American Grant Writing: Race Matters

One of the problems with affirmative action "getting them into the school" is that it can get them into schools that are above their intellectual level or competitive beyond what they're prepared for.

This is not any statement about any particular group's intelligence. This is about INDIVIDUAL intelligence. For instance, I (a white person) may not be cut out for Harvard Law School. Perhaps I should go to Cincinnati instead, because I'm more likely to succeed. (Cincinnati is a good law school, BTW.) If I went to Harvard, I'd probably break under the pressure and drop out, and a career councelor would do well to raise this issue to me. Now, let's consider a black person of intelligence equal to mine. If affirmative action helped them inappropriately get into Hardvard Law, then affirmative action has just DECREASED their chances of success!

That would be bad. Bad for that person, bad for our culture's progress towards equal rights, bad for our culture's perception of minorities and their capabilities, etc. (Being a minority doesn't make one more likely to be less intelligent, and unfortunately, some bigots need to have that fact reinforced regularly.) What we want is to give everyone an equal opportunity to SUCCEED, and to a certain extent, that involves placing them in the school where they are challenged appropriately, will learn best, and are most likely to succeed, IF THEY WORK HARD.

People are gifted with whatever intelligence they were born with, also affected by upbringing and primary education. This is not a basis on which to JUDGE people in terms of their human value so much as an attribute that varies from one person to another and which affects what they are capable of conceiving of intellectually. On the other hand, WORK ETHIC, is something that everyone should learn, and if you don't learn it, you are more likely to fail, and that is your fault if you do. If you are willing to WORK, then there is SOME job out there that you can do well at and succeed in. Our objective should be appropriate placement. Now, if someone decides that they want to go to a school that is above or below our recommendation, that is their choice. Our recommendation can be wrong, because we can incorrectly evaluate people. But that is a different matter.

The fact is, most people, regardless of race or any other attribute, would not do well in Harvard Law School.

More likely than an intelligence issue, the reason many people of lower socio-economic classes may fail at a place like Harvard is that they simply have not learned the sort of competitiveness and intellectual strategies that more affluent people perhaps tend to be exposed to in early life. (Of course, you also get your share of rich brats who are equally ignorant.) This is an issue of preparation, not smarts. Someone from a rich family in Boston may need an IQ of 115 to get through Harvard Law, in part because their parents are lawyers who have prepared their children for all the gotchas that happen in law school. Someone from the back waters of Appalacia may need an IQ of 125 to get through Harvard Law, simply because they have to do a whole hell of a lot more learning and adapting on the fly while they are there. Inner-city blacks are in the same boat as the back-water Appalacians. However, if the undereducated go to Cincinnati instead, they will succeed, and moreover, they will be able to impart to their children (who inherit the same genes, so it's not a racial issue) the knowledge necessary to succeed at Harvard.

Also, I need to make the obligatory comments about race. Race, as we perceive it, is based mostly on superficial factors like skin color. Africans, South Indians, etc. are brown because there's more sun in the place they're adapted to. Europeans are pink because there's less sun. You can do your own research on the relationship between UV, vitamin D, skin cancer, birth defects, etc. However, humans haven't been out of Africa long enough to evolve any really significant differences. At most, there's

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