Not so critical race theory
Mississippi being Mississippi:
At first, it seemed a joyous occasion. There was an audible gasp in the room, then boisterous cheering and applause when the announcement was made: Ikeria Washington and Layla Temple had been named 2021 valedictorian and salutatorian for West Point High School.
The president of the local N.A.A.C.P. in West Point, Miss., Anner Cunningham, smiled as the two young women, both standout students, were photographed. “It was a beautiful and proud moment to witness two young, Black ladies standing side by side given such honors,” Ms. Cunningham said.
And moment is what it was, because it couldn’t be allowed.
But almost immediately parents of other students near the top of the rankings raised questions about who should have been honored. Within days, and breaking with longstanding tradition, West Point High School decided to name two valedictorians and two salutatorians — with two white students, Emma Berry and Dominic Borgioli, joining the Black students who had already been named.
Affirmative action for white kids! At last!
There was a lot of fancy footwork about how you count the grades and yadda yadda but the appearance at least is…what it sounds like.
The Washington and Temple families are considering a lawsuit, and they have enlisted the advice of Ms. Ross, the lawyer from Jackson. She questions the methodology used to determine class rank in West Point — saying it makes no sense — and why weighted scores are not used.
“Anybody in education knows that a weighted G.P.A. signifies that a student has taken more rigorous courses than a student with a 4.0 G.P.A.,” Ms. Ross said.
A top grade in an easy course isn’t scored the way a top grade in a difficult course is.
Mississippi is still Mississippi.
“…considering a lawsuit…” Too bad they aren’t trans, they could get Chasio and the ACLU involved.
Indeed, my 3.3 GPA was entirely due to Honours/AP courses. If you were a really good student you could get a 5.0.
Two things:
First: Having to go back and name a separate white valedictorian because white parents were upset that a white student didn’t get it is completely ridiculous.
Second: High school GPAs are complete bullshit, and students/parents mainly just game the system now to inflate their GPAs and class ranks. One thing that’s popular around my area now is this – drop out of honors courses and college prep courses and take dual enrollment courses at the community college instead. Honors courses are graded on a 5.5 scale. College prep is graded on a 5.0 scale. Dual enrollment, though, is graded on a 6.0 scale. You might say … well, they’re college classes so they should be harder, right? Nah – they just pick the easiest stuff the community college offers. Including just taking the orientation class.
At my high school, before my time (that would be the Triassic rather than the Jurassic), there was a boy who had the highest GPA, but who had achieved this feat by gaming the system and loading his schedule with easy classes. The school administrators didn’t want him to speak at graduation at all, but there was a big political battle, and they eventually allowed him to speak as salutatorian. He reportedly gave a self-aggrandizing speech, and walked off stage waving his hands in a “Number One” sign.
Ah, Mississippi. So glad I don’t have to drive down there anymore.
Re: QPA vs GPA. Devising proper weights/biases for a quality- or impact-based average is actually a rather difficult problem. Just look at the multiple ways people have for determining player value, impact, or effectiveness in basketball. Armies of statisticians break down and analyze basketball games, and nonetheless there’s a constant fight over the proper way to assess player value and performance. You’ve got Efficiency, Player Efficiency Rating, Value Over Replacement Player, and Performance Index Rating to start, and each produces a different rank ordering based on the same data set.
On the surface it sounds bad, but it’s apparently undisputed that they’d always used GPA, not QPA, to determine those awards and the school handbook still said they used GPA. The school system’s superintendent, who is Black and so presumably unlikely to be trying to oppress Black students, verified those facts.
Bad reporting by the NY Times to apparently show no interest in delving into who had made the change to QPA and why.
Like many here I consider QPA to be the superior measure, but switching it at the last minute with no announcement of the change is hardly fair. In my high school the top several students all knew were they stood in the rankings and who the valedictorian and salutatorian were going to be. If different people were suddenly announced based on an unexpected criteria the reaction would have been much the same as the reaction here, just without the race element overlaying it.
Oh, apologies to the NYT, who did link to this explanation of how the mistake was made:
https://mississippitoday.org/2021/06/02/west-point-valedictorian-dispute-sparks-allegations-of-racism/
Sounds like the handbook is sort of muddled, a new guidance counselor misinterpreted it, and nobody double checked the calculation.
