Throwback situations
A little light reading.
From Mark Caldwell, A Short History of Rudeness (Picador, 1999):
But perhaps the deepest and stubbornest wounds to civility are those inflicted using race and gender as weapons…
In 1996, Karen Grigsby Bates and Karen Elyse Hudson published Basic Black: Home Training for Modern Times, an etiquette manual aimed at the emerging black middle class…Yet they also concede that painful throwback situations may still arise where racism survives, either in full-blown or vestigial form – and offer advice about what to do, for instance, if someone tells racist jokes, suggests a colleague would haver have been hired but for affirmative action, or behaves in any other way that suggests a continuing belief in some false or hurtful stereotype. [pp 168-9, emphasis added]
Then they all go out for a beer.
suggests a colleague would [never?] have been hired but for
having a vaginaaffirmative action?Oh, that’s quite something.
As soon as Harvard adopted blind admissions in my junior year, the girl to boy ratio went from 1:7 to 1:3 in one year, just from the incoming class. This was immediately followed by shrieks of rage by alumni, who whined that more girls would lower Harvard’s standards as well as its reputation. These, by the way, were mostly legacy admissions that had scraped by on gentlemen’s Cs. The same exact thing has invariably happened whenever any kind of blinding occurred (auditioning for orchestras behind screens, for example).
The default thinking is that white men get to whatever heights they get by ability, rather than luck or starting advantages, whereas all “others” are tokens primarily meant to “appease” the demands of “radical” equalizers. True equality will descend upon us only when there are as many mediocre non-white non-males in positions of authority as there already are of the default kind.
I could use that advice. I was at the campus bar recently when I was approached in conversation by a random Texan. He tried to persuade me that one of the good things about racism is that south of the Mason-Dixon line people get free refills for your Cola, evidently (he says) out of pity for those poor souls who are part the wrong race or class. Not like the cruel Northerners who force people to pay for their refills. Therefore, of course, racism is a good thing.
I didn’t know what to do except say, “Uhhhhh, I don’t agree with your conclusion”, and run away laughing. I sort of regret that, since it’s probably the lamest thing anyone could say in those circumstances.
I obviously don’t know this man or you but the few guys I know who are fond of jokes along this vein respond positively (as in laugh) when I say ‘Really, motherfucker?” and “That’s the dumbest fucking thing I’ve heard you say since last time you opened your mouth.”
It isn’t polite and it doesn’t help much if you’re offended but if you just want to get a shot in and maybe defuse the situation
The thing is, this guy sounded serious. It seemed like he really was trying to convince me that racism is awesome because in the South they refill your Cola. That’s so completely batshit crazy that at first I thought I’d just plain misunderstood him. One just assumes that, when growing up, even the aspiring bigot would learn not to say such massively racist garbage to a complete stranger in a bar. But he said the same thing again with a straight face when I tried to press him on his meaning. And the bartender says that this guy is a regular and he says stuff like that all the time, which also makes me think he was serious.
But he was also a nerd, so it felt like he was trying to overcompensate. I can only assume that’s how he can get away with the shtick.
Over here Hungry Jacks/Burger King offer endless refills while Maccas and KFC don’t. Does that mean Jacks is racist while Maccas & the Colonel aren’t?
by that logic, Germany would have to be a racism-free society. The concept of free refills hadn’t arrived there yet when I left 9 years ago
Benjamin, it sounds as though you were suffering from the “Wait, what?” phenomenon of not quite believing that someone would actually say that. Fear not, this is a normal reaction, even if it does leave you bereft of a snappy comeback.
There was a conversation in my office quite recently where some of my white colleagues were explaining how you can’t put up directional signage on a building site if it’s in an area with lots of Muslims, because “they can’t read and anyway, they won’t obey them because brown people think they’re better than everyone else.” They think it’s OK to say these things to me because I’m white.
I ended up just walking away because I literally could not think of a single thing to say.
This is complicated, and what I’m about to say may irritate some people, but it is borne of a more serious version of Benjamin’s failure to come up with anything intelligent to say in an awkward situation.
