20 Comments
Jul 24, 2023Liked by Free Black Thought

The outcomes cited by Mr. Creswell are well-established and under-appreciated. Furthermore, they make logical sense. Similar findings have been discovered when women pursue STEM at women’s colleges rather than coed institutions, although for different reasons.

We would be happier all around if we sought human flourishing in a variety of forms, rather than obsessing about numeric representations in each racial, gender, and socioeconomic group. For every Black denied admission to an Ivy League university, there are 6-8 times as many Whites who also get that thin envelope as HS seniors.

Human beings pursue in-group racial preferences starting with marriage rates (>85%) and only change over long sweeps of time as individuals know and trust each other. Coercing outcomes is a temporary high with longer term shortcomings.

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Mostly accurate, but I do fear that in some ways this could end up being even worse. The SCOTUS left open a loophole, which is that it's fine for a black student to talk about their race in their essay, and for the school to take that into account. Whereas previously, a black student might've not thought about race in their lives at all, but just "checked the box", now the same black student might think that they should foreground the role of race in their lives, as that's what will be, or was, front and center in the application essay. Paradoxically, we travel down a path of even more focus on racial identity . . .

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This essay raises compelling point. I’m mostly for SC striking AA down because of how uncertain race has become in the USA. “Black” as a racial category became watered down post-1965. How many of the “black” students admitted because of AA were African and Caribbean as opposed to native black slave descendants? I think Justice Thomas addresses this in his opinion. I hope we can move towards a mainstream conversation on what is black in America in an era where Africans and Caribbean migrants are outpacing native born blacks in education and economics.

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I eventually got my PhD in math from Purdue, with undergrad at Creighton. I was almost perfectly placed at both. I doubt I would have made it at MIT for either. It's not that I couldn't understand the same stuff, eventually, but the pace and level of guidance would not have fit me. I thank the Lord that I didn't end up at a school I wasn't matched for. In fact, I could have been challenged a bit more at Creighton (and actually was when thinking pre-med, which helped me learn I really wasn't wired for that), and I barely made it out of Purdue with my ego intact, particularly the first two years which had me considering quitting and going to an easier school. Looking back, though, I wouldn't have changed either school choice for me. (Not that I would send a kid to Creighton anymore. Too expensive and too woke.)

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Jul 24, 2023·edited Jul 25, 2023

We need to attain Equality with the palefaces who cannot figure out planned obsolescence in automobiles half-a-century after the Moon landing? And listen to economists who say nothing about the depreciation of the under engineered crap year after year.

I asked a PhD economist to explain how an automobile engine worked. He couldn't even start.

How many automobiles have Americans trashed since Sputnik? There were 200,000,000 motor vehicles in the US in 1994. Consumerism is based on brainwashing dummies. We could have been teaching double-entry accounting to Black kids at home since the 1950s. What would the effect of that have been by now? My mother paid tuition to nitwit nuns who never taught science. One nun told me, "You will get into a good high school but you won't do well."

Neither of my parents suggested any books K-8. Why don't Black Americans create a K-12 reading list? College is not the be all and end all.

I find it really curious that lots of people with college degrees have not talked about the distribution of steel down skyscrapers since 9/11. Go to school to learn to be told what to think. It's a physics problem guys. Sometimes known as STEM.

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Jul 25, 2023·edited Jul 25, 2023

Perhaps because automobiles are a net good, so we keep pursuing ownership and improvement? Heheh...we all have our buttons. Double-entry accounting would be very easy to teach if they had decent math skills. Understanding how cars work is certainly interesting and useful, but so is almost all knowledge. [Aside: I often ask my students--in my math classes--what to do in a situation I found myself in one summer, driving a 25-foot moving truck pulling a tow dolly with a car through St. Louis on I-44 when we hit stop-and-go traffic, and the truck's temperature gauge started climbing to the point a warning light was coming on. I could not pull off anywhere, and couldn't turn it off in traffic inching along. I ask them what I should do. Maybe one in four classes will have someone with an answer: turn on the heater. Which I did, and my mom and I each lost about 5 lbs <exaggeration>, but the gauge crept down and the truck got into a happier place, and maybe 20 minutes later the traffic opened up. Last time it was a farm girl who told me the solution. My overall point is that it is useful to be able to "know what's going on under the hood" in math as well, instead of trying to memorize math processes, because when they go wrong, your logic can look spectacularly bad.]

I had a colleague who hated that a freshman math course we taught did set theory and logic, since she thought we should teach how to balance checkbooks. Does anybody still do that, with electronic banking? (OK, I use a spreadsheet with known upcoming expenses that might not have cleared yet, but I'm not writing in the back of my checkbook.) It was one of her buttons. My valedictorian-out-of-300+-students sister once cried that people spent all that time on "manicured lawns." Whatever.

