Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society. By Richard Bernstein.
A broad revolution is underway in the United States as traditional standards used to measure achievement and provide opportunity are being rejected by schools, corporations, and governments in favor of quotas based on race and gender.
Equality of opportunity is officially out, replaced by equality of outcome:
On just his sixth day in office, President Biden signaled that the nation’s long held principle of equality for all had come to an end, signing an executive order declaring that “racial equity is not just an issue for any one department of government; it has to be the business of the whole of government” — equity referring to the idea that merely treating everybody the same is not enough, and that an equal outcome for all people has to be the goal. …
Who’d want to be a white man working for the US Government or one of these companies?
In May, Hewlett-Packard, the technology company with 50,000 employees worldwide, decreed that by 2030 half of its leadership positions and more than 30% of its technicians and engineers have to be women and that the number of minorities should “meet or exceed” their representation in the tech industry workforce.
That same month, United Airlines announced that half of the 5,000 pilots it would train at its proprietary flight school between now and 2030 will be women or people of color, with scholarships provided by United and JPMorgan Chase helping with tuition. There was nothing in the United announcement showing that there were enough qualified blacks and women in the pipeline so that a black/female quota of 2,500 new pilots could be filled, and nothing about what the company would do if there weren’t enough qualified candidates. …
The left’s coalition of the fringes demands its spoils, now that the Democrats are in power again. In tribal politics, as our African friends point out, the winner takes all:
Discontent over the pace of racial progress, fueled in the past year by the Black Lives Matter movement, has led to an explicit rejection of meritocracy and a call for old standards to make way for new ones.
In the recent past, that effort often involved working with the existing ideological framework of equality of opportunity and merit to identify worthy candidates. Now, the trend is to reject and redefine those standards. …
To say that the concept of “best” needs to be redefined in racial terms is already a significant departure from the idea of neutral standards. To go from there to the notion that meritocracy is a racist stratagem is a sea change, but there is a lot of evidence that that is exactly where society is going, in both small ways and large. …
Even the doctors are going along with the new racism:
The very august American Medical Association announced in May a new Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity in medical education and practice. …
Perhaps the most striking passages in the AMA document are those that have to do with equality and meritocracy, which it calls “malignant narratives.”
“Seeking to treat everyone the ‘same’ ignores the historical legacy of disinvestment and deprivation,” the document says of equality, while meritocracy is “a narrative that attributes success and failure to individual abilities and merits. It does not address the centuries of unequal treatment that have historically robbed communities of the vital resources needed to thrive.”
Some critics have noted that the Strategic Plan says nothing about competency; several doctors posting to the blog Legal Insurrection asked if members of the AMA would be comfortable allowing them or their families to be treated, as one of them put it, “by those who have MD attached to their names solely in the name of equity … not because of meritocracy or qualification.”
The AMA rejects that view. …
Blatantly unfair, so why bother trying? Widespread incompetence will result.
The AMA Plan also fails to address the question of principle raised by applying different standards to different groups. Is it fair to effectively prevent some qualified individuals from becoming doctors because their gender or race requires them to score higher than other genders or races? …
“We are taught to study for the test, to get good grades,” Kenny Xu, author of a forthcoming book “An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy,” said in an email. “Why? Because those good grades and test scores will, and should, lead to rewards in the future.
“How would you feel if someone who studied a third as much as you did got an opportunity you’ve been wanting for years? That would be absolutely unfair. And yet, that is what woke ideology does.” …
Elite schools including Lowell High School in San Francisco have dropped their admissions test in favor of a lottery system. This may increase racial diversity, but will the school be able to maintain its high academic standards? …
Merit is out in the USA. Where is this leading?
American high school students have steadily been falling behind their Asian and European counterparts in math and science, most recently ranking 37th in the PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, which gives a test to 15-year-olds in countries around the world. China’s Shanghai ranks No.1.
The California Math Framework does not acknowledge that in Shanghai, the entirely opposite ideas about testing and standards are followed and implemented, with students tested early and often and placed into classes in accordance with their scores. …
The woke left is composed of ugly people who want to be treated as beautiful people, bad people who want to be treated as good people, stupid people who want to be treated as smart people, and the grifters who profit from the above.
The moon landing was the high point. Then the affirmative action and administrative bloat began.
