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Earlier: Georgetown Law Prof Says She Feels Angst Over Low Performance Of Her Black Students, Gets Fired and Second Georgetown Law Prof Is Out. His Crime? Saying “Mmmhhhhhh”
Eleven years ago I spoke at a conference organized by the Black Law Students Association (BLSA) at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. I gave them a race-realist view of black under-achievement, supporting my case with statistics from the Law School Admission Council database of scores on the LSAT exam. You can read the talk on my personal website: Revisiting Race and Remedies: Should the Government Play A Role in Eliminating Racial Disparities in Education and Employment?, April 5, 2010.
Nobody screamed at me or made a fuss.
Socializing with the BLSA people afterwards, I encountered some disagreement, but everyone was cordial.
If I tried to give that talk today, I would probably have caused a riot, and quite likely have been lynched on the spot.
The underlying problem I was discussing, of course: blacks exhibit disappointing statistics on any test of intelligence anyone has been able to devise.
In an effort to improve this, colleges and universities give preferences to blacks. Blacks are accepted with educational credentials that, for students of other races, would be considered too low for admission [Group that sued Harvard asks Supreme Court to end use of race in college admissions, by Nick Anderson and Robert Barnes February 25, 2021].
Here’s how black law professor Stephen L. Carter put it in Reflections Of An Affirmative Action Baby
“I was told by one official that the school had initially rejected me because ‘we assumed from your record that you were white.’ . . . Suddenly coy, he went on to say that the school had obtained ‘additional information that should have been counted in your favor’—that is, Harvard bad discovered the color of my skin.”
Consult the Gods of the Copybook Headings. What do you think they would predict as a consequence of those admissions policies?
The applicant pool for college admissions overall contains very few really bright black students. That race just doesn’t have many academically gifted people. Behind those very few will be some larger number who are adequately bright—bright enough, I mean to cope with college-level material. And behind them is a larger number of applicants who will struggle with that material.
Call these three groups the Smarts, the Adequates, and the Strugglers.
A prestigious university will of course admit all the Smarts it can find from the preferred race, to demonstrate its earnestness to lift the race up.
They won’t find many, though, because there aren’t many. To further inflate numbers from that race, they will admit a lot of Adequates, perhaps even some Strugglers.
In considering applicants from other races, they will have plenty of Smarts they can admit, with perhaps a scattering of Adequates—legacy admissions and such. No need to admit any Strugglers from these other races.
So when a class assembles for instruction, there will be a gratifying number of students from the preferred race in it.
Their statistical profile on ability, however, will be well below that for their classmates of other races.
Comes time for final examinations, students from the preferred race will mostly pool at the bottom of the class rankings.
That would be the prediction offered by the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Is it what we see in practice, in reality?
According to Professor Sandra Sellers, who has been teaching law at Georgetown University, it indeed is:
I hate to say this. I ended up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks. Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, “Oh, come on.” You know. Get some really good ones but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.
Georgetown Law Professors complain about Black Students on Zoom Sandra Sellers David Batson, YouTube.com, March 10, 2021
Too much reality! Prof. Sellers actually said that to a colleague, David Batson, who was also a law professor at Georgetown…at that point.
There is no suggestion that either of them was anything other than a line-toeing liberal.
They’d been conducting a class on Zoom. The class was over; the two professors had stayed Zoom-connected for some discussion about the students. They weren’t aware they were still being recorded.
The recording found its way to social media somehow, the Black Law Students Association declared their intention to commit mass seppuku on Cooper Field if something wasn’t done to assuage their pain, and the university administration swung into action.
They fired Prof. Sellers.
They probably fired Prof. Batson, too. The news stories say he was put on administrative leave, then offered his resignation, which was accepted. In his resignation letter he groveled shamelessly:
I understand … that I missed the chance to respond in a more direct manner to address the inappropriate content of those remarks.