I tutored for a year at Oxford, which as most of you know is a very prestigious British university. Like many universities, it had exchanges with other universities all over the world. Various exchange programs would send students from the EU, the US etc. The overseas universities (because of Oxford’s prestige) were also very prestigious. For example, my French students all came from various Grandes Ecoles, and had clearly been selected for the exchange on the basis of excellent English and good results in their courses at home.
Maybe the US selection procedures were less rigorous, I don’t know, but I began to notice something disturbing about my US students. I spent a term trying to convince myself that I was seeing things, or had my head up my backside, but after two terms the evidence was too plain.
The African-American students were, on average, considerably less able than their white or Asian (US-version) fellow students. There were two exceptions to this, and both the students in question were African-American women. It was especially difficult for me as a marker because all my US students expected As for everything, where (as anyone who has spent time in Britain academia knows) a B at Oxbridge or one of the ancient Scottish universities is a good mark.
I did not know what to do, or what to say, although I was told candidly by more senior academics that most of the African-American students would have gained entry on the basis of affirmative action, something that does not exist at any decent British university. Oxbridge and the ancient Scottish universities spend considerable sums on ensuring that clever people of all backgrounds are encouraged to apply, but there is no drop-off in entry requirements. You still have to get three As at A-Level as a minimum.
I was hoping the final exam would provide a correction (Oxford exams are marked blind, as Athena describes above; there is no way of finding out which students’ papers one is marking), but if anything, the problem was worse. With the exception of the two women mentioned above, the African-Americans had ‘dropped their bundle’ under exam conditions and handed in very poor papers.
This situation meant I went to one of the people managing the exchange and asked him directly what was going on. He shrugged his shoulders and said ‘affirmative action’, going on to point out that the African-Americans were still able students.
To which my response was ‘not able enough for Oxford, and probably not able enough for their university at home in the US, were it not for grade inflation’.
He shrugged again and said that eventually the SCOTUS would ‘roll’ affirmative action as being ‘in violation of the Equal Protection Clause’, but until then, Americans just had to put up with it.
I just felt sorry for the two African-American women who were good students and who earned both their place and their marks. And I formed the view that affirmative action is pernicious.
How true. But what a depressing world that will be; everything will be like corporate america.
That wouldn’t exactly be my idea of how to defuse a situation, but whatever works I guess.
The US still has vastly different opportunities for students, due in large part to the way schools are funded and controlled at the local level. I think the only fair way to do away with affirmative action is to fund schools nationally, along with establishing a national curriculum. Then, in about 10 years, you could (perhaps) do away with affirmative action. Good luck getting rid of the local school board control, though.
I point to racism and I point to free refills. That’s all.
You shoulda told him that up north you get free refills on beer — if you’re not a racist pig, that is.
@skepticlawyer:
First, affirmative action covers color, gender and national origin. So the two women, doubly handicapped, still made the cut according to your description.
Second, there are always 1) people who take advantage of something that helps them along and 2) people who choose to highlight/promote inferior competitors, to make the point against whatever policy gave the competitors an advantage. Let’s put the last one another way: it’s less scary to promote mediocre people from another group than truly able ones. The latter might actually displace you.
Third, it’s true that US students increasingly expect As. The “logic” goes that they’re consumers and education is a product. So once accepted to a college, they expect to sail through. The problems are that 1) US high schools are extremely uneven, and universities/colleges have to offer tons of remedial courses, 2) US university education leaves most people with a mountain of debt, so they want a concrete return and 3) jobs at the other end are increasingly iffy.
@sailor1031:
*Snerk*
Well, I have an old racist joke by Hans Alfredson.
With a twist.
Fucking linebreaks. Another try.
If it fails this time, I’ll just leave it as it is.
I overcompensated. Aww.
Svad Cjelli@15
Well, I have an old racist joke by Hans Alfredson.
*blink*
Um. A moose once bit my sister…?
