News of which students have been admitted to New York City’s specialized, highly selective high schools has just been released, and “for minority students, the news continues to be grim.”
Combined, white and Asian students account for 70 percent of the students admitted to elite schools like Stuyvesant, the Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School. Hispanic students make up 6 percent of those admitted and black students 5 percent. The remainder, 18 percent, come from private or parochial schools and racial data for them was not available.
These numbers are no doubt disappointing, especially to those who believe the proportion of racial and ethnic representation everywhere should be the same as their proportion of the population. (According to the 2000 census, New York City is 44.6% white, 26.6% black, 27% Hispanic, and 9.8% Asian.)
But I think there’s something here even more disappointing than the numbers of blacks and Hispanics admitted to the city’s selective high schools. It’s the routine way in which “minorities” are defined as blacks and Hispanics because blacks and Hispanics don’t fare well on competitive tests. Asians are a much smaller minority, but since they are not “underrepresented” in the selective schools they literally don’t count.
This easy and all too common equation of “minority” (a) only with blacks and Hispanics, but also (b) with people who don’t do well on merit-based tests is no less insidious for being largely unconscious, and probably does more lasting damage to blacks and Hispanics than all the discrimination that is usually given as the sole explanation of their situation.
