John McWhorter, Losing the Race. MCRI
John McWhorter, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America. 2000. MCRI
In his book Losing the Race, John McWhorter discusses the cause of the achievement of black students reaching a “plateau” in the late 1980s, beyond which it has yet to rise:
“In this light, the maintenance of affirmative action nothing less than hinders the completion of the very task it was designed to accomplish, because it deprives black students of a basic incentive to reach for that highest bar. If every black student in the country knows that not even the most selective schools in the country require the very top grades or test scores of black students, that fine universities just below tis level will readily admit them with even a B+/B dossier by virtue of their “leadership qualities” or “spark,” and that even just a better-than-decent application file will grant them admission to solid second-tier selective schools, then what incentive is there for any but the occasional highly driven black student to devote his most deeply committed effort to school?” (232-233)
Answer: No incentive whatsoever…. This is exactly the result I saw for years as a college instructor. Minority students had a sense of entitlement about grades and didn’t believe they had to work as hard as other students to achieve them. The stories of this playing out in the classroom are virtually endless. Professor Carl Cohen has published a recent open letter to President Mary Sue Coleman of U of M relating how one professor was essentially forced by a student playing the race card to increase his grade, with no real support from the university administration. I, like many educators, saw and heard of such situations happening many times. Sadly, the person who is truly hurt the most by such a decline of standards is the individual student, though they do not realize it. The overall impact on the morale of a university department can be tremendous and only lead to a further decline in standards.
John McWhorter, to his credit, has the rare honesty to admit how these dynamics affected him personally:
“I can attest, for example, that in secondary school I quite deliberately refrained from working to my highest potential because I knew that I would be accepted to even top universities without doing so. Almost any black child knows from an early age that there is something called affirmative action which means that black students are admitted to schools under lower standards than white; I was aware of this at at least [sic] the age of ten.”
If we really care about our children, we expect from them their best effort, that they strive for excellence, not be happy with “good enough,” which is never good enough, especially at this time given our nation’s history and Michigan’s many economic and social problems.
Racial preferences have always been and have become a corrupt and demeaning system undermining the education of the very students who supposedly they were created to help. Instead of keeping the best interest of students foremost in mind, politicians, educators, “leaders,” and others drinking at the affirmative action trough are thinking only about the appearance of being “progressive” and for the “down trodden” or whatever. None of this will ever begin to change until the pernicious system is ended and individuals are held accountable for their own actions, instead of blaming their failings on others. Equal protection under the law also means equal obligations, duties, and responsibilities.
Frederick Glaysher
Why Voters Should Approve the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative
http://www.fglaysher.com/MCRI/