This academic version of the ‘Peter Principle’ (in business, promoting people to the level at which they become incompetent, and then leaving them there to create havoc) is something I have never seen in either Britain or Australia, and I find the thought of it absolutely appalling. As for exploiting a system that ‘helps them along’, that is wrong regardless of who does it: entitled children of the aristocracy or academically less able pupils using their race to gain entry to a prestigious university (at the expense of other, more able students, I suspect).
That a new problem (the academic Peter Principle) now exists alongside an old problem (using one’s background to work the system) suggests two things: (1) affirmative action creates what economists would call ‘perverse incentives’ and (2) it actually represents a net loss over the previous system, ceteris paribus.
My view of its perniciousness has, in light of your extra information, been hardened further. I am very glad we don’t have it in Britain.
Skepticlawyer,
I’m not sure you’re living up to your moniker here. You’ve formed a very negative view of affirmative action based on observational evidence and the gossip of your colleagues, and you’ve even noted two “exceptions” but don’t seem to think these undermine your argument. I find it hard to understand why you feel these two women were hard done by when you say they achieved high marks at a prestigious university. That seems to me to be a success, not a failure. I also think you have not taken into account alternative hypotheses. Here’s one: African-Americans are more likely to come from poorer backgrounds and perhaps what you are seeing is the effect of financial stress on overseas students who are culturally a long way from home. I don’t know if this is correct, but it seems as plausible as blaming affirmative action.
Also, there are more forms of affirmative action than you seem to think. Even if you have evidence that some US universities apply unproductive policies, it does not follow that all affirmative action programs are “pernicious.” In Australia, for instance, targeted scholarships for Aboriginal students has made a huge difference to indigenous people, and this has been particularly valuable in training nurses and doctors who then apply their training in Aboriginal communities.
I do think that affirmative action programs have to be carefully designed and implemented, but I don’t think they should be dismissed wholesale.
in business, promoting people to the level at which they become incompetent, and then leaving them there to create havoc
In corporate america they don’t get promoted because of competence to a position where they are incompetent. They get hired in directly to management because they are incompetent to begin with. The thinking being that if an employee is competent and productive s/he is too valuable to promote to management, when you can hire all the incompetents you need straight out of “business school”. In the rare event that a promotion is internal it is because the promoted employee has already demonstrated incompetence in another position. The point about promoting mediocre people because they are no threat is exactly right.
This is one of the big problems these days. In large corporations No-One in management is demonstrably competent because they have no subject-matter knowledge. If you don’t understand how a business works you can’t manage it no matter where you got your MBA from. And the people who do understand are, as I said above, too valuable to promote. As an example one of our local universities offers a master’s program in IT Management. No previous knowledge of IT required to enter the program………..
Yep… and that “carefully designed and implemented part” should also take the existing “affirmative action” for rich, white kids into account:
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/28/at_the_elite_colleges___dim_white_kids/?page=full
It’s rather unfair, IMHO, to expect that minority students admitted to universities via affirmative action programs should uniformly excel, when the same is not expected of whites receiving preferential treatment.
Elly, exactly — nobody seems to be questioning legacy admissions.
Skepticlawyer, you can only become “hardened” in your attitude if you ignore my first point. If not for affirmative action, those two bright women would never have made it past the door. And if women don’t register on the meter, compare GW Bush to Obama and the point becomes rather obvious.
PS for clarification, since it apparently needs to be said even here: the two women would never have made it not because of their intrinsic abilities, but because of both conscious and unconscious bias.
Also,
You must live in a pristine parallel universe. Women, in particular, have to be at least twice as well-qualified as men to get into any place — and often their qualifications are used as weapons against them. The argument that “deserving” people — by default white men — are excluded from what they automatically deserve has been used since time immemorial to taint even the few, hard-fought gains that non-default humans have achieved.
@Skepticlawyer
Affirmative Action is known as “reservation” in my country (for backward classes). It is perceived extremely negatively by most people who dont belong to those classes for reasons similar to yours. The problem is however how do you judge how well one does at say a higher degree when there is inequality at all the lower levels of education and society. I can look at the fact that most people who were in my engineering college , who were in through the quota fared worse than those who were in through merit – but I dont know if their children will be the same.
