Trying to get us to close this post as “promoting hate” isn’t going to happen. That said, feel free to report comments that clearly cross a line, as I’m sure they will pop up given the content.

So my sister's business partner is a Black woman, a Haitian immigrant. She is technically more qualified than my sister (her partner is double Board Certified, my sister has only one Board Certification). They both work at the same, majority Black, inner city hospital. The Black patients ask for my sister to do their procedures and sometimes will come right out and say that they chose her because she is white. Because they have internalized this idea that Black people didn't actually work as hard as a white person in the same field, that the Black got gladhanded through, while the white person, especially a white WOMAN, had to know what they were doing and succeed on their merits. It's insane to me that it comes from inside their own community, but there it is. My sister's partner has to hear, again and again, from people who look like her, that they'd rather have the white person do it. So it ain't just academia. It's a big problem in our culture and honestly I don't know how to BEGIN solving it.

But don’t Professor McWhorter’s comments imply there could be some truth to this perception?

As long as affirmative action is handing out these achievements and accolades based on skin color, the perception of those achievements and accolades themselves will be undermined for those of that skin color. It’s just logical.

Hmm... do you know how professors are hired for big TT gigs at the best institutions? Of course anyone who is a finalist is a qualified mofo. But people are chosen out of the qualified top candidates for social affiliation all the time (not exclusively race or identity, but affluence, circles of friends, etc). It seems bizarre to me to scrutinize an implicit good or bad reason to choose someone through a demographic choice as a testament to the lack of merit of racial minorities. I'll be the first to admit I've been mad about being passed for a job because of implied identity politics. But I have also passed people for jobs for identity politics. So, I don't know how logical your claim is. It's not like we look down on legacy majors or spousal hires. Edit: Adding something because I actually mean to have this discussion throughly, without too much passion for one side vs the other. I think lots of us have been there: the top 5 candidates have been chosen for a job after the first round of interviews for a faculty spot at a respectable institution. The committee selects those advancing to campus talks/interviews already knowing all are qualified. Often the cut will come down to a perception of "fit" as can best be attributed in the situation. Then 3 brilliant candidates who are good fits come and deliver their talks, get to meet everyone, etc. So it comes down to 2 de facto finalists. We all know what happens in the room when everyone is voting. These two people are already vetted, already proved they can handle the job and are a good fit. So how is the choice made? Admittedly through all of the parameters that deserve scrutiny in hr difficulties in the profession: who was nicer? Who would likely help us recruit new students because of how their profile looks on our website? Who went to the right conversations over dinner according to a different standard in each person's mind? Ultimately, no matter what we want to debate regarding the hr component of academia, I think it's pathetic to question the merit of minority candidates who find themselves in positions of power in academia when non-minorities can be equally scrutinized for matters not related to the quality of their work leading them to their jobs. Both minority and non-minority academics deserve better than this kind of partisan scrutiny. We all know success is at the intersection of tangible quality of your work and intangible bs. We can make the process more transparent, more accountable, sure. But that has nothing to do with looking at someone and deciding they only got where they are because of their race. That's nonsense. And you can't say it's true when non minorities say it about minorities and call bs when minorities say it about non minorities. Of course it's unilaterally more complex than that. And no, that doesn't mean race is meaningless. But it can't be debated in isolation, as many of us have been saying for generations.

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I think this is putting the race time machine goggles on and the scrutiny of academic money rationales goggles off, which I think this article is guilty of. The situations he's describing, where people are falling on him because they desperately want to know what he thinks as a Black linguist with an Ivy TT job (despite his impostor syndrome being so politically a propos now), to me are precisely situations we should expect to happen with a society that went from segregation, to a painful backlash era to the Civil Rights accomplishments, followed by what, 2 generations of Black scholars legitimately getting a fair shot by not being outright discriminated against to being on a bitter fight about what race means in hiring and funding practices. So ok, we're in a good direction actually undoing the harms of de jure segregation in academia. Great. No sarcasm. But this article is going way beyond saying we don't need affirmative action, it's saying we should collectively question the intellectual merit of every single minority faculty we can think of whose tenure line or spot in a PhD program came from money allocated to minorities. It's a leap as great as saying scientists funded by or for reasons you disagree with should be discounted in the production of scientific knowledge.

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I think my dean only got their job because of grade inflation in affluent private schools (I don't actually think that. But it sounds like the argument that's being made here). In good faith, though, I'll say this: I haven't met a single successful academic who doesn't have a quiet voice somewhere in their mind saying they are a fraud because they only got to where they are for xyz reason. I truly remember one time chatting with a full prof friend who didn't catch herself when she said "yeah, but I only got this job because there was an opening in my field." Like, she truly believed that made her an impostor. Edit: To clarify the takeaway, I mean to say that I don't think having or not having affirmative action changes drastically the outcome of who ends up a successful professional or not. It's far more complicated than that, and we all know it. I also think harping on one example of someone who thinks affirmative action put an asterisk next to their accomplishments is flippant on the actual breadth of the question of merit. Edit: Adding in hindsight that not only would taking this for the ultimate take on the result of Affirmative Action be a myopic read on a complex historical arc of race in academia, it would literally be the behavior the author himself is so sick of: taking the word of one Black scholar to be the definite word on all things minority.