Second Georgetown Law professor leaves in midst of investigation over conversation about Black students, by Lauren Lumpkin, (pictured right) Washington Post, March 12, 2021
All that looks to me like cover for (a) them having demanded his resignation, (b) he having gotten lawyered up, (c) negotiations having taken place, and (d) a severance package having been agreed on, with the grovel as one of the conditions. I’m just speculating, though.
A friend on whom I tried out that speculation responded that academics in the generality are such spineless critters, they don’t need any incentive to cringe and grovel before the Woke Enforcers. Not having any personal knowledge of Prof. Batson, I’ll allow my friend may be right.
Wait a minute, though: The offending words were uttered by Prof. Sellers. What did Prof. Batson do to get himself fired? Did he say something hurtful too?
Actually, no. After Prof. Sellers spoke, Prof. Batson only nodded and made a noncommittal grunt [ Second Georgetown Law professor leaves university over ‘racist’ Zoom video , by Sara Dorn, NY Post, March 13, 2021].
That was it. That was his offense. When someone notices reality in your presence—some aspect of reality that contradicts the Ruling Class Narrative—it’s not enough to just keep shtum. You have to jump up and denounce the other party for Hate Speech!
Since folks are trying to defend Prof. Batson: 1) he had an obligation to call her out on it & report her and did not, 2) the source was a student in their class, not him and not me, 3) this recording was up and available to students in the class for weeks before being taken down pic.twitter.com/toGUJb82dJ
— Hassan Ahmad (@hahmad1996) March 11, 2021
Passivity in the face of counter-revolutionary speech is itself counter-revolutionary, comrade!
This little tale doesn’t just tell you how far we have sunk, but also the rate at which we’ve been sinking—the first derivative, for you math geeks. In layman’s language, it’s going off the chart.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
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Here is a statement that Richard Topcliffe and other Elizabethan, and Puritan, torturers and investigators lived by: Passivity in the face of counter-revolutionary speech is itself counter-revolutionary, comrade!
That is, for example, the reason that Thomas More had to be executed.
I watch a lot of NASA TV as there are some big missions going on and scheduled for this year. Artemis tests and launch, Perseverance Mars rover, James Webb space telescope launch but February was black history month and March women’s whatever month so NASA has dutifully trotted out its AA negro employees and its women to make PR appearances. They even made sure to have a negro Astronaut aboard the ISS to mark the occasion and named a NASA building in D.C. after one of the “Hidden Figures” movie characters and the site of Perseverance’s landing after a negro woman sci-fi writer I had never heard of.
The sad thing is negroes have always been superfluous to NASA. Obama even made a negro NASA’s administrator though to do so he had to fire Dr. Michael Griffin, a man with 8 university degrees. Obama’s man ( Charles Bolden) was the only NASA administrator to never put a US astronaut into space!
The women’s side of things is not so bleak as women have always done important work at NASA but they were the wrong color. For example, Marjorie Townsend led the team that developed the telemetry systems for US weather satellites ( one of the civilian spinoffs were those clunky 8 track tape cassettes that appeared in record stores around 1970) so her work was vastly more important than any of the Hidden Figures characters so no building after her but her legacy is a lot more significant than any negro who ever picked up a NASA paycheck.
In TN, it is common to ignore people with names like Hassan Ahmad.
What’s really off the charts is the second derivative, the acceleration in our descent.
I’m afraid to admit that I attended law school, a pretty good one, and after a couple of weeks I was embarrassed to be there. It was so stupid.
I think the smart blacks know that they’d be a lot better off if they didn’t spend three years of their productive lives reading cases and pretending that our appellate judicial world has any attachment whatsoever to reality.
Oh wow, Derb. You’ve just created a new Three Layer theory (see Curtis Yarvin) with your Smarts, Adequates, and Strugglers. You genius, you.
By the way, when a woman says “I hate to say this” it’s in the same category as:
“Much as I hate to say it…”
“I can’t believe she said that.”
“I can’t believe she did that.”