Any affirmative action is a long term thing, short term you are always going to see issues – though id say overall Id prefer solutions other than affirmative action.
I was going to point out the same thing. Skepticlawyer’s post seems to assume that the two women were “hard done by” because they would have made it in regardless of affirmative action, thus affirmative action dilluted their efforts. Which is incorrect: what’s more likely is that they too got in on affirmative action, but being female, they had to work that much harder than their male counterparts just to get acknowledged as these guys’ equals. The same phenomenon can be seen among white students, where often, white women in college on average get better grades, because they have to, just to be taken as seriously as their “coasting-on-C’s” white male counterparts (and on that note… are there many legacy students that are female? one would imagine so, but for some reason I don’t generally hear about them…)
Speaking of being unable to come up with a quick (or any) comeback:
Me: but what you are saying doesn’t jibe with the physical facts on the ground.
Him: well, there are YOUR facts, and then there are MY facts.
(and THTHTHTHTHTHat’s all, folks…)
Extending Jadehawk’s points: If a non-white non-male stands out in a good way, their achievements can automatically be devalued by the slur “they got in by affirmative action” (some do, many don’t). If s/he stands out in a bad way, their group gets denigrated (“what can you expect from group X, they need special designations to make it”). Neither happens to a white male, especially an Anglosaxon one. They get evaluated as individuals, independently of any context that can detract from the focus on “ability”.
Jadehawk, I think white female legacy admissions are practically non-existent, for several reasons. Primarily, women never get control of the type of wealth that allows the donations enabling such admissions. Additionally, women are very rarely allowed to coast academically, as you said yourself.
This is mirrored in the discomfort engendered by Asian students + the higher percentage of women getting degrees. Schools dominated by white men = “normal,” so it’s now a problem when schools are perceived as “too Asian” (as noted here: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/04/17/high_achieving_asian_americans_are_being_shut_out_of_top_schools/?s_campaign=8315 ), or too female (an example here: http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/06/the_quiet_preference_for_men_i.html ).
not to mention that this is also borne out in the greater economy
The original pay gap study (pdf) is in the body of the post.
Jätterolig, Svlad Cjelli.
It is a source of amazement to me that with all the advantages many (not all) white men have they demonstrate such pisspoor performance anyway; at all levels of the hierarchy.
Exactly right. That perception seems totally jilted. But it’s not just an American thing, evidently it’s now a thing Canadian magazines are saying too.
I guess no matter where you go you’ll find that the print editors are pod people.
@Athena
Well perhaps in western countries there are racist overtones to the discussion on affirmative action. however places like India have 50% reservation in some states that does make it difficult for other “deserving” people.
Deepak: Indians can still be classified caste-wise even by as last names… so Aryan/Dravidian issues (to say nothing of the Dalit) are directly relevant.
Ben – “jilted”?
I think for once you did an accidental word transfer. Maybe your brain went “skewed–>tilted–>jilted.”
Pretty amusing!
Some of the poor quality African-American students were female, although yes, the bulk of the not very able were male (which is, I think, revealing and disturbing). The two excellent students were both women, however, and were so good (including under exam conditions, in 3 hour horrendous finals in June where one must sit in the Examination Schools in subfusc and sweat) that I find it very difficult to believe they gained admission on affirmative action grounds. I could have found out, but having asked two sets of awkward questions, I was reluctant to ask a third.
They were an order of magnitude better than their (oh how I hate using this phrase) ‘racial peers’, and as good as the best Asian (US), white (US & UK) and black (UK and French) students, although the best student across the cohort was a white (UK) woman. I will add that I did not see any sub-par performance from black (UK and French) students, despite the fact that many of them came from not particularly outstanding London, Midlands and French comprehensives.
I have seen the deliberate promotion of idiots (in order to ‘park’ them out of harm’s way) and also for ‘Peter Principle’ reasons in business (although not very often; it tends to get costly after a while), more often in the public sector (but still not too often, and for the same reason — it gets expensive). I have never seen the admission of weak as opposed to strong students from disadvantaged backgrounds to prestigious universities because they are perceived to be ‘less threatening’. I am hoping that is because they would not have been admitted anyway.
