But they also aren’t really good students, so the ideas articulated by protesters aren’t very intellectually impressive. In contrast, back in the 1960s, campus radicals were heavily Jewish. So the reigning theories, while puerile, were at least clever. And the clever radicals tended to attract some hot babes. So the Sixties were a big deal, because beautiful young women are always a big deal, as is whatever they think is cool at the moment.
In contrast, the shrieking black coeds of 2015 tend to be neither clever nor hot. And everybody kind of realizes that, deep down, that’s what they are shrieking about — their lack of either cleverness or hotness. But who wants to point that out and get shrieked at yourself? But the shrieking black coeds can kind of sense that they are coming across as thick, mentally and physically, which just makes them shriek louder: a feedback cycle.
Comments:
* The media wants to get blacks, women, and other traditionally Democratic groups riled up for the 2016 election. Hillary’s not looking so hot, and they figure every vote counts. (Note also that Missouri is a swing state.) So, play up a few things that you think will get people turning out, and Hillary wins again.
I’d also add the 60s campus radicals also had to be afraid of being sent to Vietnam and dying, so their protests may have seemed a little more serious. And, in terms of cultural heft, they had much better music.
* Keeping in mind UVA last year, that was at least partially motivated by bad grades, we might say that “claims of persecution are the last refuge of the failing student.”
Why now? Not sure, but I don’t think it’s being engineered by Dems. I see #BLM and WM Privilege as stemming from the same root that drove Same Sex Marriage. Which in turn derives from the particular American characteristic of revivalist moral improvement. It’s just the way we are: we fasten on something and get really excited about it, and deliver hysterical attacks on anyone who disagrees with us, and then we move on.
* Groups are used and discarded by the system as it needs them. JFK was “Peak Ethnic”- the white ethnics had their turn, and were then turned on by the system. Everything had been accomplished that they were useful for, and they were no longer needed. Blacks were the new favored group.
Obama in the same fashion is Peak Negro. Actually the left lost interest in blacks as a constituency a long time ago, turning to women and gays. But blacks still had to get their turn, and they got little for it. A lot of people, even Republicans, have been talking about backing off on criminal justice but it may never happen. Obama’s primary accomplishments were Obamacare, which benefits blacks little, gay marriage, which blacks don’t care about, and gays in the military, which blacks don’t care about.
Blacks have come to realize in the last few years they have been passed by, even with a black president. Obama isn’t even an American black, but a mulatto of foreign parentage. The country has long had Negro fatigue, and with Obama a lame duck none of their issues will be addressed. It’s not like he cared that much about those in the first place.
Blacks want more than anything an easing off of criminal justice, back from the strict policies that came about in the 80′s and 90′s. Again people make noises about this, but legislation is another thing altogether. Blacks want government jobs, but government isn’t hiring a lot, and there has to be room for new “diversity” like the San Bernardino shooter.
The one trend that may benefit blacks, as frequently visited by our host, is moving blacks to the old suburbs. But even this doesn’t benefit them- they move from one worn out housing stock to another, and without the density and public transportation that helps support their lifestyle.
Education is indeed the one place spoils are still available, and the best place for blacks to grab some. But I think they are driven more by rage at realizing they are being set aside, and a desire to influence the system while there is still a black president and a black AG.
* A solution might be to match up blacks and athletes as roommates. The best justification I ever heard for Ivy athletics is that Yale has to have a bottom 25% of the class, as a matter of arithmetic, and athletes don’t mind being there because their self-worth isn’t tied up with GPA like everyone else’s. If you didn’t have athletes, a quarter of your students would be miserable, vindictive, and generally pathetic.
* I especially like the DEMAND that basically everyone with a pulse should be paid $25 an hour. I mean why did it take so long for someone to think of that …..
Meanwhile, at Yale, the STEM professors are being criticized for being out of touch, but mainly for refusing to criticize the woman who said people should be able to do what they want on Halloween. So we are definitely at the “agree with me or else” stage.
At the same site, you can read about how both Yale and Harvard have abolished the word “Master” and replaced it with “Head”, which among other things implies that I didn’t earn two master’s degrees, I got two degrees in head. Come to think of it, that’s not a necessarily completely inaccurate description of my graduate school career.
