The Bias Fallacy: the skills gap, not systemic racism, explains demographic disparities. By Heather MacDonald.
Virtually all mainstream institutions now agree that a nonracially proportionate workforce proves racism, including their own. Organizations preemptively accuse themselves of discrimination without waiting for the inevitable indictment. …
The PC mob obstinately refuses to notice reality:
What is never asked is the proportion of competitively qualified blacks in the hiring or promotion pool. It is taken as an a priori truth that they are available in the same measure as in the population at large.
But the expectation of proportional representation in every profession is groundless, thanks to the academic skills gap. The unequal distribution of skills, not bias, explains the lack of racial proportionality in employment.
The median black eighth-grader does not possess even basic math skills. “Basic” skills, as defined by the National Assessment of Education Progress exam, means partial mastery of grade-related knowledge. Fifty-three percent of black eighth-graders scored “below basic” on math in 2017. Only 11 percent of black eighth-graders were proficient in math, and 2 percent were advanced. By contrast, 20 percent of white eighth-graders were below basic in 2017, 31 percent were proficient, and 13 percent were advanced. Only 12 percent of Asian eighth-graders were below basic, 32 percent were proficient, and 32 percent were advanced. The picture was not much better in reading. …
There are simply not enough black STEM Ph.D.s to go around. In 2017, blacks made up 1.2 percent of all doctorates awarded in physics to U.S. citizens and permanent residents… Blacks earned 0.9 percent of all mathematics and statistics doctorates, 1 percent of all doctorates in computer science, 2 percent of all doctorates in chemistry, and 1.7 percent of all doctorates awarded in engineering disciplines. There were no black Ph.D. graduates in medical physics, atmospheric physics, chemical and physical oceanography, plasma/high-temperature physics, logic, number theory, robotics, or structural engineering. How academic STEM departments and Silicon Valley tech firms are going to fulfill their diversity pledges in light of that dearth of supply is a mystery. …
Systemic racism is a myth, politically convenient for those who promote it. People who point that out are, naturally, cancelled.
The myth of bias, whether in medicine, technology, or finance, can be maintained only by ignoring the skills gap. There simply are not enough competitively qualified black candidates to go around. Moreover, one-third of all black males have a felony conviction. Such convictions do not happen by chance; they signal involvement with the street culture of guns, drugs, and impulsivity, none of which is a selling point to employers. The prevalence of out-of-wedlock births in the black community (over 69 percent of all births) means that a high percentage of black females are burdened with solo child-rearing responsibilities. Such responsibilities make advancement more difficult, no matter the amount of employer paid leave.
As long as data on the skills and behavior gap remain available, it is possible to challenge the myth of bias, at least in theory. So those facts must themselves be canceled, as well as anyone who publicizes them. That is the ultimate motivation for the movement to end the use of standardized tests in admissions. All minimally selective institutions of higher education practice race-norming in the evaluation of test results already, holding blacks and Hispanics to a lower standard than whites and Asians. The tests do not impede racial preferences; colleges simply ignore the results for the sake of diversity.
Hey, ho, meritocracy has to go:
Graduate programs have been dropping the GREs [Graduate Record Examinations] because of their disparate impact. Half of all physics and astronomy departments, and nearly as many molecular biology and neuroscience programs, no longer require them. … Harvard and Caltech’s physics departments suspended the general GRE and the physics subject test in 2020, citing coronavirus concerns; they will likely not reinstate them.
The rejection of objective standards of accomplishment is nihilistic. … To maintain that colorblind tests are meaningless in demonstrating cognitive mastery is to deny the very possibility of assessing accomplishment. Knowledge and skill exist, and they are measurable, if not always perfectly. Standardized tests are under attack only because blacks and Hispanics, on average, score poorly on them. If there were no group differences in outcome, no one would think about eliminating the very measures that were introduced to overcome group favoritism. …
Accomplishment is also cancelled. As is acknowledging the West’s enormous contribution to human achievement:
The next step in the unwinding of objective standards is to reject the notion of accomplishment itself. It has become career-ending to hold that some individuals or cultures achieve more than others. The ever-more sweeping deprecation of Western civilization refuses to acknowledge the West’s unparalleled contributions to human progress.
And now the behavioral norms that lead to individual success are being relativized as well. The National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington declared this past summer that rationality, the two-parent family, punctuality, self-control, and being polite were “white” traits. The museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, thus strengthened the underclass stigma against “acting white,” defined as trying hard in school and obeying one’s teacher. How the Smithsonian’s leaders thought that they were helping black children by teaching them to scorn “hard work” and “delayed gratification” goes unexplained. …
Whatever it takes, to eradicate disparate impact:
America’s elites have apparently decided that if, after five decades of massive financial outlays and obsessive attention from policymakers, the academic skills gap has not closed, it is time to break up the objective yardsticks that measure it. The same will happen regarding crime data. At present, data that show the vastly disproportionate rate of black criminal offending are still available from a few local police departments. Expect to find such facts harder to obtain from government agencies until they are disappeared entirely. .
The myth of bias is destroying our most fundamental institutions. Given the unequal distribution of skills, it is irrational to expect proportional representation in every profession. Yet elite whites would rather blame themselves for phantom racism than acknowledge the skills gap.
Another PC fantasy, tearing the West apart for the profit of a few.
