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quadmoniker on July 21st, 2010
[cross-posted from TAPPED]
Ross Douthat spent his precious column real estate Monday on the plight of poor, white Christians from red states who suffer disproportionately, he says, from elite-college admissions policies that favor lower-income black and Hispanic students over them. He borrows liberally from a blog post by Russell K. Nieli on Minding the Campus, who based his argument on a year-old study from two Princeton University social scientists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford.
The study looked at admissions rates for seven elite colleges. The study definitely found, as Nieli wrote, that admissions officers give preference to lower-class black and Hispanic applicants, but it’s worth looking at that fact in context. Overall the applicant pool was extremely well off: only about 10 percent of the applications to elite institutions, public or private, came from lower- and working-class families, and only about 19 percent of those applicants were admitted to elite private schools (acceptance rates to the public institutions didn’t correlate highly with class). The private schools in the study did tend to weigh lower- and working-class black and Hispanic applicants more heavily than their better-off counterparts, but there wasn’t an advantage for lower- and working-class whites compared with whites from higher socioeconomic levels who, incidentally, made up most of the applicants. Other studies show this likely stems from a failure to account for a sort of income-based achievement gap, and not, of course, outright animosity toward poor whites. It’s also possible that schools want to admit students who can pay first, but many elite colleges have need-blind admissions processes.
The important thing is that, overall, the study shows what we already know. The vast majority of applicants to elite institutions and the vast majority of those admitted are white and middle- or upper-middle class. Where Douthat goes really astray, though, is when he borrows Nieli’s claim that cultural markers seemed to make a difference as well.
Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”
It’s too bad that Douthat seems not to have read the actual study, because he would have found that that’s, at best, overreaching with the data.
More…
A lot of jokes have been crafted over the last week or so with KFC’s vaguely evil chicken-cheese-bacon-chicken sandwich as the punchline, but one of the things that’s so surprising about the reaction to it is that, nutritionally speaking, there really isn’t anything about it that is especially outrageous as far as fast [...]
quadmoniker on February 10th, 2010
Photo by Andii, via Creative Commons.
x-posted from TAPPED.
Last month, Brookings released a report that showed poverty on the rise in suburbs, especially in the Midwest — now, suburbs have the largest share of the nation’s poor.
Suburbs often don’t have the same same level of services that many cities do, and [...]
shani-o on January 6th, 2010
I’m kind of tired of the bourgie-black-parents-have-to-deal-with-their-kid-dating-interracially thing.
A lot of the humor in Our Family Wedding (and Guess Who and Something New and hell, even that terrible MTV movie Love Song) seems to rest on the fact that the blacks! are! middle! class! With their cotillions and tennis and fancy cars!
Look, [...]
quadmoniker on January 5th, 2010
Cross-posted from TAPPED.
Bloggers and columnists, in the flurry of predictions that come at the start of any new year, are wondering how we’ll consume media in 2010. What will be the new Twitter? Will any of it will be enough to save old media outlets? These questions are important, but it’s [...]
Alisa on November 17th, 2009
In a recently published study, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers assessed the subjective happiness of women and found that despite greater opportunities, higher wages and increased education, their perceived feelings of well-being have decreased steadily over the last 35 years. In addition they identified a widening gap in the levels of subjective happiness experienced by men and women. This finding touched off a flurry of responses and rebuttals, in the attempt to determine whether we really are unhappy and if so, why. Among the popular hypotheses for female misery was the stress of motherhood due to the disproportionate role of women in child-rearing, along with the lack of supports within society for those who are struggling to balance parenting and careers.
Did all this depress you? Need a pick me up? Then maybe you should forget everything you just read and go pop out a baby instead of popping pills.
More after the jump.
belleisa on November 16th, 2009
The story of Michael Oher’s intellectual development is also the story of his body type. Michael Oher is rare. Huge. A freak of nature. He’s also an anomaly of nurture and it has taken a village to raise him. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis chronicles Oher’s turbulent childhood, his unlikely ascent into professional football and the importance and evolution, largely monetary, of the left tackle position in the N.F.L. The position Oher would come to play in college for Old Miss and, currently, the Baltimore Ravens.
