by The soft bigotry of low expectations There is much rumbling about the likelihood that the Supreme Court will deal a coup de grâce to racial preferences in university admissions when it takes up two cases, probably in its next term, challenging affirmative action policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill … But I find myself thinking about … how we’ve allowed ourselves to all but give up on the idea that many Black and Latino students, as well as Pacific Islander and Native American students, can compete. When we expect less of people it’s often because we think less of them … I think of this kind of thing in reference to altering standards of evaluation so that Black and Latino students are represented
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The soft bigotry of low expectations
There is much rumbling about the likelihood that the Supreme Court will deal a coup de grâce to racial preferences in university admissions when it takes up two cases, probably in its next term, challenging affirmative action policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill …
But I find myself thinking about … how we’ve allowed ourselves to all but give up on the idea that many Black and Latino students, as well as Pacific Islander and Native American students, can compete.
When we expect less of people it’s often because we think less of them …
I think of this kind of thing in reference to altering standards of evaluation so that Black and Latino students are represented proportionally in various institutions. These days, one is to think of this sort of thing as “equity.” The idea seems to be that until there is something much closer to equality — as in equal access to resources — throughout society, we must force at least the superficial justice of equity in sheer percentages …
Too often, we forge this equity by tokenizing people of color, declaring that we have achieved the proper representation after pretending that race or ethnicity entails alternate conceptions of excellence from those we unquestioningly expect of everyone else. And I think much of the motivation for that pretense is to allow white teachers and administrators to inoculate themselves against the accusation that they’re denying the existence and impact of racism. Maybe that helps them, but that’s another kind of low expectation.