2006-04-13

Racism, Racism Everywhere

Here a college gets brought to its knees because somebody updated a standardized test replacing "Gallager" (a comedian famous in the '80s, whom nobody today of college age would remember) with "Condelleza" (a name known by everybody today) in a math problem involving the speed of a watermelon (Gallager's signature gag involved him smashing a watermelon). I imagine that most of the students didn't even know about a perjorative watermellon - black person connotation... but they do now! I wonder if the poor schmuck who updated the test even knew, or even thought anything but spotting an unfamiliar name and replacing it with a familiar name; the poor bastard might have even been purposefully ensuring to add the names of famous black people into the document.

At a time when blacks who work hard do very well and have full legal rights, but Americans in general do poorly in math, is this really how college students, teachers, and administrators need to spend any of their time? How about just NOT CARING? This response creates the impression that black folks are hypersensitive and more urgently concerned about perceived slights than they are about focusing on serious academic matters.

1 comment:

Paul Hue said...

This article declares that white men regularly treat black women as slutty sirens:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Duke_Lacrosse_Black_Women.html

However, a writer could just as easily compose an article with just as many black women declaring that white men treat them more respectfully than black men. Furthermore, the race-baiters as often is the case, tender mutually contradictory assertions: One the one hand in this article they claim that white men generally regard them as irristablly and especially attractive, but in other articles black race-baiters insist that black women are discriminated against for failing to meet "white standards of beauty".

Talk to any black stripper, by the way, and she will tell you that at white strip clubs, they generally cannot earn as much as the white strippers. They will furthermore tell you that black patrons will pay more for white strippers. Pimps and hookers make the same claims consistently, that a white hooker of lower physical appeal can command more money from black and white patrons than can a black hooker of higher physical appeal; naturally, the rating of "physical appeal" is relative, and it is people like me who are judging that the black strippers on average are undervalued.

There is a long-standing claim among blacks (a claim that I share) that a black man will have lower standards for a white woman, and a white man will have higher standards for a black women. This belief counters the article which asserts that white men in general find black women especially attractive. I know models who are black who complain that they get less attention from white men than do white girls that they consider to be less attractive.

If this subject raised by the article is going to be broached, it should consider these other claims. Taken together, I don't think that they support the assertion of the article.