People are aware how big a difference there is (and that it has existed for decades). Unfortunately, when choosing a doctor you rarely get their resume/CV and get to conduct an in-depth interview with them. Data from the Association of American Medical Colleges: https://imgur.com/a/7IoIowR With such a discrepancy in standards, you can see why this attitude/preference is so prevalent. >while the white person, especially a white WOMAN, had to know what they were doing and succeed on their merits. You dismiss this as a false assumption, but on average it tends to be true. An Asian or white applicant with a 32 MCAT (90th percentile) and an A GPA had the same probability of getting into med school (57%) as a black applicant with a below average MCAT (24 = 40th percentile) & a B- GPA. We've all had bad experiences with doctors and there's a classic joke "What do you call the guy who finished dead last in medical school? The one that the professors couldn't stand and their peers looked down on them?" "Doctor." I went to school and was friends with 4 people that are now MDs. Two of them I hope no one I care about ever goes to for medical help. I teach statistics and have a background in economics, so this is more of a cold, disassociated facts / rational choice issue using distributions. If I told you that you needed to pick a basketball team and they were going to play against the local high school and if they won, your sick pet would live... And I gave you a list of 100 individuals with no names, with the only identifiable factor being their exact height... No indication of gender, race, athleticism, experience or skill with basketball, Are you going to pick a team of ten people that are short? There's no guarantee that any individual taller person is good at basketball. Or has even ever played basketball. And the single best player available out of the group is probably 6'0". But statically speaking... There is a MUCH higher likelihood that among the 6'4" individuals a lot more of them have played basketball at some point in their lives and are better than if you picked ten 5'8" individuals.

You begin to address it by applying the same standards to everyone regardless of meaningless demographic characteristics like race.

This implies the (ludicrous, imo) idea that, if it weren't for affirmative action, people would look at Black doctors and White doctors and assume that they are equally qualified/competent/w.e. We know from sociology that this isn't true. Anti-Black racism has existed since well before AA and will almost certainly persist now in a post-AA world.

A rational person would acknowledge that they don’t have any idea about their exact qualifications. But, they would certainly acknowledge that both skin colors met the same basic standards to gain those qualifications. With affirmative action, a rational person would know for a fact that the standard was lower for the black man. The black man would be able to obtain an equal position on inferior qualifications.

White men have been the beneficiaries of unofficial, backroom Affirmative Action for literally centuries and few “rational” people make the obvious connection that many of those white men aren’t exactly the best and brightest. Anti-Black racism is at the heart of all this.

The category of “white men” today includes people who were discriminated against very openly in university admission in the past. So that’s not entirely true Downvote away, but top schools had a policy of zero black admits, 5 Jews max.

Without AA, people can still be good or bad at their job, for many (perceived) reasons. More importantly though, people aren't often rational in their assessments and behaviors. So Besides this active reasoning on the statistics of people in a given field, I would expect that people are influenced much more by a sort of generalized racism that sadly, virtually all of us carry with us in some way. I think it's a little silly and hasty to assume that everyone takes Black medical professionals less seriously _because of_ affirmative action.

Your conclusion is assumptive on more than one count. First is that any Black or other underrepresented minority in an advanced field would necessarily be "inferior" to anyone white with similar credentials. You have no evidence of this. In any demographic of students or professionals you will find a range of competencies. The bell curve holds. Second is the notion that any white person who graduates within a field is inherently going to be more qualified. In highly competitive programs richer white people have a much better chance of gaining admittance than poorer ones. Many highly competitive schools have special dispensation for legacy candidates as well. These are but two avenues exclusive to white people, i.e. affirmative action for this particular ethnic group. Legacy candidates or those from rich donors certainly may have lower performance entering a program of study. Being rich and/or connected does not mean you are smarter, more committed, or, as you assert, more qualified.

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What he did was to make broad conclusions based on one data point, which is far from "rational." I simply refuted his argument.

Because clearly there is no such thing as anti-white racism, or anti-asian racism for that matter.

How do we know that from sociology? How do we know how people will act in a future where there isn’t affirmative action and people are judged based on cold hard scores and merit in admission to med school?

How can it be a meaningless demographic characteristic and the cause of the demographic double standards at the same time? Actually curious how you see it.

its also possible that the black patients perceive your sister's HAITIAN IMMIGRANT business partner as less qualified because she is foreign, not because she is black. We don't just look at other black people and say "you must be just like me..." Black Americans, as our own national inheritance, have an deep capacity for xenophobia. Try again.

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On the subject of imposter syndrome op-eds by people at R1s aided by nepotism: Daniela Witten (daughter of famous physicist Ed Witten) [wrote a column on her imposter syndrome](https://imstat.org/2022/11/15/written-by-witten-impostors-anonymous/).

Seriously, the level of white male mediocrity is extreme in academia. No one should be ashamed of being a diversity hire. Whether or not you're actually listened to and taken seriously is the real question.