Honestly sounds like they made the best decision they could after the mistake came to light. The students who should have won by the published criteria were given the awards and the students announced as having won by different and arguably better criteria got to keep theirs. There was apparently some rudeness in not informing the first two students of the change in a prompt matter, which is unfortunate, but otherwise it looks like they did the best they could.
This story is a good illustration of everything that is wrong with the current discussion of race in the US. Summarizing:
The rules for valedictorian were stated and known, and based on that the students had an expectation of who it would be.
The school made an error, using a wrong algorithm.
Understandably, the students who would have been chosen, under the stated rules, raised the issue.
The school principal decided to award both sets of students (seems fair under the circumstances).
There is no evidence presented — literally none — that any of the actions by anyone involved had anything to do with the race of anyone involved.
Yet the NY Times presents a thoroughly irresponsible article making it all about race.
This is what CRT does, it insists that everything must be about race. If you sum up CRT in one line, it is the doctrine that racism is so prevalent that, in CRT’s maxim: “the question is not *whether* racism was manifest in that situation, but *how* racism manifested itself in that situation”.
And that is poisonous. Of course if you ask *that* question then the above story is all about race. But there is no path to racial reconciliation down that route. There needs to be a presumption of innocence. There needs to be an acceptance that interactions between people are not necessarily always about race.
Coel – do you know anything at all about the history of Mississippi?
Yes, I’m aware (to some extent) of the history of Mississippi. But that’s exactly the problem with CRT and “critical social justice” in general: treating people not as individuals but as members of groups, and thus presuming them guilty based on their “identity” and based on history. (Isn’t that the very essence of stereotyping?)
I’m not even saying that there was no racial motivation here — I have no idea, I know only what has been reported, it may even be likely — but no actual evidence of that has been presented, and the facts are compatible with there being none.
Well in fairness to Mississippi, they did replace the state flag that had the Confederate battle flag canton.
*This year.
Meanwhile here in Georgia, we still have the ol’ Stars and Bars. The official Confederate flag. :P
Coel – Well I don’t know if there was racial motivation or not either, which is why I said in the post “There was a lot of fancy footwork about how you count the grades and yadda yadda but the appearance at least is…what it sounds like.” It sounds like yet another fix, but I don’t know that it is, and the Times didn’t say it is. But I don’t think your “This is what CRT does, it insists that everything must be about race.” is a good fit here. I doubt that CRT does insist that, I think it’s hyperbole. But there is a long long long history of pretending almost nothing is about race, and I (along with others) think a corrective is badly needed.
Have you read David Oshinsky’s Worse Than Slavery? I recommend it. It’s about the way Jim Crow labor laws replaced slavery after the defeat of Reconstruction, and it’s full of horrors. Real ones, I promise, not maybe or maybe not ones like this high school incident. I knew none of it until I read that book, and…I think it’s bad that I didn’t know. I think we should all know. I don’t think we have much right to talk about racial reconciliation until we do make at least some effort to know.
A lot of the indignation over Critical Race Theory is worked up by people who don’t give a damn about the nearly 100 years that the descendants of enslaved people were still treated like slaves, except better because no capital investment so you could just work them to death. I don’t think their cause is just.
Hi Ophelia, It’s important to realise that CRT (and thus opposition to CRT) is not about subject matter or about teaching an honest appraisal of US history and the central role of race. Rather, CRT is a contentious, ideological approach to teaching that subject matter.
CRT in operation (and why people are opposed to it) is illustrated by the Gabrielle and William Clark law suit. Would you regard their case as just?
[Short summary: high-school student William has a black mum and had a white dad, and “passes” as white, though he himself does not particularly identify as such. His school required him to label himself as “white” and thus as an “oppressor” and to apologize for and “unlearn” his identity. When he refused his school accused him of “fragility” and “denial” and gave him a D- fail grade, threatening that he would not graduate. The school has capitulated to the law suit.]
https://www.fairforall.org/fundraiser-for-gabrielle-clark/
https://twitter.com/SwipeWright/status/1341645599578308609
Coel, what do you mean “it’s important to realize”? Why should I “realize” something just because you assert it?
Your approach is not entirely free of “contentious” and “ideological” itself.
And you ignored my question. It was a serious question, and not asked in a hostile way. Ignoring it is strikingly rude.
Hi Ophelia, well, to answer the question, no I’ve not read that particular book.