I think the cars tend to be recycled for steel, and possibly even plastics to some extent. (A local guy who runs a metal recycling business told me they--the people who take the cars away--shred them and the plastic floats to the top. I have not verified this.)

Yes, people can be swayed to change their priorities, but a priority like automobiles has staying power because it does push buttons, with exceptions for people who live places where it is more trouble than it's worth (e.g., for some people in Chicago, Taipei). Good luck changing that.

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Jul 25, 2023·edited Jul 25, 2023

A 2003 article said that 5th graders could learn accounting as well as college students:

https://www.newswise.com/articles/fifth-graders-learn-accounting-as-well-as-collegians

https://www.upi.com/Accounting-collegians-vs-5th-graders/82121056408042/

Accounting Theory and Practice, (1922) Vol 1&2, by Roy B. Kester

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/70367

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/70556

Depreciation is one of the interesting things about automobiles. Ever heard any economists talk about what American consumers lose on the junk each year? Double entry accounting is 700 years old. How hard can it really be? I am not suggesting that everyone should know how to be a corporate CPA. But how many people had 5 credit cards in the 1950s?

Ever wonder if experts make their area of expertise more difficult than it needs to be?

You measure computer performance with benchmarks. I never saw the word "benchmark" on any IBM documentation while I worked there. I had to write my own to learn that an old computer was faster than its replacement.

Of course all of the electronics in cars these days is another interesting issue. How much still works but gets crushed with the car?

STEM education must provide a curious perspective. The transistors work the same way at every school though. In fact, what I taught myself in high school got me my first job. Two years of electrical engineering was nearly useless.

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What a purely Progressive perspective on Black Americans. I thought I was reading an article written by a bonafide White liberal who viewed Black scholars as incapable of succeeding at higher education schools. When I tapped the links for some of your sources, I discovered you pulled data from a DECADE ago. I always find it quite odd that supposed conservative channels ALWAYS pull their data sources from White Progressives, who have been responsible for creating significant barriers to the learning experiences of Black youth. And when these youths fail, they get blamed for it EXCLUSIVELY.

I’m curious, exactly what “skills” do you specifically identify as being a mark of Black scholars? Because clearly, skills related to academic excellence is not a part of your argument. So, tell me which “skills” mark Black students, and which colleges are most appropriate for these skills ... since we want to play the race card.

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author

Thanks for reading and responding. First things first we are not a "conservative channel." We welcome and have published a wide variety of viewpoints. We are not Conservative Black Thought but Free Black Thought. Mr. Creswell has been published numerous times in the journal and we find him to be a thoughtful and well researched writer. That said, we invite you to write a response to Mr. Creswell's piece. We're all for expanding the conversation and would love to hear what you consider to be a conservative response to the affirmative action decision.

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I’ve read several articles from this platform and on Twitter to identify the conservative bent in this article. As such, my analysis stands. With that said, I’d prefer to read Creswell’s answers to my questions considering he suggested there were special “skills” Black students have that somehow do not align with academic excellence. If he wants to play the race card, then elaborate.

The conservative solution is to apply conservatism equally, and that means valuing the individual and not putting Black students under an umbrella that suggests they are ill-qualified to attend prestigious universities.

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Nowadays, being not-liberal (or not-leftist) can come across as conservative. I'm sure it goes the other way too: If I want to government to force semitruck drivers to have mud flaps so fewer cars have rocks hitting their windshields, to a radical libertarian that stinks of totalitarianism.

Sometimes the only useful data is ten years old.

Academic mismatch is a real thing. I wrote about my own experience, where I was actually matched, but I was mismatched with my first, publish-or-perish job out of grad school, and left that place to go to a university more matched to my professional skills (centered more on teaching and with a more expansive view of what constitutes scholarship). Yes, there's some old data out there, like when Thomas Sowell pointed out that the blacks at MIT were in the top 10% in math of students around the country, but in the bottom 10% in math for students at MIT. That is academic mismatch. I was kind of "the darling of the department" as a math student at Creighton, but would have been a drag on the math classes at MIT. With COVID and CRT motivating schools to take standardized tests less seriously (sometimes not at all), it's unlikely that the situation has gotten any better. As a math prof at a small regional university, I can tell you that students are less and less prepared for their GE-level courses, but part of that is that universities are in denial of the need to remediate students coming out of the high schools. Instead, they dump them into the GE-level courses and hope they'll catch up. It's a very depressing time to be teaching theses courses.

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Everyone is responding to my comment ... except the author.

Thanks, but my questions were SPECIFICALLY directed to the AUTHOR.

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He's referring to skills and preparation in general. Its palpably clear to anybody who has grade 7 English reading skills.