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* Blacks seem to have strangely weak-strong social ties. Your typical NBA star might not know the names of his seven kids, but if his buddy needs $250,000 to “start a restaurant,” no problem. I think some blacks might get disoriented by all the rhetoric about “the Dartmouth community” and say, hey, what about me? If this is the Dartmouth community, where is my BMW in the parking lot? When the Zappos guy Tony Hsieh started a “community” in Las Vegas, he had to stop using “community” because that was code for “grant application” and he kept getting grant applications from members of the community. “We found that when we used the word ‘community,’ there were a lot of groups that suddenly expected us to donate money to them or invest in them just because they lived in the community or because it was for a good cause,” Hsieh wrote to VEGAS INC. “People would be upset if donating or investing in them did not happen to fit in with our priorities and business goals, and they would refer back to our use of the word ‘community.’” I think Dartmouth and Yale are running into the same thing.
* Wasn’t there quite a bit of writing on the African matrifocal family? Paternal ties are weak, tribal ties somewhat stronger?
* Remember my first theory about Mizzou was that the black profs weaponized the black students to blackmail the administration into hiring more black profs. That theory, while probably valid in some way, wasn’t sexy enough, to explain something that drastic, and I now think that it was a massive professor-led mutiny against Tim Wolfe. I have condensed it all into one neat convenient bookmarkable blog post.
I happen to think that one of the motive-obvious demands of the Black Autumn extortion mobs is that they want to be able to graduate from college without actually having to do any work and without one red cent of student loan debt. Sure, a lot of them want to stay and be turned around as black studies profs, but for most affirmative action blacks, getting the college sheepskin is the golden ticket to getting affirmative action government or quango jobs, easy sinecures. But, they want to be able to get them without devoting any of their income to student loan repayments.
* I’ve never met a black person that could handle even mid-tier engineering (i.e. engineering at a state school rather than MIT/CalTech, etc). I’m sure they exist, but they are exceedingly rare (and are snatched up by MIT/CalTech etc). (a quick discussion of the numbers: 244 blacks exceed 750 on the math portion of the SAT. Split them between high end colleges, then physics, economics, math, engineering, computer science, other sciences, and even business throughout the country. How many are likely to study electrical engineering at Colorado State or Alabama? The pool is exceedingly small).
* One of the myths in this piece is the assertion that classroom life at an Ivy is as tough as the admissions process. Anyone who has had experience on an Ivy campus, or any of the New Ivies for that matter, will tell you it is not much different from the average state campus, in terms of classroom difficulty. There’s a reason why the graduation rates are close to 100% at these schools. The vetting is all done at admissions. After that, the only way to fail is not show up or commit a crime.
* I tend to think the kids are doing this because the society (the NY Times, T. Genius Coates, Twitter, etc) is telling them it’s a Good Thing to Do.
Look, you go to your average integrated public high school and it’s not like every black girl in your class is going to be a source of panic and disruption. Plenty will be quiet and studious- there’s a reason the percentage of black girls attending college keeps going up. Many of them won’t have the skills to graduate from their local community college, let alone Princeton or Yale, but they’re doing their best, and not pinning the principal in his office and screaming about oppression.
Later, I taught at one of the Black Automn places, including one of the girls in the background of one of the videos. She was okay as a student, enthusiastic if distractable in class and not quite at the bottom of the class on tests. (Because of just how strong Asian and nerdy white students are at these places, but how many disaffected jocks there also are, the distribution of grades tends to be very very wide on any test with objective content.) There were better black students in previous years, in the upper half of the distribution even.
But when she and one of her friends stayed after class one day discussing their plans for the next few days, it was clear that it was one event in the Oppression Olympics after another, a continuous round of low-level protest and consciousness raising, all paid for by university budget and facilitated by university staff. Meanwhile, the President was already abasing himself on racial issues on a regular basis, sending out horiffically contrite emails in response to the most anodyne occurrences and being confronted by brigades of students for not being contrite enough even then. The sense of entitlement has been deliberately cultivated over years and years. And now the protesters are just repeating the same words they hear in every corner of respectable opinion.
Now that we have a prestige media that speaks with one voice, endorsing views on race that only wacky 19-year-old activists used to old, now that old gray-haired college administrators are on board with reparations as a Genius idea, what are wacky 19-year-old activists going to do? They have to just get louder and more threatening, just to stand out.
* This theory of blacks being underqualified can be applied to blacks just about everywhere. Kind of a Peter Principle applied to affirmative action recipients. A person who is able to claim affirmative action privilege is always going to be accepted or promoted into a position for which they are not otherwise qualified. Resulting in stress and micro aggressions being perceived by those privilege recipients across the board, all walks of life.