Some philosopher needs to explain what women really mean with such intros to an unapproved thought.
My lefty wife recently retired from a semi-elite liberal arts college in Ohio. Their student body is 9% black. She confessed a year or so before retirement that all her bad students were black, and that she had one or two who simply couldn’t learn. That would be Spanish.
However, she did not elaborate. She had come too close to the edge of sanity. I didn’t comment either, so I’m in the same position as Prof. Batson. Of course, I am a believer in HBD and the necessity of White Separatism, so I am evil and deserve punishment. But I am retired, too, and my wife doesn’t know for sure what I think. She may have suspicions.
I’m reading The Gulag Archipelago now.
In it, we learn of people sent off to labor camps for a smile, or lack of a smile, or looking askance at a portrait of Stalin, or setting a drink down on a photo of Stalin in a newspaper, or carrying a bust of Stalin by a rope around its neck, or…countless other mindless actions of everyday life.
There really is nothing new under the sun.
So, where do they go instead?
Well, if they’re smart, which is what I stipulate, they set up an inner city vote fraud business and finance a roofing business with the proceeds.
I’ve known black guys who are this smart and have no interest in kissing ass in some female-run activist law factory.
A great reality TV show would be to place one of those insufferable woke, black women with a huge afro on a space mission with regular astronauts.
“Is it your turn to take out the space trash this week LaToya?”
“Fuck you, I ain’t yo’ maid!”
Contrary to National-Socialism, where you had to be of the wrong race or strongly transgress against current dogma, Communism has always birthed equal-opportunity removal regimes.
The 3rd derivative of position is also very high. It’s called the jerk, and I don’t refer to the President here.
“When someone notices reality in your presence—some aspect of reality that contradicts the Ruling Class Narrative—it’s not enough to just keep shtum.”
Sounds like the properly Yiddish thing to do. Funny how a lot of these Jewish liberals like Sellers, Aaron Kindsvatter, Bari Weiss, James Bennet, etc. are getting entangled in the snares of cancel culture themselves now, which was always supposed to be just a trap for “deplorable & irredeemable” “white nationalist” types. There can’t help but be a certain amount of satisfaction in watching them getting hoisted by their own petards. But if cancel culture keeps coming after Jews too, who will win that clash?
“When someone notices reality in your presence—some aspect of reality that contradicts the Ruling Class Narrative—it’s not enough to just keep shtum. You have to jump up and denounce the other party for Hate Speech!”
It was sometimes worse than “jump up and denounce the other party” in the late 60’s at my elite New England university. The other party sometimes suffered worse than a denunciation. In one incident, when the victim reported the greater-than-denunciation to the university president, the response of the president was to point to the telephone on his desk, and say: “Where would you like to be a student tomorrow?” as he reeled-off the names of a few Ivies as alternatives. “Just tell me, and I’ll get on the phone with my counterpart university president. It appears that you’ve worn-out you’re welcome here.” (Forgive the quotes because I cannot recall the exact words, but that was the gist of it.)
This “telephone” anecdote was not mine. But I had my own. I did not bother proceeding to a telephone pointing.
Hate facts will not be tolerated.
Will these leftist egalitarians wake up now? How many of these goodwhites will have to lose their jobs and social status before they come out of their daze? I wonder how these upper middle class liberals react when their kids get passed over for schools and jobs? As the economy contracts in the next few years, I expect more people will start to get it.
Never resign, never apologize, fight them on everything.
This, of course, is an integral and critical component of The Plan. Given that none of the many other subterfuges has worked in achieving the preferred optics, the new method involves dumbing down virtually every standard and situation such that no one is challenged and everyone passes.
Look at course and examination materials from generations past and you’ll see that this has already been SOP for quite awhile now. We have to keep racing to catch this particular falling knife though.
)))Hassan Ahmad(((
Is anyone surprised?
