Who but a racist could believe that meritocracy was racist? The students at elite
Brooklyn Tech are "Bengali and Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese, Sinhalese and Russian, Dominican and Puerto Rican, West Indian and African American." They're also 61% Asian and therefore not racially balanced.
“Educationally, we don’t need these schools,” said David Bloomfield, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College. “These students cannot be in a bubble. They need to be in a more diverse student body, where you could have advanced classes.”
Only we do very much need schools like Brooklyn Tech "educationally," and there aren't comparable advanced classes in the "diverse" schools they "need" to be in or, at some of the schools, any advanced classes at all. It's almost as if the lessons we are determined that these kids learn had more to do with political indoctrination than science.
Tausifa Haque, a 17-year-old daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants whose father drives a taxi and whose mother is a lunchroom attendant, says:
This is my great chance. It’s my way out. I have classes with students of all demographics and skin colors, and friends who speak different languages. To call this segregation does not make sense.
Ricardo Nunez, who is black, says:
I don’t feel like a minority. We resist being pitted against each other at this school.
But you're not allowed to climb out, and we have ways of making sure you allow us to continue to pit you against your peers, namely, denying you a decent education and a shot at financial independence if you don't agree to stay inside the right kind of bubble. Which is definitely not that bad bubble consisting of gifted and hard-working students.
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The prevailing concept is that disparate outcomes can only result from intentional design with structural, systemic, racist outcomes at the foundation. So if a STEM school has the wrong kind of diversity, it's because we started with the wrong kind of STEM. Or something.
In Texas, some may remember, we ran an experiment to help address the financial problem at the other end of the education system. The "B On Time" college loan. Founded on the promise that anybody could apply and get some money for college, the structural systemic program claimed to assume that those who were serious about education would maintain a "B" or better GPA, and graduate with a four-year-degree in no more than four years. Matching performance to those expectations, graduates would find their loan forgiven, considered instead a "grant". Those with lower GPAs, or needing 4.5 or more years, were still getting a low interest college loan. So...
It turned out that one segment of the many demographic groups in Texas was earning disproportionately less of the "grant" awards than all the others. Hmmm.
So, the program was cancelled for everybody.
This, my comrades, is how you fight structural and systemic racism and make education a priority and utter other buzzwords for publication in all the right headlines.
Years ago, Ralph Peters (prolific author and former Army officer) wrote:
"Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characterized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well…Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted…We refuse to believe that the “civilized peoples of the Balkans could slaughter each other over an event that occurred over six hundred years ago. But they do. Hatred does not need a reason, only an excuse.”
Excuses for inter-group resentment and hatred are now being manufactured in high volume, practically on an assembly line.
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