* I always assumed that the benefit of the Ivy League was the opportunity to make connections and participate in extracurriculars, not that you got a more rigorous education than elsewhere. And once you get in, it’s almost impossible to flunk out. So it really shouldn’t matter if blacks and Hispanics are held to lower standards, at least at the Ivy League level. The state school level is another story, and the attrition rate is significant there. As a graduate student, I taught an intro-level accounting course at a state school. It was considered a “weed-out” class with a failure rate close to 20% on average. I had eight black students. Four of them failed, and one of them got a B (no A’s, and about 10-15% of all students got A’s). Talking to another TA, he told me that was about how his black students did too.
* From Charles Murray’s footnote from Coming Apart:
Chapter 2, n. 30, IQ broken down by degree attainment (by 2000) and race, the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 cohort.
White
Bachelor’s — 113.3
Masters — 116.9
Ph.D./Professional (f/e J.D.) — 125.6
Black
Bachelor’s — 99.1
Masters — 101.7
Ph.D./Professional — 112.2
Hispanic
Bachelor’s — 106.7
Masters — 106.4
Ph.D./Professional — 115.2
Even 15 years ago, black Ph.D.’s had an IQ approximately equal to white college grads, and about a standard deviation below white Ph.D.’s. I doubt that particular gap has gotten any smaller (though more recent data would be welcome). Despite this, blacks remain drastically underrepresented among the ranks of college professors relative to their share of the population.
How to increase their numbers? Mandate greater “diversity” in hiring and increase the number and size of racial/ethnic studies departments.
However unhinged and even childish the protesters may appear, their demands are entirely rational from the perspective of black academics, and black students who would like to become black academics.
I think it’s a mistake to tie this to the election cycle, or revivalist fervor. The drive for diversity has been a feature of American life for 50 years, and since the percentage of URMs is constantly increasing, while the gaps stay (at a minimum) the same size, there is no reason to expect the drive to slacken, much less to cease.
* My own psycho-speculation is that deep down these angry blacks are really angry at themselves. They notice their own lack of capability at the higher levels and they realize that amongst the different people of the world they’re considered to be at the bottom in terms of of attractiveness. So they just turn their anger inside out and spend their time shrieking about this, that and the other; it’s black primal scream therapy.
* I like to use the term “village idiot” here.
A 1200 math+verbal SAT is at about the upper quartile (=75th percentile) for all test takers.
That’s pretty good.
But at Princeton, the lower quartile (=25th percentile) among undergrads is about 1400.
So if you’re a Princeton undergrad with a 1200 math+verbal SAT, then you’re a village idiot in that village. Even someone with a 1300 math+verbal SAT is almost certainly going to be completely outclassed in things like math and physics.
I’m sure it’s not fun being a village idiot, so the village idiots tend to be angry.
But almost all universities have “College for Dummies” majors that give their village idiots a path to a degree.
* These girls get the self-confidence and self-esteem that they need to shriek at college professors and college presidents from their training as young girls. When they perform in church, they are complimented by deacons and pastors. When they perform in school, they are praised by teachers and school principals.
* Janet Napolitano had no professional background in academia and she is now President of the University of California system. Universities now have little to do with scholarship. They are machines for extracting money from parents and the government – self perpetuating institutions, busy about the task of perpetuating themselves. So scholars aren’t really needed to administer them.
* Every victory for BLM is an incentive to fight for more spoils. They made BLM to serve themselves, but now BLM serves itself and those who ally with it can gain political power. The Democrats have to end the movement before it gets much larger, and it may already be too late. An attempt to shut it down could trigger an ugly public conflict within the coalition, the biggest since the 1960s. Who is going to speak truth to BLM power? A white Democrat? A Hispanic? I don’t see how this doesn’t blow up in the Democrats faces at some point, it could happen as soon as next year.
* It could be post-’gay marriage’ fatigue.
Negroes took the backseat to that but now they are asked to take back seat to Bruce Caitlyn.
Too much.
And even hot black women are troublesome and bitchy.
Naomi Campbell and Kathleen Battle have been biatches.
It’s a racial mismatch of temperaments.
It’s like what Rankin said.
Serenisha’s tantrums on court jes’ be normal for black behavior.
Sulkowitch is a pain, but she just drags a mattress around.
Black nature wants to jump on it and burn it.
Blacks don’t have academic demeanor.
They evolved in a rhythmic butt-centric world.
They just be flipping.
We see this as black v white issue, but blacks are acting toward whites the way they act amongst each other: hollering, walloping, screaming, ranting, tantrum throwing.
Most rap battles are among the negroes.
And black biatches be screaming at each other all the time.