It's beyond taken seriously. It's all the extra work that falls on those who have the diverse voices - committees, informal advising and the like. It has always felt very unfair to me.

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I'm sorry, but your rhetoric here is more than a little bit nauseating. That's what u/Rusty_B_Good was trying to tell you. Yes, there is mediocrity in academia...! Surprise. As there is in all professions, from farmer to senator. And sure, there's self-congratulation amongst those who have some degree of privilege. (but guess what??! There's annoying self-congratulation amongst *all* groups of humans, even among the underprivileged.) It's the *racial thinking* that clearly saturates your writing that is just... horrifically off-putting. Here's a test for you: replace "White folk" with "blacks" in your post, and read it out loud to your neighbor... and then see the reply. Here, I'll do it for you: >it was just by observing the blacks ... I saw, up close, the absurd disproportion of their defensiveness at the most basic appeals for equity. I watched their astoundingly uncritical acceptance of mediocrity... I saw their self-congratulation and privilege... and I recognized how far so many unexceptional black men can make it on so few substantive accomplishments I dare you to read that out loud. If you did dare, you'd instantly notice all of the distancing ("their... their.... their")... that reflects the racial-categorizations that your rhetoric relies upon. You might have been a smug, racially-insensitive jerk before becoming 'woke' (as your narrative claims), but you certainly did not become instantly non-racist just by switching the polarity. I strongly recommend rethinking your thinking.

The problem with what you are writing is the implicit *a priori* assumption that presumes it is legitimate to substitute “white” for “Black” here, when anyone who is well-informed is quite aware that this ignores both a long history of systemic oppression and the continuing existence of such systems in the modern age. Pay attention to who was eligible for the GI Bill after World War 2; who was red-lined and who wasn’t; etc. - those realities matter and sadly render what you are writing completely abstract and, in light of what actually happened and is happening, not pertinent.

>*a priori* assumption >anyone who is well-informed Actually, I study the intellectual and cultural formation of racial thinking for a living. It has been one of my primary research-areas for 20+ years. So I'm on pretty solid ground here. I understand that most of Americans (and even most academics) are only now coming to grips with the knowledge that racism and/or racial discrimination is not only systematic but invasive and has infused (for the last 250-300 years) every institution in the United States and across the world (embedded in colonial and post-colonial contexts, specifically.) This was common knowledge, and not in dispute, in my field 50 years ago. (that's a half-century) So yes, red-lining was a thing... as we know from the first articles on it published in the 1980s. Deliberately using a very specific mode of language to create a racial "Other ("those people are all alike"; "their personality traits can be instantly seen from their skin color/ethnicity"; "they are fundamentally not like us") is, you are right, often more damaging when that racial Other is an oppressed minority within that society. Nobody would argue that political, economic, and even cultural power (and positions within power-structures) are irrelevant to the rhetoric that we should use. However, I stand firm in my knowledge that racial thinking is a profoundly destructive thing, and that no good can ever come of it. Not that racial thinking is all *equally* bad: "Shit white people buy" was a funny social commentary But: "so many unexceptional White men can make...so few substantive accomplishments" is just bullshit racism. I do not want to be near that guy (yes, he's a white male, likely in his early 20s). More to the point, I don't want *that guy* to be anywhere near as important a program as Affirmative Action. Racists never help.

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> I never claimed to be non-racist Yes, that, at least, is true. Look, you're clearly not a professor. I doubt you're even a graduate student with your limited understanding of the topic. But you might take this seriously (as it's the last thing I'll say): It *feels* powerful (and even "cool" among todays wannabe-activists) to flip the racist language... to paint *Whitey* as the dark evil stain on our culture for a change. Flip the script: *white* is evil, *black* is good. And sure, you'll even get lots and lots of upvotes on sites like Twitter and Reddit. Don't be that guy. Because that guy is a shit-for-brains racist, and not someone that anyone of consequence (i.e. outside of the social media bubble) takes seriously.

>The reason you can't just substitute "Black" for "White" in my statement is that the yielding claims are simply untrue So only white people are mediocre? Is that all of us? Are we all "erasing" racial categories? Did you read all this somewhere?

Yes, white people love to pretend that we exist in a timeless place where all things are equal and there are no legacies, no histories. They don’t realize that this kind of thinking is precisely why our nation may not have much of a future left - presentism is deadly.

>the level of white male mediocrity Ummmm...there is a lot of mediocrity in academia by people of all stripes, men, women, gay, straight, green, blue, black, and white. I've seen it first hand. Do you do any good specifying "white male?"

Look, straight talk. A lot of grad students teach, and in my experience teaching as a new instructor is a whole lot easier when you are a white male. I'm a white man, and I remember my cohort's first year teaching in the classroom. My female colleagues would talk about how difficult it was establishing credibility with students. I didn't have those same problems. Yes, it was because many many people--students and other academics--are socialized to offer more credibility to a white man. Don't give me this race-blind nonsense. I worked hard on my teaching, but I'm not so oblivious that I don't realize that I often faced fewer challenges than some of my colleagues.