The requirement for equality between White and any other group is written into law in the US in the form of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as interpreted by the US Judicial Branch. This requirement is not new, it is old. It just took some time to implement. Caldwell’s Age of Entitlement covers the implementation at length. Dumbing down is the only successful way so far to eliminate the gap between White and Black groups. Any school that would not dumb down would be subject to Civil Rights litigation.
So think about this: The enforced dumbing down will continue until the 1964 Civil Rights Act is repealed or otherwise becomes a dead letter. Think of the changes that would be required for that to happen.
I am still waiting in vain for a protest by a Times or Post columnist. Even the worst of liberals should be able to see that this is not only unjust toward the two professors but a shocking violation of the American sense of freedom of expression. But it seems that the lines are drawn, and Derbyshire alas is right: For badthinking whites, even the best-intentioned of them, no mercy.
That would be Spanish.
From an HBD standpoint, that’s interesting. If there is one academic area blacks should be able to hold their own, it would be foreign languages. Learning to speak a foreign language does not require a high IQ and African blacks are generally very proficient in multiple languages. So there is probably a strong cultural element at work.
Of course, if your wife is trying to get black students to read and write in Spanish and learn formal grammar, then yes, God help her. Black students would probably do well in a language class that focuses on speaking and mimicry.
I’m sure this has been discussed at Unz somewhere, but it does seem that Woke and Intersectionality are driven more by Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrants looking to piggyback on preferences than by American blacks themselves.
I read about this incident on some black website. They were convinced that Sellers’ rueful admission of guilt over having so many black students cluster at the bottom was evidence of her racism. To them, she was admitting that she unfairly downgraded black students. That was the only reason they didn’t do well. There could be no other explanation.
I really, really, really do not mean to be rude but.
That is a dumb question.
Yeah, agreed, but.
There are none so stupid as those that will not learn from experience.
Or perhaps a better version: there are none so stupid as those who do not need to learn from experience.
Look at what a botch all of our high-IQ white leaders have done to the country. People like Hillary Clinton etc. are nominally high IQ, but their track record is one of abysmal failure. And it doesn’t matter, they sail on from honor to honor.
The CEOs of the Wall Street banks that failed were nominally high IQ, but they drove their institutions into the ground and were bailed out and given massive performance bonuses and are now chuckling at us proles over their champagne.
We are I think in a post-IQ world. Could these low IQ diversity champions being admitted into our elite universities really do any worse?
It’s not about IQ. It’s not about reason. it’s about power.
Ahhh…. a liberal academic jew ‘cancelled’ for a perfectly innocent observation, the old hoist and petard…..
may there be many many more…
excellent…
Why would philosophers waste time deciphering the incongruent contents of a womans head ….
A pointless, fruitless endeavour..
aristophanes dealt with just this topic centuries ago and believe me when I say nothing has changed.
You don’t think anyone ever wakes up? All hope is lost? Must be very cloudy where you live.
I was always told there were no “dumb questions”, just dumb people. How’s that book coming along? Got enough crayons?
@7 bob sykes: You are going to have to choose between your wife and sanity/reality. Those who think they can straddle the middle ground are running out of room.
I said I didn’t want to be rude.
In my experience, the true, hardcore leftist never does. He doubles down and digs deeper. Now, there are a lot of hangers-on and leftist cosplayers, kids who just wanna get laid, kids who want to get in with the cool crowd – there may be some hope there. I pretended to be a leftist once.
It is. That’s why I come here. Over at Audacious Epigone they all think the country’s gonna split up. I don’t, because I’m more pessimistic than they. It’s cloudy in my neck of the woods.
Yeah, but if you’re a man, with spine you lose everything. Even a 33 years old itinerant preacher from the Middle East knew that: For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
The entire 3 tier structure of Strugglers, Adequates and Smarts is perfect.
You can easily shoehorn people of all races into any of the 3.
Strugglers are to be directly incentivized to reproduce as little as possible, Adequates would depending on race be either left alone or supported to breed more, and Smarts of all races are to be bred as much as possible.
