Stuart Taylor, yet another adherent of the Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom Pretend Conservative School of Racial Unreality

The Thernstroms, who are heroes to the race-blind mainstream conservatives, oppose racial preferences and admit that blacks are far behind whites academically, but insist that racial differences have nothing to do with it. With the right tweaking, the right Charter Schools, the racial “gap” can be eliminated.

Buck writes:

I just listened to a short interview with Stuart Taylor (my favorite Supreme Court reporter) who has co-authored a book with Richard Sander: Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It.

After explaining the books premise—that AA students are failing and the schools are covering it up—he was asked if he and Sander were arguing that blacks are generally underperforming and failing to make the grade because they are black, or if there is another reason. And, of course, Taylor said that there was another reason: “We wrote a whole chapter on that.” He went on to say that it remains our failure because we have still not figured out how to educate blacks properly and adequately prepare them for college, where they are clearly and consistently mismatched with whites and Asians who are prepared. The AA students do not succeed, and the universities cover that up. He says that the cover-up is compounding the unfairness to blacks who still fail to profit from a scheme designed to benefit them (Even though the court asserts that the state’s interest is in helping whites by forcing a lacked diversity on them.). He says that they would be better served by the truth (not his word).

Without reading it, I don’t know how Stuart and Sander actually treat the endlessly repeated canard that a failure by whites is the reason blacks don’t match whites in academic achievement. He mentioned one school that has shown success and cited it as a model. I didn’t catch the name. Haven’t we been hearing about these magic schools for decades? [LA replies: Yep.] I can imagine that a special school packed with the best of all teachers, and isolated environment, and with a pick of the litter of students, would show better results than other schools. But, how could that one petri dish be broadly duplicated in the impossible world that modern liberalism has constructed. Distribution of wealth and white guilt are two of modern liberalism’s most potent weapons in their war against human nature. It’s a MAD doctrine, a Mutually Assured Destruction in which our side offers no effective deterrence and actually enables the destruction. It’s mutually assured destruction, but with only one side wielding weapons.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 27, 2012 05:20 PM | Send