Using a mixture of stark language and deftly placed insight, Michael Lewis describes the evolution of the left tackle with the language and rationale of free market capitalism. In the early nineties, the N.F.L.’s free agency system meant that teams could “buy the players they needed,” but as would soon become obvious, not all positions were created equal. “The price of protecting quarterbacks was driven by the same forces that drove the price of other kinds of insurance,” Lewis writes. “It rose with the value of the asset insured, with the risk posed to that asset.”
The person charged with protecting that million-dollar golden boy needed strength, speed, agility and bodily bulk— a massive butt and legs as well as long arms—to give the quarterback a few extra seconds in the pocket was unlike the other offensive lineman. It’s rare for someone to have all these specific physical traits, and for the players who had them, the price was high. Very high.
More…
G.D. on November 9th, 2009
The following post was originally published in December 2007. We’re re-running it as it touches on a major component of our next Book of the Month pick, Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side.
Michael Oher was born in the 1980s on the desperately poor, black side of Memphis. His father was murdered shortly after he was born. His mother was a crackhead. By the time he was an adolescent, he’d been in nearly a dozen different schools. One obese foster parent, who took him in for the money she would get from the state, would sit on him to punish him. A test put his I.Q. in the low 80s, which meant that the little boy was mentally retarded.
But in a strange, sitcom-ish confluence of events, Oher ended up on the other side of Memphis, the adoptive son of a the Tuohys, a wealthy, white Republican family with pull all over town. “Big Mike” —- he was six-foot-six and over 325 lbs. —– went from being undernourished and wearing the same clothes every day to flying around in his adoptive father’s private jet, attending private school, and getting a Mercedes as a birthday present. The Tuohys hired a left-leaning school teacher named Sue Mitchell (“We had a black son before we had a Democrat friend!” Mr. Tuohy said) to drill Mike and make up for the educational deficit he’d accrued during his sad childhood. When his I.Q. was measured again as he got closer to graduating high school, it was in the low 100s — which meant he possessed about average intelligence. (Oh, yeah. Here’s the even more unlikely happy ending: Big Mike is an athletic freak of nature and is a likely first round NFL draft pick, which will make him more wealthy than his parents, and a movie about his life is in the works.)
The psychologists who administered the second test to Big Mike were stunned. How does one kid’s I.Q. jump 20 points in less than a decade? How elastic is I.Q.? And how much of a role does environment play in determining it? More…
belleisa on October 28th, 2009
This month we’ll be reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis.
In an excerpt called “The Ballad of Big Mike,” Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from Memphis who through a strange confluence of events ends up in the legal custody of a wealthy white family. At the time of his adoption at 16, Oher had an IQ of 80. With his adoptive parents’ resources and support from the Christian high school he attended, his I.Q. rose by 20 to 30 points. He went from foraging through the garbage for food to traveling on his father’s private jet. It’s also worth mentioning here Oher is also a behemoth —6′5, nearly 300 lbs. and boasting a basketball player’s physical grace — so by the time he graduated high school, he was on the wish list of every top college football recruiter in the country.
Now, the ballad comes to the big screen. The movie based on the book comes out November 20th, and the trailer seems to be focused on the relationship between Oher (Quinton Aaron) and his adoptive mother Leigh Ann Tuohy (Sandra Bullock), as well as the kid’s massive size. (Frankly, the trailer is worrisome and strikes me as an “Inner City Teacher Movie.”)
What the trailer and the NYT article barely mention is Lewis’ analysis of the “evolution of the game” — specifically the left tackle, whose job it is to protect right-handed quarterbacks’ blind side from rushing defenders (hence the title). As the N.F.L. has opened up for passing offenses, left tackles have grown in importance, and are now the highest paid players after quarterbacks. Oher, who was drafted in the first round out of Ole Miss, is an almost prototypical lineman: huge, strong and surprisingly agile.
The movie and book trailers are after the jump.
Happy Reading.
