Can quotas rule the ultimate meritocracy?
Heather Mac Donald reports that the politically correct crowd is now demanding "diversity" on the web. To be precise, they are engaged in their usual quota scheme in which they count up the number of blacks, Hispanics and other minorities to see if it is the "right" number in the blogging world. The problem is, as usual, that the real world insists on intruding into leftist fantasy land. Due to the poor performance of minority students in liberal dominated public education, most do not graduate with the required reading and writing skills if indeed they graduate at all.
Of course I would bring to their attention the fact that I am of a Hispanic background with college entrance exams in the top 1 percent, but unfortunately for me I am a conservative/libertarian and thus do not count in their arithmetic of representation.
As for minorities, the skills gap in reading and writing means that, at the moment, a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics possess the verbal acumen to produce a cutting-edge blog. For decades, blacks and Hispanics have scored 200 points below whites on the SATs' verbal section. Black high-school seniors on average read less competently than white 8th graders; Hispanic 12th graders read only slightly better than white 8th graders. And those are just the ones who are graduating. In the Los Angeles school system, which is typical of other large urban districts, 53 percent of black students and 61 percent of Hispanic students drop out before graduating from high school; most of the dropouts exit in the 9th grade. Assuming, generously, that those dropouts have 5th-grade skills, they are unlikely candidates for power blogging.
1 comment:
Yeah. I think it would be silly to try and regulate blogs, blog stats, or anything else having to do with web-logs just to "represent" something so irrepresentative of our culture as Americans.
I'm hispanic, too, so I suppose I represent a good minority statistic, but I don't care. I'm just as American as my Dad (caucasian) or my Cherokee ancestors.
I feel that anything that levels the "playing field" at the cost of genuine individual merit, regardless of race, religion, or whatever, really stands against the reason we have this country in the first place.
The Civil Rights movement should continue, but not to the negation of the progress our country has made over the past thirty-plus years.
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