* The GOP would be very smart to send out Rand Paul to troll on the topic of gentrification. It is one of the few issues where the right can point out blatant liberal hypocrisy. If there is a Philadelphia gentrification project ongoing, organize a high profile public protest during the DNC convention. These protests can offer earn a quick victory as well, because time is money for the city and the developer. Trump may know more than anyone which projects are the weakest and would stand the best chance of creating a political victory.
* Evolution just made black women more biatchy.
The diva-bitchery is prominent among hot famous black women too.
Take Rihanna. She mostly sucks but ‘umbrella’ is one badass hot ho song.
Formulaic and trashy but sizzling hot mama stuff. It is as good as trash gets.
Ok, she’s got fame and the name.
But she is still a no-ggod biatch.
But a hot sizzling ho biatch.
* I noticed that all the friends that I met in college, I met at orientation or in my first classes. Other college graduates have noted that also. The first semester seems to be very important for socialization. The local college has this “outreach” program for minorities. They even have a separate orientation for the minorities. Hence from the very beginning they are isolated from the majority of students. At a certain point, they get angry and form protest groups that issue unworkable demands.
* For some blacks, these are the golden years: with high IQ by black standards (up to 115) they are offered college scholarships, elite jobs, access to white women, re-spect, and suchlike. But that danegeld only goes to the top third.
The bottom third sees this. It’s a big river of stuff they desperately want, but because they can’t speak the language, be on time, stay on task, settle down, patiently work it through, defer until appropriate, barter subtextually, or deploy any high socialization skills, they are CUT OFF! and they know it. It will never be for them, and they know it. No amount of work, no adherence to Republican bromides of effort as the path to improved competitiveness, can help them–and they know it. More, they’re cajoled by cynical libs telling them “the system” is against them (when it’s their own biology that’s against them) and easily het up to hysterical and violence.
Result: It’s going to get worse before-even IF–it gets better.
* Why now? My working assumption has been professional agitators. It’s very, very easy to get a bunch of black college kids and their white/Asian Prog sympathizers wound up. What’s a lot less likely is a leader rising naturally from this mixed bag of nobodies. But send in some professional organizers and you get things going in no time.
We know that Soros funds this stuff. There are even government organizations devoted to this kind of thing, hidden under fancy names, but I don’t feel like looking any of this up. And then on some campuses it’s Uber Left professors behind the scenes making it happen. There is really no such thing as a spontaneous revolution.
* I think the real truth is simple: some people are, by nature, massively self-absorbed and self-centered. We’ll call them narcissists, even if that maybe isn’t precise enough. Narcissists automatically believe that everyone should be catering to them at all times and they genuinely believe they are being wronged whenever someone else fails to abide by their will or something doesn’t go their way. (Indeed, for many narcissists pretty much everyone they know is constantly catering to their whims, and yet they still believe they are put upon.) Normally such people are only allowed to endlessly bleat at their friends and family, but when they’re black its different. As we all know, white racism is the cause of every ill that has ever befallen any black anywhere, so their narcissistic whining isn’t merely a personal problem. No it’s a big social issue we all need to discuss.
So you take some whining narcissists, tell them that their bitching is actually the most important issue in the world, and then refuse to let anyone else tell them to shut the fuck up, and this is what you get.
* I’ve come across numerous very competent Black and Latino lawyers over the years. But, because of affirmative action, for the most part Black and Latino lawyers with anything on the ball get sucked up by high paying corporate law firms, government agencies, etc. The result is that those Black and Latino lawyers who go back after law school and “serve the community” by hanging out their shingle tend to be the bottom of the heap.
* I graduated from an Ivy League school (Penn) last year. There’s an important detail that needs to be added to this: the majority of black students on campus are focused on getting high paying finance and law jobs when they graduate. There are also a fair number who are devout Christians. Some, even most, of the Christians and the future-wealth-acquisitioners probably sympathize with these protests in some abstract way, but in practice they’re annoyed by them. Vocally annoyed by them. These kids go to college to get access to big salary jobs, not become affirmative bureaucrats.
The small contingent of black protesters at Penn was hilarious. They did a ‘mock slave auction’ in front of a fraternity to protest the fraternity buying a Beyonce themed sex doll. Seriously.
* In my experience at Berkeley in the late 80′s, the racial segregation of blacks was all-encompassing. Separate living (when they could), separate social events, majors, gathering places, study halls, churches (especially), and anything else they could come up with. I was friends with a few, and admired their tenacity, but much of my impression of black college students was that they were there to fill quotas and protest every so often. It would be very difficult for them to be individuals and carve out their own path with that sort of peer pressure.
You weren’t allowed to join the black sorority or fraternity UNLESS you were black. They were racially discriminating and totally proud of it.
