According Lani Guinier, co-author of “The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy,” affirmative action is like the canary miners used to take into the mines to provide an early warning system about bad air.
Speaking at a symposium on Brown v. Board of Education at the University of North Carolina, Guinier said
“Affirmative action is like the gas mask for the canary…. But this is not a problem solely of the canary, but a problem of fixing the atmosphere.”
Guinier said that when a working class person doesn’t get accepted into college, he might blame affirmative action for filling all the spots with black people. But, she said, in reality, 74 percent of students in the nation’s 146 most selective colleges come from the highest socioeconomic class.
It appears as though it is Guinier’s metaphor that is the victim of bad air here. So, when a (presumably white) working class person blames affirmative action for not getting into a selective college, he really should … what? Blame rich people instead? Do the rich kids get in because they’re rich or because they score higher on the standards employed by the colleges, such things as grades and test scores?
Guinier doesn’t really say, but she does strongly imply that the problem is with what she calls “the standard for so-called merit” that has “allowed those who are privileged to perpetuate their own privilige in the name of merit.” Her Canary co-authoer and co-keynoter in Chapel Hill, Gerald Torres, a law professor at the University of Texas, claims to have learned from his experience with Texas’s top 10% plan ” that students with lower SAT scores often fare better in college than those with higher SAT scores.”
Perhaps what Guinier and Torres should turn their attention to is coming up with a description of real (not “so-called”) merit and how to measure it.
And some of those rich kids are rich black and hispanic kids. That has to be one of the more “ironic” aspects of race-based affirmative action. Rich black and hispanic kids are preferred over poorer white or Asian kids.
The above should have ended, “preferred over poorer white or Asian kids with similar grades and test scores.”
What does she want to transform democracy into????
A socialist utopia, where everyone is above average, everyone goes to college, everyone shares, everyone recieves the same pay…