If he were talking of Asian students I doubt you would be so triggered. He is clearly expressing the fact black students, like all students, have skills and preparation, that can be best met at certain schools. As I did. As we all do. Playing the race card like this is exhausting. Respond to the 30 or so irrefutable points he made first maybe?

And perhaps its because thousands of white progressives have worked so hard to help black students the past 40 years that they are often cited? Man you wonder why they bother. Perhaps its because so many scholars who work in race are white? And um, more than half the country is white? Sorry. Not sure what we can do about that.

And I really doubt Roby Chatterji, Shirley Wong, Seungil Yum and Nina Agrawal , just to pick a few, are white progressives.

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The next time I want to chat about Asian students, I will ask you.

My questions remain for the AUTHOR.

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Yes its an ad hominem. Its clear why you're upset with the author, and its not his work.

And its clear you are not interested in the data or facts, but rather with an imagined slight on black students. And on it goes...

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Again, when I want to discuss Asians, I will ask you.

You are not the author of the piece. My questions are not for YOU.

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Ms. Killings,

I would like to respond to your comments.

You ask, “I’m curious, exactly what “skills” do you specifically identify as being a mark of Black scholars[?]” I identify the same skills that are required of any scholar regardless of race, sex, nationality or ethnicity: mastery of an academic discipline and the ability to convey that knowledge to others.

You also write “So, tell me which “skills” mark Black students, and which colleges are most appropriate for these skills ...” Black students, like students of all races, bring their own set of skills and abilities to campus. The most appropriate colleges are the ones which are best suited to the student’s abilities and preparation. This means that they provide an education that is delivered at a pace that is neither too fast nor too slow. These schools challenge the student intellectually, but not so much that they fall behind.

Now let me ask you a few questions.

You imply that I’m playing “the race card.” But isn’t that a case of projection? You concede that you committed a misstep from the outset: wrongly thinking that the article was written by a “bonafide White liberal.” Why is important to know the race and political leanings of an author? Shouldn’t you focus on what the person wrote and not speculate about his or her race?

You write “that supposed conservative channels ALWAYS pull their data sources from White Progressives.” But as the editor pointed out, JFBT is neither conservative nor liberal. It publishes articles from all political perspectives. Are you that unfamiliar with JFBT?

You write “[C]learly, skills related to academic excellence is not a part of your argument.” This is the exact opposite of what I wrote. I specifically tied skills to academic excellence. How did you so grossly misinterpret the piece?

I look forward to your response.

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Perfect.

Now, that I finally have a response from you, I can further my discussion.

I’d like to address the subtle notion you pushed, which suggested Black scholars are not academically prepared to attend these higher education institutions.

For example, you stated, “One reason is that black students will now matriculate to colleges and universities that are best suited to their skills and preparation. Under affirmative action, two problems arose. One problem was that many black students were admitted to selective schools that presented challenges beyond their academic abilities.”

The source you hyperlinked to support your assertion does NOT validate what is perceived to be a prevalent stereotype that people have about Black students. Every institution that accepts a scholar (save perhaps in the case of legacy admissions) WILL require a plethora of metrics for acceptance. SAT scores are obviously NOT the only element a school looks at. Your statement, as I have already argued, plays into the stereotype because of how you’ve framed your argument without provided the adequate source to support it.

Secondly, I play the race card whenever I need to push the conversations forward as it relates to Black Americans, especially when scholarly articles are presented that too often paint Black Americans as a bunch of idiots. I have no problem addressing race when the authors CHOOSE to make race a primary topic.

Lastly, I’m not an affirmative action supporter. Universities will pivot and will extend more outreach efforts to recruit Black brilliance in their schools. I know this, because the University of California has done this, of which I am graduate (BA and MA). So, please trust, you are not responding to someone who cannot ascertain when she sees scholarly opinions written with a slight bent of Black stereotypical jargon.

To address one more matter, when I mention progressive data, I am specifically referring to the general reports that emerged from researchers and institutions that have a long-standing history of looking at Black America to produce numbers that do NOT represent the full story. They fulfill specific agendas. For this reason, any data void of quantitative AND qualitative research and analysis will ALWAYS be suspect to me. This skepticism should not seem foreign to ANY one who values truth.

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Ms. Killings,

You write, “I’d like to address the subtle notion you pushed, which suggested Black scholars are not academically prepared to attend these higher education institutions.” You are distorting what I wrote. I was referring to only some black students and only some universities, not all of them. Please read carefully.

You also write, “So, please trust, you are not responding to someone who cannot ascertain when she sees scholarly opinions written with a slight bent of Black stereotypical jargon.” Given what you’ve written so far, I can’t trust your ability to comprehend even the most basic information, much less subtle points.

For these and other reasons, I’m suspending any discussion with you.

Have a good day.

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Well, since you won't engage with my critique here, I will bring this discussion to Twitter.

Have a great day.

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