Black Community News News and Commentary for Christians
In conversations with most college officials, many CEOs, many politicians and race hustlers, it’s not long before the magical words “diversity” and “inclusiveness” drop from their lips. Racial minorities are the intended targets of this sociological largesse, but women are included, as well. This obsession with diversity and inclusion is in the process of leading the nation to decline in a number of areas. We’re told how it’s doing so in science, in an article by Heather Mac Donald, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, titled “How Identity Politics Is Harming the Sciences” (http://tinyurl.com/y9g8k9ne).
Mac Donald says that identity politics has already taken over the humanities and social sciences on American campuses. Waiting in the wings for a similar takeover are the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and math. In the eyes of the diversity and inclusiveness czars, the STEM fields don’t have a pleasing mixture of blacks, Hispanics and women.The effort to get this “pleasing mix” is doing great damage to how science is taught and evaluated, threatening innovation and American competitiveness.
Universities and other institutions have started watering down standards and requirements in order to attract more minorities and women. Some of the arguments for doing so border on insanity. A math education professor at the University of Illinois wrote that “mathematics itself operates as Whiteness.” She says that the ability to solve algebra and geometry problems perpetuates “unearned privilege” among whites. A professor at Purdue University’s School of Engineering Education published an article in a peer-reviewed journal positing that academic rigor is a “dirty deed” that upholds “white male heterosexual privilege,” adding that “scientific knowledge itself is gendered, raced, and colonizing.”
The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are two federal agencies that fund university research and support postdoctoral education for physicians. Both agencies are consumed by diversity and inclusion ideology. The NSF and NIH can yank a grant when it comes up for renewal if the college has not supported a sufficient number of “underrepresented minorities.” Mac Donald quotes a UCLA scientist who reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mac Donald observes, “Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.”
Focusing on mathematical problem-solving and academic rigor, at least for black students at the college level, is a day late and a dollar short. The 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka The Nation’s Report Card, reported that only 17 percent of black students tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math. In some predominantly black high schools, not a single black student scored proficient in math. The academic and federal STEM busybodies ought to focus on the academic destruction of black youngsters between kindergarten and 12th grade and the conferring of fraudulent high school diplomas. Black people should not allow themselves to be used at the college level to help white liberals feel better about themselves and keep their federal grant money.
Mac Donald answers the question of whether scientific progress depends on diversity. She says: “Somehow, NSF-backed scientists managed to rack up more than 200 Nobel Prizes before the agency realized that scientific progress depends on ‘diversity.’ Those ‘un-diverse’ scientists discovered the fundamental particles of matter and unlocked the genetics of viruses.” She might have added that there wasn’t even diversity among those white Nobel laureates. Jews constitute no more than 3 percent of the U.S. population but are 35 percent of American Nobel Prize winners. One wonders what diversity and inclusion czars might propose to promote ethnic diversity among Nobel Prize winners.
COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COM
Photo credit: By NazWeb – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
The views expressed in opinion articles are solely those of the author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by Black Community News.
I’m 68 and time is running out. Will I see the day when most Black people have had enough of Liberals thinking they are stupid and working really hard to keep them that way from kindergarten on?
The weird thing is that I can remember when Black people DID realize what was wrong. Affirmative Action in the beginning was just a plea to “put me in coach, I know I can play”. People studied, worked hard, and just wanted a chance to get the job, not a guarantee that if they messed up they wouldn’t get fired. It seems as soon as the Liberals saw this happening, they started convincing kids that working and studying was “selling out”. They needed to keep these kids dependent.
I’m White, of Irish ancestry, and my skin crawls when I hear Libs implying that Black people are too incompetent to be able to get ID or study and work hard to get ahead. I cringe when I hear Libs say that many of the things we have been taught were virtues are “White”, as if virtues weren’t Black as well. Honesty, being studious and practical, writing and speaking properly, getting to school and/or work and getting there on time are only White qualities now? I would like to see more Black people tell the Liberals to leave their children alone, as they have places to go, things to do, and dreams to achieve.
White liberals: “leave my children alone.” It’s good to finally hear a White person say that.
That “making blacks dependent” has been going on over the past fifty-odd years. It began with ole LBJ’s “Great Society,” upon the implementation of which he is infamously noted to have stated, “I’ll have those N****** voting democrat for the next hundred years.” (Or, was it 200?) And, they are half way there! By the way, here are some VERY scary stats:
In 1960, barely 2 percent of all American children, from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, lived with a never married parent. By 2008, 41 percent of black children, 18 percent of Hispanic children, and 7 percent of white children lived in a home with an unmarried parent.
Over this same period of time, from 1960 to 2008, the percentage of white adults that are married dropped from 74 percent to 56 percent, Hispanic adults from 72 percent to 50 percent, and black adults from 61 percent to 32 percent. Since that “legislating from the bench” SCOTUS decree in ’73, Americans have killed the equivalent of entire populations of several ‘countries’ through abortion – 61 million and counting.
THINK about just those black families – from being “part of” JUST 2% of ALL children, probably a .0 something percentage, living in an unmarried household to OVER 41% today! What on God’s green Earth could possibly go wrong with that “devolvement?”
Science is “white”?! Back in the 1990s I read about something called “women’s physics” and thought things couldn’t get any sillier than that. Guess I was wrong…
Every day it appears we Americans are making Nikita Khrushchev into the second coming of Nostradamus. “I once got in trouble for saying, ‘We will bury you’. Of course, we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.” America is getting “long in the tooth” for being THE preeminent world power. “The average of the world’s great civilizations before they decline has been 200 years.” 1776, Alexander Fraser Tytler
As many have reported, China’s long term (formerly 100 years) vision is to be the World’s #1 economy by around 2025! Anybody, besides me, feeling that “decline?”