In due time, the entire race question is completely taken care of, as the amount of Strugglers would be reduced massively.
‘Strugglers are to be directly incentivized to reproduce as little as possible, Adequates would depending on race be either left alone or supported to breed more, and Smarts of all races are to be bred as much as possible.’
That’s dated. After 2020, I have no interest in blacks in any way, shape, or form.
Au contraire. The driving into the ground produced high bonuses and high salaries, the bail outs enabled the whole thing to start over, only this time turbocharged by low interest rates and asset inflation.
The high IQ people who cared about the long term sustainability of the bank would never have made partner no matter how high IQ they were. The high IQ people who cared about their personal enrichment were the ones at the top.
And when the SHTF, the high IQ people at the top were able to persuade the politicians they’d previously bought that they HAD to be bailed out or the sky would fall.
It’s time to stop pussyfooting with affirmative action and go whole hog – make the Ivy League 100% black, until black and white wealth and income reach parity. Consider it reparation.
Anything less is just leftist hypocrisy, and a waste of time.
It was Bolden who said NASA had the goal of “Muslim outreach.” WTF? No wonder the astronauts remained on the ground.
If Cape Canaveral started to look run down, if it became dangerous to visit, if trash were strewn across the grounds, if drug use and crime became common, if NASA became totally dysfunctional, etc., then Bolden would have truly put his AA mark on the organization.
One of my brothers went to law school. He had a rough first semester and found he didn’t like the law field, but by this point he had taken the loan money and it had to be repaid, with or without a law degree, so he stuck with it. Now he’s in his upper 60s, he still doesn’t like it, his life is miserable, the job is destroying his life and health, and he’ll probably die at his desk, working well past midnight, or while driving long distances to visit clients.
Anyone thinking of going to law school should read this first:
Why You Should Not Go to Law School
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/02/tucker-max/why-you-should-not-go-to-lawschool/
Several decades ago a coworker told me about a true case of a dumb question. He was in his first day of a college biology class and, in giving his presentation, the professor happened to mention that male sperm has a high sugar content. Without thinking through her question, a young blonde girl asked, “But why does it taste so salty?”
There was a moment of stunned silence as people realized what had just escaped from the blonde’s lips and then the class roared with laughter. The professor was at a loss for words himself. The blonde belatedly realized there is indeed such a thing as a dumb question and, after turning extremely red-faced, she stood up, walked out of the class and never returned.
A lot of that article is correct, especially if you can only get into a second or third rate law school. I found some value in being in one of the better schools, but that’s because it gave me entree into interesting work that was not practicing law.
Being anything can get boring at times. Doing anything without interior motive is deadening. Some people enjoy the challenge of giving expert legal advice.
On the whole, the article was too long and too self-defining.
The average black score on the LSAT is 142. For whites it’s 153. That gap doesn’t sound all that big but remember the scale is 120 to 180. I don’t know why they use such a silly scale unless it’s too make the black / white gap look smaller than it it.
Blacks are just extremely inferior mentally and everybody knows it. Very few blacks can read a newspaper as fast as they talk and many can’t even tell time. That’s why can’t keep appointments.
1. Black-americans come in last in all standardized tests. Asian-americans do fine on all the tests so it’s not due to cultural bias in the tests.
2. Africa is by far the poorest and most backward continent on the planet. All of black africa is now controlled by blacks and has been for decades so it’s not due to racism.
3. No black has ever won a Science Nobel Prize unless you count one in 1979 for the semi-science of economics. They have won many nobels in non-brain fields like Peace and also in Literature so it is not due to racism.
4. Out of 1552 chess grandmasters in the world, only THREE are black.
The sad part–nay, the tragic part–is that nearly every nation on earth is doing the exact opposite of that.
Why on earth doesn’t your brother retire?
Why didn’t he retire many years ago??
Yes! This!
