and Flushing are intrinsically more intelligent than the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Washington Heights, and I refuse to accept that.” ***
ReplyDeleteHe can refuse to believe in evolution if he wants. It doesn't change reality.
Conservative: As Charles Murray has indicated, the black-white gap may have narrowed slightly.
ReplyDeleteActually, in Footnote #44 [if I understand it correctly], Murray has some truly terrifying data, which indicates that [owing to welfare-state-induced dysgenic fertility] the average black IQ may have fallen, from 83.7 in 1979 [for the mothers] to 80.2 in 1997 [for the children].
Any loss of IQ would be a disaster, but a loss of 3.5 IQ points, in a mere 18 years, is absolutely catastrophic - it represents about 3500 years of selective breeding for intelligence which just got thrown right out the window.
If compounded over the course of a century [and assuming the trend doesn't accelerate], then you'd be looking at an average African-American IQ in 2179 of about 64.3.
"That's 1.6 million, I believe"
ReplyDeleteNo, it's actually a woman and three-fifths.
coined the expression "C-level management" either had a fine, dry wit, or cloth ears.
ReplyDeleteHahaha, actually they call it C-suite. My mistake.
Jennifer J. Raab, the president of Hunter College, is the one who doesn't want "quotas" and she did NOT resign. Nor was she the victim of any coup. And it's rather telling that you failed to mention how she was appointed...P.S. It's nice to see the acolytes here finally get that high school students join JROTC and not ROTC.
ReplyDeleteWell gee, that's exactly how I read it. Who the f@%^ are you to assume I didn't?
"I want to point out that in China poor kids usually perform better in school than rich kids because going to a prestigious college is often the only chance for the poor kids to move up in social status"
ReplyDeleteMy Chinese wife whose family was banished to the countryside during the cultural revolution begs to differ. Country folk in China are fairly stupid, according to her, although much better behaved than blacks or Mexicans. But they are not some huge reservoir of untapped intellectual talent. In China, IQ stratification happened a long, long time ago; economic mobility in China means everybody moves up, but the rank order stays the same.
"Why would you expect anyone here -- or anyone at all -- to care about "the improvement of humanity at large"?"
ReplyDeleteIs this a trick question?
Ben tillman:
ReplyDeleteWhy would that be more sensible than focusing your concern on the well being of your race or nation or religion? In each case, you're putting some high value on a group of people which includes you and your near kin, but also huge numbers of people only very distantly related to you.
These are abstractions that some people find immensely important. But it's hard for me to see why one has more inherent meaning than the others. (Its
not hard to find people willing to argue that I should value each of those abstractions highly, but it's
not at all obvious to me why race would beat those others out.
"My Chinese wife whose family was banished to the countryside during the cultural revolution begs to differ. Country folk in China are fairly stupid, according to her, although much better behaved than blacks or Mexicans. But they are not some huge reservoir of untapped intellectual talent."
ReplyDeleteWill your wife call this guy stupid? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_C._Tsui)
China is still in the process of urbanization. According to the 1953 census in China, the rural population was 86.7%. And I bet most of your wife's grandparents were born in rural villages. The rural population in 2009 was 53.4% in China. I think there are lot of untapped intellectual talents among them.
"In China, IQ stratification happened a long, long time ago; economic mobility in China means everybody moves up, but the rank order stays the same."
I disagree with your statement above. I just looked at the 2009 list of China's 400 Richest by Forbes. I only checked the top 10. Four of them were born to peasant families, which would be classified as "stupid" by your wife. Three of them were born in small cities (县城), which were also relatively poor. Three of them were from big cities. I don't think those former peasants on the list are stupid. These former peasants were born to poor families, but they have become rich due to their intelligence and hard work. Why would you claim the rank stays the same?
"In China, IQ stratification happened a long, long time ago; economic mobility in China means everybody moves up, but the rank order stays the same."
ReplyDeleteThis is completely wrong. Ask any US science or engineering professor who is familiar with graduate students from the PRC. There are many high IQ kids who were born in the countryside. It's also true of entrepreneurs in China.
300M people migrated from the country to the city in the last few decades. Anecdotal evidence suggests that these people are just as smart as the city dwellers they joined.
Of all the important questions that are relatively *easy* to answer, the IQ distributions of rural China and India must top the list. The results have global significance for forecasting the future.
Of related interest:
ReplyDeletehttp://blog.swiftkickonline.com/2010/07/valedictorian-speaks-out-against-schooling-in-graduation-speech.html
I'm with asdf, and further, I think you are more obsessed with race than amused by it, but you're rightfully embarrased by that because it's ultimately a human weakness.
ReplyDeleteI think race is like tits -we seemed to be wired to give it a lot more attention than we should.
But the concept of race is also like the major religions -a macrosocial phenomenon that shapes our microsocial behavior even though it scales on the order of hundreds of millions of people.
I think, like tits and some of the intricate details of the bible, we waste attentional resources on racial theatre that should go to solvable problems of mortality.
It's attentional crack cocaine, a coordination game problem that as a system we frequently fail to solve.
Hopefully Anonymous
http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com
"Faculty committees have recommended broadening the admissions process to include criteria like interviews, observations or portfolios of student work
ReplyDeleteThese are all things that parents can help their offspring greatly with."
Great catch. I wonder if this is more about preserving slots for whites (or more specifically, white kids of rich/professional parents) relative to asians and russian-type immigrant whites than about increasing black/hispanic enrollment. Because if you want more blacks and hispanics, quotas would seem to me to be the easier way to go. Portfolios -sounds more to me like a place for a kid with rich parents to shine than for inner-city types.
Hopefully Anonymous
http://www.hopeanon.typepad.com
Dear Mr. Sailer !
ReplyDeleteI understand that posting a comment 6 days after original post is somewhat obsolete.
Sill, there is a very reasonably-toned article
"Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century"
by Thomas Sowell at
http://article.nationalreview.com/439011/applauding-immaturity-at-hunter-college-high-school/thomas-sowell
Sure, he writes there obligatory
"Native intelligence may indeed not vary by neighborhood,"
but continues:
"but actual performance — whether in schools, on the job, or elsewhere — involves far more than native intelligence. Wasted intelligence does nothing for an individual or society."
Respectfully, Florida resident.