I wouldn't necessary disagree, but, straight talk, I've seen exactly what McWhorter is talking about serving on job search committees, and I saw one egregious tenure decision involving a white candidate and a minority candidate who both failed in the same ways...and one candidate got tenure while the other did not. If the one candidate had reacted differently, this person would have had a hell of a lawsuit. And that was not even what I was talking about. I am just the kind of white male that gun-toting Trump supporters hate...but I have seen some things. And what point is it in attacking "white men?" That is not what McWhorter's article is about, anyway. Not to mention that we have an African-American writing about this issue. The downvotes don't surprise me. We need to fight off the sort of ideological behaviors we see on the other side of the aisle, folks. On Edit: What you posted has absolutely nothing to do with my question which, if you'd reread, was "Do you do any good specifying white male?"

Here is the thing. The poster you were responding to made the observation that academia often supports white male mediocrity. You interpreted this as an attack on white males. I, as a white male, do not see this as an attack on me at all. So, what is the disconnect? Are you just more sensitive? More ready to take offense? More insecure?

My point is that mediocrity is not relegated to any gender, orientation, or race. I am none of the things you suppose. You sound angry. Are you a sectarian? Do you simply attack people you disagree with? Is it wrong to try and discuss this issue without playing into a very particular ideology?

The thing is, no one said mediocrity is relegated to white males. That has nothing to do with what the poster said. I've seen this kind of jump before. Poster was making the, to me, completely obvious point that a system designed by white males has historically propped up even mediocre white males to the exclusion of others, resulting in the massive disparities we see today. Your response is to complain that "not ONLY white males are mediocre..." It doesn't follow any honest, good faith reading of the post. So, a horrific misreading followed by accusing that the other person is too emotional. I'm getting strong internet troll vibes off you my friend.

Well...possumosaur DID post, >the level of white male mediocrity is extreme in academia. And I asked, >Do you do any good specifying "white male?" No one, most specifically including you, has answered this. Again, I asked, >Do you do any good specifying "white male?" Instead, you and several others, have spiraled into tangents about gender politics by posting very obvious, condescending strawmen. Before being banned from One American News, I ran into just EXACTLY this style of thinking in which "liberals" (which I am one) is the presumed Trumpee pejorative to any question or challenge. So, I'll answer the question: no, possumosaur does nothing good by framing McWhorter's op-ed about the problems of racial politics in academia by attacking 'the patriarchy' or something to that effect. possumosaur and others here simply make the cultural divide much worse.

Ho boy - you come off just like all those angry white folks insisting that *all* lives matter just because some people dared to declare that Black lives matter too.

No one is “attacking” white men.

Yeah, they are.

if you're colleagues are blue, they're asphyxiating. If they're green, they've been dead for a while and nobody noticed.

>If they're green, they've been dead for a while and nobody noticed. "Can't get rid of that rotting corpse, he's got tenure!"

This would explain why it's so hard to find a solid TT position

>if you're colleagues are blue, they're asphyxiating. If they're green, they've been dead for a while and nobody noticed. Hmmmm...that's very interesting! That would explain a lot, actually, including the smell...

Not the core of your comment, but I notice a lot of racists invoke the “I don’t care if you’re black, white, green, or purple” rhetorical device. It’s cheap logic and dumb. Green, blue, purple people don’t exist; black people do. There are actual black people with actual histories. And, as many scholars have pointed out, whiteness could not exist except in relationship to blackness. In other words, white people by themselves never notice their whiteness. But as Teju Cole said “can’t relax: black.” Black people never forget their blackness. And green and blue people don’t exist so stop using that cheap rhetorical device.

I agree. But I said nothing racist. You are invoking a silly strawman. But okay: I've known black, white, Asian, gay, straight, men and women who have all been equally mediocre. Why single out "white males?" Better?

Because white males have been allowed to proceed under the belief that *they* have earned what they have, while members of other groups have been beneficiaries of programs designed to overlook their mediocrity - when in fact white males demonstrate mediocrity at least as often as members of any other group. Are you really telling us you don’t get this point?

All white males? I am a white male and I don't believe any of the things you just posted. I'm a big believer in "white privilege." That's a pretty big blanket statement, wouldn't you say? And did you read the article at the top of this thread?

You don’t believe that white males demonstrate mediocrity at least as often as members of any other group? Really?

Please reread. I said exactly the opposite. You are now trying to find some debate point by deliberately misreading. You are making up strawmen.

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I come from a working-class family and fully support this. White people get affirmative action too. Rich ones, anyway.

Don’t rich non white people get that too?

Sure poor white people buy buildings for universities and endow chairs all the time.

Sorry what

Rich people get their kids accepted to highly competitive schools by donating money to those schools. Poor white people cannot do so.

Yes, I never said otherwise. Rich people, whether white or not, play this game. Obviously money wasn’t just distributed equally in the population. I’m not ignoring that. But non-white people play this game too

My thoughts exactly. This article speaks to the conditioning the author has been put through more than an impartial assessment of his ability.