At Harvard, at Yale, at Princeton: all Black administrators, all Black professors, all Black students – for the next 400 years.
It’s only fair.
You think that scale is silly? Check out the MCAT scale:
https://mededits.com/mcat-scores/
“The MCAT will total your four section scores for a cumulative or MCAT total score range of 472-528 with 500 as this midpoint of this range.”
You get 528 if you get every question right. You get 472 if you get every question wrong.
My guess is that the scale is designed to make the difference between the black dimwits who get into med school with an MCAT 0f 490 and the whites/Asians who get rejected with an MCAT of 510 look small.
But their track record in lining their pockets is a spectacular success.
One of the few good career decisions I’ve made was dropping out after one year in the evening program at New England School of Law. Back in the early 80s, tuition was only $5000 per year.
Pump and Dump eventually destroys an economy but is highly profitable for those running the operation. And the highlight now, is that it’s not just the sucker speculators who get fleeced – it’s the whole of the public via government bailouts.
Keep it going long enough and you get a map like this:
For a supposedly Democratic country (constantly propagandizing for “equality”), the US is just about the top ranking country in the West with regards to wealth IN-equality.
It’s a very good guess imho. There is no end to the subterfuges.
And how many can even be bothered to figure this out?
There are so many apparent anomalies on that map. I can’t quite figure it. Would you have guessed Sweden would be so bad? Botswana is supposed to be Africa’s success story. Doesn’t look that way. And why should Burma and Thailand be opposites? It’s sort of fascinating.
Off topic here, and I agree. But In a broad sort of way it makes sense. Wealth inequality can be the same in a rich country and a poor country , so the developed West with its Democracy and middle class can have low inequality (Western Europe, Canada, Australia) same as much of Africa (equally poor) and the Middle East (Islamic equality – apart from the oil states).
NE Asia takes on the profile of the West as they build a middle class (Japan and S.Korea already and China recently).
Wealth in Russia is concentrated in Moscow and St.Petersburg giving a high Gini coefficient, but the big surprise has to be the United States. Given its Democracy and educated middle class it should automatically fall in the low inequality Western European category but it doesn’t. It’s highly unequal.
Just guesses are that 1) the US middle class is losing its jobs/income 2) the US middle class have lost political power 3) massive increases in public and private debt are benefiting disproportionately the already wealthy (MIC spending, Covid spending, Wall St) 4) the switch to the outsourcing model generates US unemployment, loss of skills, wage pressure, while at the same time record corporate profits.
German, Dutch and Swedish wealth inequality is also odd, but it’s present in already very wealthy societies – so I suppose that it’s hidden to some extent. They’re all big exporters, so outsourcing could be producing the same disparate wealth effect as in the US.
Whitey on the moon!
Video Link
Jew vs. Jew? At that level Jews are the only ones to fire. Even their secretaries are Jewish.
> Obama’s man ( Charles Bolden) was the only NASA administrator to never put a US astronaut into space!
The Shuttle was launched 8 times during Bolden’s tenure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrators_and_deputy_administrators_of_NASA#Administrators
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Space_Shuttle_missions
The Shuttle was retired under Bolden’s watch for being dangerous and outdated. And rightly so.
SpaceX now takes astronauts to space under the Commercial Crew program, which was started under Bolden.
I think Bolden has been more than ok as NASA administrator. He is definitely not an overhyped hidden figures calculator girl.
The usual Gini map is for income. This one is for wealth.
Wealth inequality (on paper) by country is hugely affected by how housing and retirement work. In countries where most people own their houses/flats and have retirement savings instead of government pensions, I guess there will be more wealth inequality — because some people will not own anything and have no retirement savings. Europe has taxpayer financed housing and pension as a safety net so these people get many of the benefits of being conscientious and industrious (and in good health) without having to go to the trouble of scraping the wealth together themselves.
“No child left behind!” —then — must pass them Grade 12—must have them on our athletic teams–must get them into PHD program—