More…
blackink12 on September 21st, 2009
Today in my office, a pimp and his prostitute came looking for advice on where to score some blow and advice on how to fill out their W-2s. When I told them what they could do, they accused me of encouraging them to engage in public masturbation. I hope Beck and Co. don’t get [...]
blackink12 on September 15th, 2009
Believe it or not, I’ve been known to be a jackass. Ask anyone who had the misfortune of knowing me in college. Or a couple years ago. I really hope President Obama isn’t asked about it anytime soon:
Anyway, lots of things have happened since our last Monday roundup. Here’s a few of [...]
G.D. on August 12th, 2009
I’m probably gonna get pilloried for this by some folks, but I don’t care much for Spike Lee. Yeah, he’s talented and a pioneer and Do The Right Thing rightly deserves the praise it’s accorded. But the quality of his work varies too wildly, there’s a weird misogynistic streak in many of his films, and he’s way too hamfisted a lot of the time. (His endings are particularly egregious.)
That last bit is especially true of Bamboozled. Up until the inexecrable Crash and 2007’s putrid Angelina Jolie vehicle* Wanted, it was almost certainly the most supremely shitty movie I’d ever paid money to see.**
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMZ6zp-3oGY]
There are a lot of reasons that movie didn’t work — yes, Damon Wayans does speak that way for the entire film — but Bamboozled’s most insurmountable shortcoming was its central device: the director’s employment of blackface. This is a lazy move, and sort of like comparing a political opponent’s policy prescriptions to Nazism; useful in getting the people already on your side to whoop and amen, but toxic to any discourse with the unconvinced. What Spike was trying to say (I think?) is that black folks play a major role in dehumanizing media portrayals of black life/lives. Fine. That’s a little simplistic and broad, but okay. That idea could be a jumping-off point for an interesting conversation. But Spike, as always, prefers to kill his ants with sledgehammers, and so we get a media critique featuring black tap dancers in blackface before rabid fans who are also in blackface and an oleaginous white TV exec who enjoys emasculating his black underlings. (Also, people feel guilty and get shot at the end.)
This is too much even for Spike, which makes me think that the near-constant presence of blackface in Bamboozled just sets the movie’s baseline for provocation so absurdly high that the volume on every other dramatic element in it had to be turned up to 10 so as to not be completely drowned out. More…
A few months ago, I was taken aback by a wildly problematic post that was part of Danielle Belton’s “Unconventional Wisdom” series on her popular blog, the Black Snob. The problems in that entry, on integration’s destruction of “black community” and HBCUs in particular, were glaring and easy to knock down. It augured very poorly for what was to come later in the series.
“Unconventional Wisdom” is supposed to take a closer look at some notions that are commonly held by and about black people. In reality, the posts end up mostly being full of lazy generalizations that support pretty orthodox (and occasionally damaging) ideas; when you make statements like “ghetto names are stupid and embarrassing” or “liking school and being ’successful’ will get your black pass revoked,” it’s pretty safe to say you’re not upending any popular notions about dysfunction and black life.
Belton’s latest entry, “There’s No Sexual Revolution In Black America Just Sex,” is a great example of the tone and shortcomings of Belton’s approach to this series. She begins with an anecdote about her upbringing that serves no real purpose (unless “I was raised better than y’all” counts), links to some grim stats and then starts wildly extrapolating from there. It’s all topline punditry, with no attempts to dig deeper at all.
More…
blackink12 on July 27th, 2009
Because of technical difficulties and an unusually busy work day, this almost became Your Tuesday Random-Ass Roundup. Sorry I’m late again.
DougJ at Balloon Juice: “We’re a country where a uniform and a badge entitles you to arrest people for speaking loudly on their porches.”
Your PostBourgie-approved weekend reading material:
First things first, [...]
I’ve been chomping at the bit to get to our discussion of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes, this month’s reading/discussion group pick. The book follows the efforts of Geoffrey Canada and his audacious Harlem Children’s Zone program, a formidable array of proactive social programs that Canada hopes will lift every child in Harlem into college and out of poverty. The scale of that undertaking is mind-bending, but Canada is undaunted, maybe even obdurate, in the pursuit of that end. More…
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