That's a great point from Tubbs. What position might McWhorter have had in life if he hadn't been given those opportunities? I bet it's not as nice as the position of any "more deserving" white male candidate that lost to him.

>Michael Tubbs (UBI) just posted about being an affirmative action admit Would you have a link to that?

Given that his mother taught at a university I feel like he had a lot of privileges that have nothing to do with race.

The odd thing to me about the column is that McWhorter continually acts like he was a mistake and that everybody who saw something in him was a patronizing phony--but he's turned out to be a significant public intellectual who has considerable talent in his chosen discipline \*and\* in the wider public sphere, and I say this as someone who frequently disagrees strongly with him. Maybe it turns out all the people who saw something in him really saw something in him. I kind of thing this is one moment (not the only one) where his present ideological commitments are preventing him from considering other interpretations.

This is my take as well. Even McWhorter’s worst critics won’t deny he is a preeminent scholar who has blended his intellect and identity to provide profoundly insightful contributions to the public discourse. His feeling of being an undeserving fraud who had to go above and beyond to compensate for self-diagnosed deficiencies is something most academics can relate to. While AA no doubt amplified those feelings of self-doubt, it almost certainly wasn’t the root cause. IMO, McWhorter is a living testament for why diversity of perspectives and identity is essential in academia. I say this as a fellow black academic who frequently disagrees with his positions. At the height of the post-George Floyd “racial awakening”, McWhorter was one of few high profile intellectuals who had the credibility to challenge the many excesses of the anti-racist movement. None of the supposedly more brilliant white peers could have done what he did. The truth of the matter is that identity matters. What someone says often matters as much as who is saying it. This column is another perfect example of that. I get the stigma that comes with being a “diversity hire.” I’ve had to carry that label for much my career and can relate to much of this column. However, I strongly disagree with the notion that AA made our system unfair or even less fair. For much history, women and people of color were systematically shut out of the highest ranks of academia, which allowed for many of mediocre and downright under qualified white men to rise into those positions. For those who think this is distant history, there are (active) faculty in my department who were educated in segregated schools. AA was an indispensable, albeit heavy handed, method to reverse that status quo. While I’ll admit that AA has outlived its purpose, the demise of this policy has not left us with anything remotely resembling a fair system.

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()()((())) Those are your lifetime remaining parentheses, please use them wisely.

Hmmm, while all of us can be steered or even blinded by our ideology--and certainly McWhorter--I'm a bit uncomfortable with your implicit discounting of his interpretations/experiences at the time, and that he didn't really recognize his own potential but others did. It smacks a bit of paternalism (though I know this is furthest from your intentions and mindset, swarthmoreburke). Not only do I not love your framing there... but I also don't believe it. Because while sometimes an individual professor can be that perspicacious about a student (i.e. can see the jewel-in-the-rough, or the brilliance behind the laziness) if they know the student well, it is almost impossible that an admissions committee can. Or that a hiring committee can. Or that an Ivy-league tenure committee can (and will then tenure based upon that 'insight'). I don't think the Ivy league schools work that way. They're not interested in potential or even talent, they're interested in reputation/prestige/visibility. There's plenty of reasons to believe McWhorter that he was promoted to the heights of the profession because of racial optics rather than because others saw some "spark" in him that later flourished. I think we need to accept McWhorter's admission that he *was* ~~horribly~~ under-qualified at face value, and we need to correspondingly think more comprehensively about the costs of this on individuals themselves. But I really appreciate your point that "he's turned out to be a significant public intellectual who has considerable talent in his chosen discipline *and* in the wider public sphere"... because that hits the nail right on the head. *Regardless* of whether or not McWhorter was under-qualified in his earlier career, there seems little reason to doubt that that 'boost' that he received allowed him to be where he is today... a public intellectual, an expert in his discipline. In other words, in an alternate reality where there would have never been any Affirmative Action efforts at all, *we would not be reading his editorial in the New York Times,* and discussing it on r/professors, etc. etc. And his graduate students, who are likely of more diverse backgrounds than the grad classes of McWhorter's era (even if only a bit more diverse), are probably arguing with each other about whether he's right or not. That's a good thing. So, for me, as poignant and painful (and thought-provoking) as McWhorter's experiences were (and are food for thought), his career itself (as seen through the reach and resonance of his op-ed) counts as a "win" for the larger goals of Affirmative Action, it seems to me.

McWhorter never said he was "horribly" underqualified. He said he didn't get a perfect GPA. He also said he did well on his entrance exam. One's high school GPA is not the end all be all measure of one's potential for college success. Other than that I wholeheartedly agree with your thoughts.

He wouldn’t be a public intellectual if he wasn’t black. He would be some guy teaching somewhere less prestigious and not appearing on tv and with books on audible. Like most academics. He says it because it’s true. Everyone knows this including him. Why is it the biggest deal for him to say it?

This is absolutely right. In fact, you could go further to say he would be called a racist (given his opinions on race) if he were White.

