Closing the “Stuff Gap”

598 words

Duke University’s Black students are outraged that the institution had the nerve to perform a study which confirmed the obvious . . .

The most immediate cause for students’ anger is an as-yet unpublished study by Duke researchers saying black students match the GPA of whites over time in part because they switch to majors that require less study time and have less stringent grading standards. Opponents of affirmative action are citing the study in a case they want the U.S. Supreme Court to consider.

Whether or not it’s the truth is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the comfort level of the privileged caste. We need to worry less about findings and more about feelings…

But the students say the research is just one example of an environment in which many black students feel uncomfortable. The document they gave to administrators cites concerns over the future location of the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture and the status of the Black Student Alliance invitational weekend, an annual event the students say is in jeopardy because of the administration’s lack of support.

[…]

Some of the students’ recommendations include establishing an endowment to create a stable funding source for cultural events and academic programs involving black students, and for the creation of a special university working group to assess whether blacks feel the climate at Duke is unwelcoming.

Despite their supposed lack of intelligence, they do seem to have rather intelligently exploited this episode to drum up funding for their race-specific projects. Blacks at Duke are owed something after all, given how disastrously the Duke Lacrosse Rape Hoax panned out for them. According to the article, “Bad feelings over that case linger in Durham to this day.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3c8z9eku6I

Merely a few days ago, a nearly identical crisis struck a high school in Tennessee when the principal foolishly noted that Blacks in his school were scoring lower on the state’s standardized test. The truth is no defense. In fact, the truth is so heinous that Principal Horrell found himself besieged with outraged victims demanding that he apologize for stating the obvious. He indulged them with pious self-flagellation, of course.

“I unintentionally offended a number of students on this campus,” Germantown High School Principal Ted Horrell wrote in the letter. “I apologize to all the students and parents who were offended.”

During a school presentation last week, Horrell reportedly laid out the results of the Germantown High’s Tennessee state report card, which breaks down standardized test scores by race and income. The assembly aimed to discuss how the school can close the achievement gap and introduce a new program that would offer assistance to struggling students.

But a number of parents and students were offended by the presentation, arguing that it only created a greater divide among students as some students found it reason to start mocking black students for “being dumb,” according to WMC-TV.

The irony here is that the naive fools who honestly care about “the gap” are the ones bringing up the insensitive data and instigating the hurtful discussion. They’re loyal to the emperor and wish to increase the opacity of his robe, unlike the more cynical subjects who know the score.

The score is that these Black groups on these campuses don’t want to “close the gap” in aptitude scores and actual performance. They only want to close the “stuff gap”, wherein White people have more stuff. Unlike the other gaps, this one can actually be closed. Great strides have been made and will continue to be made in the pivotal civil rights campaign to extract stuff from Whitey.