In the early 1990s, Pinch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, was quoted by New York magazine as saying that if older white males felt alienated by the changes Pinch was making to the Times, this was proof that “we’re doing something right.”
Over the weekend in his paper, token conservative Timesman Ross Douthat explored “The Roots of White Anxiety:”
Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.
This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.
This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.
But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.
This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.
Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.
This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they’re assembling their freshman classes.
If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there’s more to diversity than skin color — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more R.O.T.C. cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.
And speaking of aspiring farmers, Andrew Breitbart begins his latest round of video drops:
We are in possession of a video in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail, that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.
In the first video, Sherrod describes how she racially discriminates against a white farmer. She describes how she is torn over how much she will choose to help him. And, she admits that she doesn’t do everything she can for him, because he is white. Eventually, her basic humanity informs that this white man is poor and needs help. But she decides that he should get help from “one of his own kind”. She refers him to a white lawyer.
Sherrod’s racist tale is received by the NAACP audience with nodding approval and murmurs of recognition and agreement. Hardly the behavior of the group now holding itself up as the supreme judge of another groups’ racial tolerance.
The second video affirms the real reason there is tension between the Democratic Party and a growing mass of middle Americans — and it’s not because of race.
The NAACP which has transformed from a civil rights group to a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party and social-justice politics, supports a new America that relies less on individualism, entrepreneurialism and American grit, but instead giddily embraces, the un-American notion of unaccountability and government dependence. Shirley Sherrod, a federal appointee who oversees over a billion dollars of federal funds, nearly begs black men and women into taking government jobs at USDA — because they won’t get fired.
This is why the Democratic Party is scared. This is why the NAACP is scared. This is why black conservatives, previously marginalized as “Uncle Toms” by these progressive bullies, and shamefully, the NAACP, are coming out of the woodwork to join and, in many cases, lead the Tea Party movement.
The emerging Tea Party nation understands that the media has focused on the manufactured racial schism while intentionally ignoring the schism between free market thinkers and government expansionists, that the latter of which is brazen in its desire to transform America into a European-model welfare state with a healthy dose of socialism.
It’s unfortunate that the NAACP’s recent resolution and false accusations have forced us to show you video 1 when video 2 is the bigger problem. That’s not to say video 1 is not a problem, but this country can ill afford, in this time of economic peril, to waste our time poking and prodding at the racial hornet’s nest that was supposed to have been removed with this post-racial presidency. But now President Obama and the modern-day Democrat party reveal they are anything but post-racial.
Yet again, the juxtaposition of the real video evidence shown here versus the mainstream media’s straight faced reportage of the NAACP’s baseless accusations demonstrates that, once again, the American main stream media has asserted itself as the number one enemy of the truth, when the facts don’t fit the left-wing narrative. Like the NAACP, it has become no better than Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in its willingness to exploit race for political ends and their unflinching support of the Obama’s left-wing agenda.
Click over to watch the aforementioned videos.
And then check out Stanley Crouch, who asks in the New York Daily News, “Is NAACP blind to Farrakhan & Co.? The Nation of Islam is built on racism and lies:”
I do not think that the NAACP was out of order in asking the Tea Party movement to separate itself from the racists in its midst, but the famous civil rights organization ought to start by following the same suggestion.
During the great March On Washington in August of 1963, the Nation of Islam was not invited. Its members were not bothered because Malcolm X was to become a bit more famous by ridiculing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the whole affair as a meaningless piece of theater held in check by the almighty white man.
But by the end of the decade, the civil rights movement had fallen to pieces shortly after King’s assassination in 1968. Black Power emerged and whites were discouraged from joining or attempting to join anything supposedly free of white control.
Integration was out, self-segregation was in. That’s the way it actually was.
This was intellectual pollution. It is now known as “identity politics.” A toxic form of pretension, it had certain memorable ingredients. They were all conveniently superficial. Big hair styles, name changes, African clothing, combat boots, reading the combative works of Frantz Fanon and just about anyone from anywhere in the world ready to call white people dirty names and blame capitalist Western culture for the troubles of the planet.
“Unity” became the loud call and was thought capable of putting color prejudice in its place. All black people needed to do was cease going in a number of separate directions. It was no longer time to come to Jesus; it was time to come together! Color was the ultimate reality, they said; the white man could maintain power only if black people kept spinning their wheels on separate paths.
That was the point at which previously unacceptable racist cults like the Nation of Islam became acceptable. Those brothers and sisters must have been doing something right because the white man didn’t like them. Hmmm. Shoddy thinking, but pervasive.
Indeed.™
Related: Speaking of the New York Times, “Matt Bai repeats the big lie:”
New York Times reporter Matt Bai is writing for readers who get their news from, well, the New York Times. So he feels free to regurgitate this:
The question of racism in the amorphous Tea Party movement is, of course, a serious one, since so much of the Republican Party seems to be in the thrall of its activists. There have been scattered reports around the country of racially charged rhetoric within the movement, most notably just before the vote on the new health care law last March, when Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, the legendary civil rights leader, was showered with hateful epithets outside the Capitol.
There are a few problems with this assertion regarding the report that John Lewis was showered with “hateful epithets” outside the Capitol last March. There was supposedly only one epithet involved. Rep. Andre Carson was supposedly there for the walk along with Lewis. And what about Reps. Emanuel Cleaver and James Clyburn? What are they? Chopped liver? Not legendary, I guess.
The real problem with Bai’s assertion is that it didn’t happen. It’s a big lie. A complete and utter crock. Thus the failure of any independent witness or journalist to vouch for the story, and the failure of any video to corroborate it and win Andrew Breitbart’s $100,000 reward. On the contrary, the video record decisively refutes the story.Is it possible that Matt Bai doesn’t know this? Only if he gets his news from the New York Times.
Is the..? Of course it is.
Update: USDA Official In Breitbart Video Goes Under the Bus.
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