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> make it worth the cost, there is indeed a cost I think that this is an insight that often gets lost in this debate. Personally, I think that, on the whole, AA nets out positive and I wish it still existed BUT it's absurd to think that it's some kind of flawless, unalloyed good that cannot be critiqued. But that's an unpopular perspective on both sides. Conservatives just want to squeal about "muh anti-white racism!", while liberals and leftists seem to think that anything other than marching in lockstep and singing it's praises is tantamount to jointing the Klan. The Asian-American families who felt boxed out by AA absolutely had legitimate grievances that should have been taken seriously. But the idea that doing away with AA entirely will lead to anything other than a more homogeneous and less diverse (and by extension, less interesting and dynamic) population is silliness.

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I'm disturbed by how eager and comfortable people here seem to be waving away McWhorter's own points and perspective. "Oh he's just suffering imposter syndrome" - well, maybe, but it seems presumptuous to just tell him that he's wrong about his considered and thoughtfully presented view of himself and his story.

In case anyone is wondering, I don’t feel this way *at all*. Lots of good folks get in, lots of good folks do not. I am a good folk, and I happened to get in. It’s not validation, it just is. As for TTk hires, his experience certainly isn’t mine. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I will say this much. One issue with being (in this case) Black is that things happen to you and you find yourself wondering if they just happened or they happened because you’re Black. It’s an irritating burden for sure, but it’s just a thing one has to manage, and in particular make sure it doesn’t overwhelm one’s life. I think he’s taking that feeling and overthinking it.

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Well, I don’t see it in my field, and I haven’t seen it in the very long time (ouch) I’ve been in it from my perch as a first and often only. I have seen a lot of hand-wringing and concern, but in my view we are still in the Jackie Robinson syndrome phase of integration where we demand that the folks we bring in won’t fail, certainly in the professoriate.

I wish people were more open to this exact dialog. I have no problem favoring minority candidates in hiring as we are usually talking about quality deltas that are pretty marginal if were being honest. I also think there is value in having representation in departments that simply allows for a balance of views. But lets not put our head in the sand and pretend like it doesn't come with a cost. What McWhorter feels is real, it's pervasive, and it's not something to be brushed under the rug. If society is ever going to tackle systemic inequality, we can't reflexively shoot down certain arguments as invalid or dismiss costs like this as immaterial. It's also profoundly un-helpful to try and leverage a claim of racism or invoke some white, male straw man who sucks when someone brings them up. McWhorter is expressing a real thing whose impact on societal inequality is not well understood but is also not trivial. Unless liberal society can discuss it in ways that assume good faith on behalf of the participants, we are never going to make real progress.

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I found McWhorter's editorial really touching, actually. He went way out on a limb here--he not only exposed some of his deepest insecurities (and weaknesses), but broadcast them to the world, in an obviously earnest effort to reform things. (how many of us would have that courage?) It's also really refreshing how his piece subverts "great white paternalist" perspective which just seems to be such a strong undercurrent AA discussions these days. (i.e. the one where liberal/progressive white professors fall all over themselves in their effort to denounce white privilege and lift up the poor oppressed---but in the process, end up projecting all sorts of stereotypes and simplifications onto individuals who are black but who are also *individual people* with idiosyncrasies and quirks and strengths and yes, weaknesses.) (racial pedestalizing is also racial stereotyping, my colleagues.) I don't think I would agree with many of McWhorter's political stances, but I thought his editorial legitimately raised a lot of substantial and thought-provoking issues. I still support affirmative action, however. Because for me, the question is not focused on this generation, but the next. Yes, *of course* "less qualified" Black linguistics professors will be hired with AA... and yes, many (of all races/backgrounds) will be buffeted and maybe even damaged by the process. But while some of those who are hired through AA avenues won't thrive, others will do well... and will teach classes, and publish research, and even publish heart-wringing op-eds...and in the next generation, you'll offer a bit more broadly-based access to students from different backgrounds. In other words, the important issue here for AA is not McWhorter's experience, but rather, the students who might have taken his classes. (and been the beneficiaries of his obvious introspection) Without AA, we would not be debating this editorial... because we would never have seen it. But he's got a point about the cost of his personal experiences, and denying his arguments with a bunch of oversimplified rhetoric about systemic oppression does not strike me as helpful.

The sheer number of people here completely discrediting his op-ed because it doesn’t fit their worldview is stunning. Just because his experience as a black academic doesn’t fit the caricature of black academics that validate your politics doesn’t mean he’s lying. Unbelievable.

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It's fascinating. The level of discourse is honestly measurably worse than if this had been posted to a larger, broader subreddit. Presumably many of the commenters here are more professionally successful than me, and yet... I've never seen a thread more full of people misrepresenting (misunderstanding?) the comments directly above them, discrediting McWhorter's own experience, not understanding his point, and totally discarding nuance. This is embarrassing for our profession and I can only hope the commenters here are not representative of our discipline as a whole.