I must admit I still find the thought appalling, and there is a part of me that wants to suggest that if you have evidence of it that would stand up on the balance of probabilities, then you should be talking to your MP (Congressman? Senator? Governor? Not sure who looks after that sort of issue in the US).
I will also add, for all their antiquity and prestige, Oxbridge and the ancient Scottish universities do not have legacy admissions; everyone who gets in has 3 As at A-Level. This may play a part in my British perception. I am a very black-letter lawyer, but I think that if they are going to admit some not very clever scions of the aristocracy, then admitting some not very clever scions of the poor does no harm. It will all come out in the wash.
US universities and colleges also admit lots of students for athletic reasons as opposed to academic reasons.
Admissions are also entangled with ideas about character and “roundedness” so that they actually exclude students who are “too” academic.
Haha, true. Not Romeo and Juliet. Not not not.
Yes, athletic scholarships; we don’t have them, and attempts to bend the rules in order to admit good athletes are punished harshly, as this Boat Race story reveals:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/other_sports/rowing/6903124.stm
Heehee – I think I’ll start saying my perception is jilted. I like the chain of association.
Skep – that story makes me so jealous.
Honestly the athletic thing is a disgrace.
I had someone tell me recently that the police psychologist she works for had signed off on the hires of sociopaths solely in order to fill a quota of black officers. This was supposed to be a statement against affirmative action, but I don’t think she realized that I got a different message. Either:
A) She didn’t have good reason to believe any of this herself, and was lying/exaggerating for petty reasons, or else gullible regarding office gossip.
B) She was reliably told that someone was hired in part to fill a quota, but for whatever reason just decided herself that the person shouldn’t have passed the psych eval, and repeated the story as if her personal opinion was the psychologist’s.
C) The psychologist has fudged his evaluations of sociopaths for reasons unrelated to affirmative action, in which case he is corrupt, endangering the lives of others, and honestly should be reported and removed from his position at the very minimum, because there’s no good reason to allow a sociopath to become a cop, especially in light of a recent case of police brutality by two (white) local cops.
D) The psychologist has fudged his evaluations of sociopaths for reasons related to affirmative action, in which case he is corrupt, endangering the lives of others, and honestly should be reported and removed from his position at the very minimum, because there’s no good reason to allow a sociopath to become a cop, especially in light of a recent case of police brutality by two (white) local cops.
Having no way to decide which of these possibilities is the case, the only thing I could determine was that at least one person at her office is a total asshole.
And this I find as mind-boggling as the deliberate admission of academic noodles for athletic or quota purposes. Don’t you want smart people at university? Especially if your university has some claim to prestige?
I suppose this is why the Brits have such a reputation for eccentricity.
Indeed, a favourite Oxford moment: two dons strolling past the Bodleian entrance while I was taking shelter from the rain inside. I heard one of them say ‘and, seventhly…’ during the course of a sentence.
@Athena
Sure. But the sheer number causes a problem – 50%. Hence it is not altogether unreasonable that deserving candidates do miss out.
I know; same here.
Mind you, I suspect places like MIT don’t do that. But the Ivies – definitely. Pride themselves on it.
If it weren’t for taking “roundedness” into account, I never would have been admitted to NYU, Columbia, or Sarah Lawrence College (which I attended). As a high school dropout (left school to escape getting beaten for being gay) who spent his teenage years in boys’ homes, I certainly didn’t get in on my academic pedigree.
The Peter Principle is quite out of date. Managerialism killed it. And thus things got worse. Instead of being managed by an incompetent (at management skills) who at least knows what the job is and how to do it well, you now get managed by incompetents who have no idea what your job is and how to do it at all.
Skep.
My daughter spent one year of her undergraduate career in the International House of her University. The majority of residents were, as the name suggests, from overseas. Most of them were perfectly competent students, except for the Americans. She says they were nice people, very friendly, very cheerful, but so naive and ignorant that it was like having pets. So it may very well be that the students you had at Oxford were, in fact, the best of the best and nothing to do with affirmative action.