Brain Fertilizer

There's much food for thought in this article.

James Taranto hits some of it lightly in this piece from Friday's Best of the Web

Excerpt:

The Wrong Kind of Black Student? America's elite colleges have made Herculean efforts to enroll black students, but now some proponents of racial preferences are complaining that they're admitting the wrong blacks, the New York Times reports from Cambridge, Mass.:

While about 8 percent, or about 530, of Harvard's undergraduates were black, Lani Guinier, a Harvard law professor, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chairman of Harvard's African and African-American studies department, pointed out that the majority of them--perhaps as many as two-thirds--were West Indian and African immigrants or their children, or to a lesser extent, children of biracial couples.

They said that only about a third of the students were from families in which all four grandparents were born in this country, descendants of slaves. Many argue that it was students like these, disadvantaged by the legacy of Jim Crow laws, segregation and decades of racism, poverty and inferior schools, who were intended as principal beneficiaries of affirmative action in university admissions.

What concerned the two professors, they said, was that in the high-stakes world of admissions to the most selective colleges--and with it, entry into the country's inner circles of power, wealth and influence--African-American students whose families have been in America for generations were being left behind.

If blacks who are immigrants from African and Caribbean countries--lands that aren't exactly "advantaged" themselves--are doing so much better than black Americans whose lineage is pure enough to satisfy Guinier and Gates, doesn't that give the lie to the claim that continuing racism is the reason for black Americans' underachievement?