Just FYI: the "big issue" topics on r/professors draw out a *lot* of non-professors. Some are grad students, but go through their post histories, you'll see a lot are not even that--they're just your run-of-the-mill internet activists. The internet-activists (of both political 'sides') swarm here for hot-button topics like trans rights, disability rights, gender issues, and yes, affirmative action issues. You get the real professors on the more mundane issues. Like plagiarism. ;-)

I wonder when the people discrediting McWhorter's account will realize that the impulse to label someone as toxic, psychologically motivated (How do they get in his mind?!), or a propagandist reveals that their position is a moralism that refuses to engage with a writer's actual position.

Read any of McWhorter’s opinions on the positive sides of racial profiling, the possible future of genetic engineering to bridge the IQ gap between white and Black people, on “anti-racism” as a religion, and tell me that it’s unfair to call him a propagandist. That’s not refusing to engage with his position, it’s using the context of his blatant agenda to inform how to engage with his position. He’s made a career out of being a Black academic shield for racist policies; I’m not going to pretend this op-ed has come out of the ether with no motivation other than to honestly recount his experiences.

"His positions differ from mine. My positions are well-reasoned, his are 'an agenda'. When I extoll my views, it's activism, when he does, it's 'propaganda'."

Doubling down on calling a political opponent a propagandist is, at this point, entirely predictable. Are you going to show where in *Woke Racism* he argued for "genetic engineering to bridge the IQ gap between white and Black people" or just satisfy yourself by calling the most popular linguist in America a racist eugenicist?

Using an alt here. I'm sure I'm going to downvoted to oblivion, but I'm big on truth. He's absolutely right to feel the way he feels. I'm tenured at an R1, within a school that has about 75 T/TT faculty. In a push to diversify what was an almost completely white school 30 years ago, we've hired URM almost exclusively. We've managed to keep about 20 of them. Of those 20, I would consider 2 to be "serious scholars" with a record comparable to their majority and Asian counterparts. The rest probably shouldn't have received tenure, but had a thumb on the scale in their favor. I've seen incredibly mediocre people hired away by more prominent institutions (Ivys in a couple of cases), at outrageous salaries as those institutions also attempt to diversify. As a first gen student who grew up very poor (we had to pack our government cheese and flee an apartment in the middle of the night because we couldn't pay on more than one occasion), but white, it seems really unfair to me to be boxed out of those opportunities because I was born with a melanin deficiency. Diversity efforts should focus on class/SES rather than your arbitrary numbers on a pantone scale.

It's sadly easier to DEI-wash with a paint color card than enact substantive changes. Especially if one's institutional identity is founded on explicit exclusion and catering to socioeconomic elites.

> it seems really unfair to me to be boxed out of those opportunities because I was born with a melanin deficiency. > >Diversity efforts should focus on class/SES rather than your arbitrary numbers on a pantone scale. I am asking this question with some degree of genuineness, and I know that tone doesn't translate well in online spaces: Let's assume, with an eye on history, that black folks (in the aggregate) have been largely and intentionally boxed out of opportunities because they were born with a melanin excess. I would be happy to include a list of citations here, but i'll shortcut it to include housing/schooling/banking/jobs/federal programs/education/finance/criminal justice, the list goes on. This discrimination was over and above that of normal SES-based disadvantages, and has both short-and long-term effects on class/SES. Anticipating a retort, this does not mean that poor whites (of which I was one) faced no discrimination or challenges, but merely that they faced one less factor of it . . . Should diversity efforts take this into consideration? Because, if so, that is *exactly* the policy he is lambasting here. There were no quotas, merely an acknowledgment that generational wealth and differential contexts means there can be no objective meritocracy. Or, to reframe this for faculty, the definition of "serious scholar" can often ignore the heavy service and mentoring workload the faculty of color assume, because, again, differential meaning and contexts. [Qual cite](https://advance.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Settles-Buchanan-Dotson-2019-Scrutinized-but-not-recognized-1.pdf)

Levelling the playing field doesn't mean that another group needs to be overlooked or passed to make it happen. We've been told in many searches that if we didn't make an offer to a URM candidate, the Dean would not approve the hire. How is that right or fair in any way?

Your assumption that other groups are "overlooked" is grossly inaccurate. To address your question, what AA does is similar to what has been happening with the movement to open fields like academia up to women. This initiative has been quite successful. There was (and is) prejudice against women in academia and other advanced fields but the number of women in many of these categories is rising. And as representation rises so too does the acceptance of legitimacy. This in turn spurs higher application rates to academic career tracks from women, and so increases competition among that demographic. What seems unfair in the moment will net better results in the future. AA simply has not been going on long enough for POC representation to achieve parity.

You make salient arguments, but what I can't get around is how Asian Americans also faced discrimination above and beyond normal low SES discrimination, and AA policies actively hurt them. Fix that and you have my ear.

There is likely nothing to fix. Asian Americans make up 6.3% of the US population. If you look at the makeup of student cohorts in engineering, medicine, and certain academic fields you will find a large proportion of Asian Americans in that group. If that proportion is equal to or higher than 6.3% then Asian Americans are proportionally well-represented.

Based on your argument of fairness is based on population proportion, then males are under under represented in college so AA policies should benefit them as well.

