Check out any professional and most college basketball
teams. Their starting five, and most of their other 10 players, are black,
as is 80% of the NBA.
This does not come anywhere close to the diversity
and inclusion sought by the nation's social justice warriors. Both professional
and college coaches have ignored and threw any pretense of seeking diversity
and inclusiveness.
My question to you is: Would a basketball team be
improved if coaches were required to include ethnically diverse players for the
sake of equity?
I have no idea of what your answer might be but mine would
be: "The hell with diversity, equity and inclusion. I am going to
recruit the best players and do not care if most of them turn out to be black
players." Another question: Do you think that any diversity-crazed college
president would chastise his basketball coach for lack of diversity and
inclusiveness?
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (National Accelerator
Laboratory) is home to the world's most powerful experiments, fastest
supercomputers and top-notch physics researchers. Much of SLAC's research is on
particle accelerators that are complicated machines that are designed,
engineered and operated to produce high-quality particle beams and develop
clues to the fundamental structure of matter and the forces between subatomic
particles.
You can bet that their personnel makeup exhibits very little concern
about racial diversity, equity and inclusion.
The bulk of their scientists
is not only Americans of European and Asian ancestry but mostly men. My
question to you is: What would you do to make SLAC more illustrative of the
racial, ethnic and sexual diversity of America?
As for me, my answer would be
the same one that I gave in the basketball example: I am going to recruit
the brightest scientists and I do not care if most of them turn out to be men
of European and Asian ancestry.
In the hard sciences, one will find black Americans
underrepresented.
For example, a 2018 survey of the American Astronomical
Society, which includes undergraduates, graduate students, faculty members and
retired astronomers, found that 82% of members identified as white and only
2% as black or African American.
Only 3% of bachelor's degrees in physics
go to black students. In 2017, some fields, such as structural engineering
and atmospheric physics, graduated not a single black Ph.D.
The conspicuous
absence of black Americans in the sciences have little or nothing to do with
racism. It has to do with academic preparation. If one graduates from high
school and has not mastered a minimum proficiency in high school algebra,
geometry and precalculus, it is likely that high-paying careers such as
engineering, medicine, physics and computer technology are hermetically sealed
off for life.
There are relatively few black fighter jet
pilots. There are stringent physical, character and mental
requirements, which many black applicants could meet. But fighter pilots must
also have a strong knowledge of air navigation, aircraft operating procedures,
flight theory, fluid mechanics, meteorology and engineering.
The college majors
that help prepare undergraduates for a career as a fighter pilot include
mathematics, physical science and engineering. But if one graduates from
high school without elementary training in math, it is not likely that he will
enroll in the college courses that would qualify him for fighter pilot
training.
At many predominantly black high schools, not
a single black student tests proficient in math and a very low percentage test
proficient in reading; however, these schools confer a diploma
that attests that the students can read, write and compute at a 12th-grade
level and these schools often boast that they have a 70% and higher graduation
rate.
They mislead students, their families and others by conferring
fraudulent diplomas.
What explains the fact that over 80% of professional
basketball players are black, as are about 70% of professional football
players? Only an idiot would chalk it up to diversity and inclusion.
Instead,
it is excellence that explains the disproportionate numbers.
Jewish
Americans, who are just 3% of our population, win over 35% of the Nobel prizes
in science that are awarded to Americans.
Again, it is excellence that
explains the disproportionality, not diversity and inclusion. As my stepfather
often told me, "To do well in this world, you have to come early and
stay late."
Walter E. Williams is a professor of
economics at George Mason University.
____________________
RELATED
ARTICLE
Institutional Racism
By Walter E. Williams |
Townhall.com
Institutional racism and systemic racism are terms bandied about these days without much clarity.
Being 84 years of age, I have seen and lived through
what might be called institutional racism or systemic racism.
Both operate
under the assumption that one race is superior to another. It involves the
practice of treating a person or group of people differently based on their
race.
Negroes, as we proudly called ourselves back then, were denied entry to
hotels, restaurants and other establishments all over the nation, including the
north.
Certain jobs were entirely off-limits to Negroes. What school a child
attended was determined by his race. In motion pictures, Negroes were portrayed
as being unintelligent, such as the roles played by Stepin Fetchit and Mantan
Moreland in the Charlie Chan movies.
Fortunately, those aspects of racism are a
part of our history. By the way, Fetchit, whose real name was Lincoln Perry,
was the first black actor to become a millionaire, and he has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame and, in 1976, the Hollywood chapter of the NAACP awarded
Perry a Special NAACP Image Award.
Despite the nation's great achievements in race
relations, there remains institutional racism, namely the widespread practice
of treating a person or group of people differently based on their race.
Most
institutional racism is practiced by the nation's institutions of higher
learning.
Eric Dreiband, an assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights
Division of the Department of Justice, recently wrote that Yale University
"grants substantial, and often determinative, preferences based on
race."
The four-page letter said, "Yale's race discrimination
imposes undue and unlawful penalties on racially-disfavored applicants,
including in particular Asian American and White applicants."
Yale University is by no means alone in the practice of
institutional racism. Last year, Asian students brought a discrimination
lawsuit against Harvard University and lost. The judge held that the plaintiffs
could not prove that the lower personal ratings assigned to Asian applicants
are the result of "animus" or ill-motivated racial hostility towards
Asian Americans by Harvard admissions officials.
However, no one offered an
explanation as to why Asian American applicants were deemed to have, on
average, poorer personal qualities than white applicants. An explanation may be
that Asian students party less, study more and get higher test scores than
white students.
In court filings, Students for Fair Admissions argued
that the University of North Carolina's admissions practices are
unconstitutional. Their brief stated: "UNC's use of race is the opposite
of individualized; UNC uses race mechanically to ensure the admission of the
vast majority of underrepresented minorities."
Edward Blum, president of
Students for Fair Admissions, said in a news release that the court filing
"exposes the startling magnitude of the University of North Carolina's
racial preferences."
Blum said that their filing contains statistical
evidence that shows that an Asian American male applicant from North Carolina
with a 25% chance of getting into UNC would see his acceptance probability
increase to about 67% if he were Latino and to more than 90% if he were African
American.
In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209 (also
known as the California Civil Rights Initiative) that read: "The state
shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any
individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national
origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public
contracting."
California legislators voted earlier this summer to put
the question to voters to repeal the state's ban on the use of race as a
criterion in the hiring, awarding public contracts and admissions to public
universities and restore the practice of institutional racism under the
euphemistic title "affirmative action."
When social justice warriors use the terms
"institutional racism" or "systemic racism," I suspect it
means that they cannot identify the actual person or entities engaged in the
practice. However, most of what might be called institutional or systemic
racism is practiced by the nation's institutions of higher learning. And it is
seen by many, particularly the intellectual elite, as a desirable form of
determining who gets what.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of
economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams
and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit
the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
