[PEN-L:11470] Ward Connerly

[djones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (rakesh bhandari)]

The NYT devotes much ink to Ward Connerly, the black man appointed by
California Gov Pete Wilson to the University Board of Regents to speak in
favor of the destruction of affirmative action.

Connerly notes that on the SATs blacks whose parents earned $60,000 a year
were outscored by whites and Asian-Americans whose families earned $20,000
or less.

"It's time we get a handle of why middle class black kids from the suburbs
are losing out to low-income Asians from the inner city," he argues. He
suggests that black students are overwhelmed by ideas of inferiority. "And
do you know what reinforces the idea that they're inferior? Being told they
need a preference to succeed."

Of course no attempt is made here to control for number of parents working,
whether both parents live with the child and contribute to her
development, the wealth of parents,  educational attainment of
parents--Connerly assumes that middle income black parents are
college-educated professionals, that they live in integrated, wealthy
suburbs and that black middle class kids thus receive  and are generally
"exposed" to  better quality educations and environments commensurate with
their parents' income.

For Murray and D'Souza what these low scores really indicate is that blacks
are a separate and unequal population the lower "mean" of to which these
children have simply regressed in Galtonian fashion.  I believe that this
one stylized fact cited here by Connerly has become the prime
justification, aside from black success in sports,  for the ideology of
deep racial difference, even as it has been discredited at the level of
biology (see John Vandermeer, Reconstructing Biology, Jonathan Marks, Human
Biodiversity, Genes, Race and History).

Now, Connerly does not ask, is that suburban residence really an advantage
for black middle class kids? Having attended a predominantly white middle
class high school which was attended by 4 African-Americans out of 1500
hundred students, I find it amazing that Connerly simply refuses to
consider the graver impacts on these children of racism and the
consequences of teacher neglect, self-doubt and demoralization from being
in "better" communities. The racist treatment of and rumours spread  about
these "poor" kids  in our high school were so barbaric as to still make me
sick. Indeed my high school principal just recently had to apologize for
referring to the Bay Bridge as connecting Fairyland (SF) with Jungleland
(Oakland).

 Also  what such results do indicate is that SATs do not test for actual
intellectual attainment. That is, perhaps because certain children simply
refuse to demonstrate actual intellectual attainment in a competitive
setting out of a radical identification with an oppressed group  (see
William Whyte's classic studies of subcultural solidarity as summarized by
John Madge The Origins of Scientific Sociology) and because they may indeed
be anxious about stereotypes and thus protect themselves through
underpreparation (and the SAT must be prepared for), their test scores
simply don't reflect their *substantive* intellectual accomplishments, much
less capabilities.

  Such results could as easily serve to dereify low test scores  and prove
the terrible consequences of racism as they are used to prove black
inferiority (most insidously by Murray and D'Souza). Perhaps then what
needs to be banned is not affirmative action but the tyranny of
standardized testing as a determination or diagnosis of superior and
inferior intellectual accomplishment (what do people think of Elaine Mensh
and Harry Mensh The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender and Inequality?)

Rakesh