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June 23, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
08:03
Two Truths About Race in America
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about race in America.
And one of them is, in Charles Murray's view, the issue of test scores and different racial groups or ethnic groups.
And I asked about the disparity between white and Asian test scores, and you were saying? - I was saying that Asians are really overrepresented statistically at the very high end.
So you have a lot of absolutely brilliant Asians.
That is even greater than the difference in means.
I was thinking over the break, Dennis, some things I just have to say because anytime you're talking about test scores and IQ and race, it's really easy for people to confuse a difference in means with a difference that sorts people into different bins.
That's just not true.
As I constantly put it, millions of blacks are smarter than millions of whites.
We're talking about overlapping distributions.
It shouldn't be a big deal.
We have made it into a big deal because we have taken the differences that exist in the population at large and we have, through public policy and university policy, translated those differences all the way through the steps of the educational process so the people who graduate with educational credentials have been chosen all the way through.
Evil genius.
So that you have exactly the same disparities among black and white bachelor's degree holders and black and white master's degree holders as you do in the population at large.
That should not exist.
There should be no important difference between people holding the same educational credentials.
But there is.
And the reason for that?
It's affirmative action.
If you are black and you...
Have a test score of X, you have a chance of getting into Harvard that would be zero if you were Asian or white.
That's just a fact.
Being black, or for that matter, being Latino, is factored into the admissions process so that you end up with SAT score differences of up to a couple of hundred points between Asians and blacks, for example, in the same university in coming class. for example, in the same university in coming class.
I have opposed affirmative action from the very beginning, and my argument was that it hurts blacks.
And I don't know why one would have goodwill toward minorities and still do this.
Among other things, it cheapens black achievement.
Because, I mean, I'm sure you feel the same way.
I feel passionately the same way.
Imagine what it's like.
By the way, I understand you have two white guys saying, oh, blacks should realize how much it's hurting them, and I know it sounds condescending, but dammit.
It's not nearly as condescending as affirmative action, as changing standards because of your color.
That's condescending.
Exactly.
So imagine the situation.
If you were black in the 1940s, you had to be twice as good as the whites to get the job, because in that time, you faced real discrimination in the job market.
These days, you're a talented black, and you get hired.
Everybody in that company is saying, well, is this guy an affirmative action hire?
And you have to be twice as good as the white guys today just to prove to everybody, no, you really belong there.
And I'll tell you another thing that's even sadder as far as I'm concerned.
You have very talented black kids that enter MIT or Harvard or Princeton or Yale.
And let's say they want to be engineers.
They've made great engineers, and if they went to a good, solid state school, they'd graduate and be fine engineers.
But they are going into an MIT class where they aren't up against other kids that are pretty smart.
They're up against some super smart kids, and they're at the bottom of the class, the black kids are.
They're stupid.
They're smart.
But they have been mismatched into a situation which leads to a lot higher dropout rates for talented blacks in these elite universities than should exist.
Now, I say that if I'm wrong about that, admissions officers and presidents of elite universities publish the data.
Prove me wrong that they do just fine in intellectually demanding courses.
And don't drop out in larger numbers.
They won't release those numbers.
It's an invitation to failure.
United Airlines announced that it's reserving half of its pilot places to women and minorities, people of color, I think is the term they used.
And all that will do, in my opinion, is, and I fly constantly, the next time, not next time, but five years from now, if I meet a female pilot.
If I meet a female pilot now and I've had any number of them, all I thought was a talented woman became a pilot.
Fine.
It's not an issue.
I don't give a hoot.
But I'm not going to think I don't give a hoot five years from now.
Exactly right.
And even now, even now, here's another commentary on what affirmative action has done to us.
If you are going to go out and choose a cardiologist, And the only information you are given about the alternative cardiologists in your area is their race, a rational, non-racist person that will say, well, if that's the only thing I ought to go on, I'm choosing the Asian.
That should not be true.
You actually don't have that much information knowing they're Asian, but you have better than zero.
And we also go into that knowing that black medical students are admitted with far lower...
MCAT scores than the white and Asian students.
That is not just a recipe for...
Well, it generates racist responses.
I'm not usually big on policy solutions.
The effect of the U.S. government saying we will no longer give preference to any person because of race, we will have no programs that incentivize...
The economy to treat people by grace?
Our goal is to be completely impartial, treating all Americans as individuals with equal rights and equal innate human dignity.
If the U.S. government, it's impossible to conceive of doing this, if that were to happen, 90% of the racial polarization that's going on in this country would end.
So finally, I don't know if you even know if it's answerable, I have wrestled with this question all of my life.
Given the utter damage affirmative action does, what motivates the people advocating for it?
Well, flight guilt is a real thing.
Flight guilt among the elites, especially, is a real thing.
And I think there are lots of people who are completely sincere in thinking that this is appropriate.
Are they sincere in saying, and there are no differences in ability just because you have 200 different points difference in SAT scores?
Do they really believe that?
Are they so dismissive of those kinds of things when it involves their own children?
Here, I think there is a lot of condescension.
All right, my friend.
Charles Murray, the book is Facing Reality, Two Truths About Race in America.
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