But, again, the dispute is not about subject matter! “Critical theory” is an *approach* to subject matter, a method of analysis, and it is explicitly an activist approach! “Critical theory” advocates say that themselves. [E.g. from wiki: ” [Max] Horkheimer described a theory as “critical” insofar as it seeks “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”]
“Critical theory” is *explicitly* an approach of analysing everything in terms of oppressor/oppressed power relations, and then identifying how these are operating in any situation, as a means to then seeking to overturn them.
When one applies “critical theory” to race one then gets CRT; when one applies it to sexuality one gets “queer theory”, et cetera. It’s not just me saying that CRT is an activist ideology!
Leaving aside the exclamatory assertions about critical theory for the moment, could you say a little more in response to my question? Do you have any interest in this subject of the continuation of slavery (complete with torture and very high casualty rates) for a century after the Civil War? Do you think it just doesn’t matter?
Of course it matters and of course it should be taught in schools.
Then I don’t think we disagree all that radically.
I still think “critical theory” means different things to different people, and is currently a popular hate-object and thus even more susceptible to broad interpretation. Conversely it’s also a popular woke-object, which also makes it more susceptible to broad interpretation – and to being a hate object, and the spiral continues. Some of it is dumb, some of it isn’t.
We probably do disagree fundamentally about the worth of analyzing history or social arrangements via imbalances of power.
“Anybody in education knows that a weighted GPA signifies that a student has taken more rigorous courses than a student with a 4.0 GPA,” Ross said.”
As an educator, what I know is that there is little rigor in Honors, AP courses, dual enrollment in high school. Students don’t work any harder in those courses than they do in the regular courses, but students know that they will get at least 5 points added to their final score just for taking the “rigorous” courses. At the same time, their parents get bragging rights. “My child is taking AP Math!” Good for him or her, what was their score on their AP test? No comment. Has anyone asked if the students in Mississippi got a passing score for college credit on their AP tests? I bet they did not. It used to be that the advanced courses were for the quicker students needing more of a challenge, but now in the name of equality, any student who wants to take them can, and their grades will be inflated just for taking the class.
Even on the last I would agree with you, analyzing power relations is fine, if done sensibly in perspective with other considerations. It’s when it becomes that only allowable perspective, dominating everything, that it goes wrong.
Think of CRT as what you’d get if you handed over the race-relations curriculum to today’s Stonewall (complete with simplistic slogans, name calling, refusal to debate, obligation to assent, demonisation of anyone who disagrees, etc).
When epistemology is reduced to relations and exercise of power, as in Foucault, there’s a serious problem.
But is that what all of it is like? Or only the stupid part of it? I agree that for example Robin DiAngelo belongs in the box labeled “stupid part” but I have strong doubts that that’s the only part there is. They’re only doubts though, because I haven’t read any primary sources, because I don’t know which ones to read.
I think you may be asking the wrong question. Is all of Queer Theory wrong? Is all analytic philosophy right? Is all of Christianity wrong? Is all of feminism right? Is all of astrology wrong?
It’s not whether all or none of a collection of related thoughts is right or wrong. Rather, of concern is the nature of a representative synthesis of that collection. If we think of this synthesis as a vector, where does it point and what do we think of that?
For a quick overview, there’s always wiki. If you want to read some primary sources, there’s
Richard Delgado.
For examples of standpoint epistemology and colonial theory, there’s Bell Hoo—oh, sorry—bell hooks, with whom you should already be familiar from Higher Superstition’s sections on black studies and afrocentrism.
Actually, here is a rather large list of primary sources, compiled by Richard Delgado.
I don’t recommend reading any of it, to be honest, much as I don’t recommend reading the Bible, Qur’an, or theological texts, but whatever floats your boat.
Well, fine, but I don’t happen to have the nature of a representative synthesis of that collection handy so that I can decide what I think of it. I don’t know what thinking of a synthesis as a vector means.
I do know what standpoint epistemology is, and to the extent that it’s part of the dread theory I abjure the dread theory.
By primary source I just meant primary intro or outline or quicky for the lay audience.
Ah, mea culpa.
I forget not everybody on the internet is STEMmy. A vector is a just an arrow that indicates direction (and optionally velocity, acceleration, jerk, etc.) So it was something of an abstract metaphor for where a philosophy/ideology/whathaveyou leads and how it gets there.
If what you want is a good, relatively objective summary/intro/outline, I don’t have one of those on hand, but I’ll certainly try to find one for you.