Heather Mac Donald on Ricci Bottom Line
The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald says what many people don’t want to hear. Commenting on Ricci v. DeStefano, she cuts to the chase in City Journal:
“The main function of the race industry today is to repackage problems of black underachievement as instances of white racism. For decades, the vast majority of alleged discrimination violations have been manifestations of the black-white performance gap, whether in academic achievement, crime rates, or poverty-producing behaviors like illegitimacy and dropping out of school. The race industry cloaks such problems in the language of rights and racism—pushing the achievement gap offstage, keeping alive the phantom of ubiquitous white bias, and generating jobs in the race industry. Thus, employment and educational standards that no one would otherwise think twice about are suddenly viewed as legally suspicious, without any reason to think them flawed except that blacks do not meet them at equal rates.”
People have to blame something or someone for the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites. Blaming blacks themselves or otherwise seeing the gap simply as a reality of the differences between groups of people are politically incorrect propositions.
Leftists and preference apologists prefer to blame “the system,” institutionalized racism, or the more ridiculous-sounding “test bias.” New Haven’s promotional exam, an objective civil service test, “merely favored those who had studied hard and prepared themselves to become captains and lieutenants,” Mac Donald writes.
As Mac Donald notes, had blacks passed the test in satisfactory numbers, criticisms that imply memorizing information negatively impacts blacks, for instance, would not have come up. She also notes that New Haven had already tinkered with the exam to remove any alleged bias against minorities. For example, the questions were below 10th grade reading level, and minority firefighters were “oversampled” in developing the test.
“The Court’s majority and minority opinions are assiduously silent about the only reason why anyone views the New Haven firefighters’ exam through the lens of race at all: the gap in cognitive attainment between blacks and whites.”
There’s the often unspoken rub. Generally speaking, blacks tend to score lower on standardized tests than whites, but people frequently discuss the gap without reference to this fact. And it gets us…nowhere.