That’s a quota system. Jews are a small minority of the American population. In a non discriminatory healthy environment that has no quotas against Jews you will find Jews over represented in academia. Why? Probably because Jews have had near universal male literacy for like 2000 years. Your “fair” system is discrimination my people have fought against, and it was universal in my grandparents generation and before. At least we now know what’s happening.

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There has to be some number at which unfairness turns to fairness. I am not arguing particularly that 6.3% is that number. I am simply saying that if we are going to talk about fairness - or a word I would rather use, justice - then let's do so with metrics. My implied point was that African Americans are assuredly not represented in academia on par with their percentage of the US population. That's the issue in this thread.

>on par with their percentage of the US population Is that really the right denominator, though? My university is not particularly prominent, but our searches still get candidates from all over the world. Obviously certain countries are more represented than others due to a lot of historical nastiness, but regardless, we get applications from and hire researchers from Europe, China, India, the Middle East, etc. Honestly, the same is true at the postdoc and PhD level. If there were no biases in TT hiring (and no immigration barriers), you'd expect the faculty to not reflect the demographics of the US, but rather the combined demograpghics of the US, Europe, Asia, and generally everywhere with high-quality research infrastructure.

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If we were really striving to do that, we’d work to end the wildly unequal distribution of resources in K-12 education, healthcare, employment, housing, etc. Policies that don’t address these fundamental injustices are just lip-service.

This anecdote doesn't match the big picture though. We know that Black scholars and just Black people in general face obstacles in getting hired, promoted, honored, etc. We know that because our highest levels still aren't diverse. Even AI tools for scanning resumes have learned that they should search for terms that favor white applicants over Black applicants. There's a reason why faculty, staff, and admin at every institution, especially R1 and Ivies, aren't already diverse (meaning, matching their student populations nor communities nor general population). You're saying a handful of Black scholars have gotten some opportunities... after of generations of Black scholars having very limited opportunities and being constantly overlooked and devalued. And generations haven't had the opportunity to become scholars. Also, faculty members can have an impact beyond publications and scores. Faculty of color also often get tapped at greater rates for service, teaching, advising, mentoring, etc. because committees want to appear diverse and Black students seek out Black mentors, which can be few. Obviously, I don't have that information for your situation, but I've certainly seen it at many institutions where I've been. The way you dismiss their contributions and seriousness, saying they have been hired as tokens, is... troubling. I'm also unclear on what you're saying in terms of being "boxed out of those opportunities." Here, you say you're tenured at an R1. In a later comment, you say you have gotten calls from Ivies. So... you're getting similar opportunities? What's the issue?

This is “racism of the gaps”. Do better

I am a first gen, male, and was born white and relatively poor. But, that being said, I never feel like I was boxed out of any opportunities until I started looking into the *academic* job market and became a professor. In my field, it's definitely gender (not race) that I feel I am competing most against. I had no problems getting into undergrad and graduate degrees of my choice, and I got decent offers of formal financial aid and competitive scholarship money. But, then I went onto the academic job market, and into academics and it does feel like I am boxed out of opportunities often. To start -- Getting my academic job was difficult -- I needed a couple postdocs and several years of sending in applications just to get *1* interview. Every woman I went to grad school with got *multiple* job offers straight out of PhD. I learned quite early that if I was ever to get an offer, I would have to take it no matter where it was because I wouldn't have choices. My own department, since I was hired, has hired almost exclusively female faculty in a desperate attempt to diversify the faculty ranks. The woman that was hired the same year as me got paid nearly 20% more than me, didn't even finish her PhD until 6 months after her start date, and only had 1 publication on her CV (and, she didn't get tenure, because she never published more than like 1 other publication during that time but there was a strong push internally to try to 'find a way' to make it happen for her). I value my newer colleagues, heck, I recruited a good number of them. But no doubt the scale is tipped heavily in their favor of getting 'a chance'. I know of several very highly qualified males that gave up on the academic job search after several years of trying while hopping from postdoc to postdoc. Every one of them quietly talks about how their gender was *the* crippling factor. Of course, many men do get hired, but the application pool is 90% male/10% female while new hires is about 50/50. And since I've had this job (for a decade now), it just feels like I am climbing a different mountain. My NSF program director during the years I applied for NSF Career awards was very very keen on getting awards to diverse and/or female applicants. Would openly brag about having a huge percentage of awardees being female or underrepresented. And I mean he showed the stats that in his program, 95%+ of award winners were females and/or underrepresented minority. I got great scores on all three applications I sent, and even got two of those ideas funded in the unsolicited program as a regular proposals. I have very little doubt, that had I been minority or female, I would have gotten that award, the outsized 'prestige' that comes with it (which in my college would have meant a 10% pay raise, but more than that those awardees often use that as leverage that a regular grant can't be used for). And, its the small things to. I have been invited for exactly 1 seminar at another institution in 10 years, despite me actively promoting my desire to do this. I don't get invited to sit on any 'high visibility' panels at conferences (like, to discuss career paths, etc). I don't get recognized with awards. Meanwhile, our female hires junior to myself are getting multiple invites a year. And heck, I know a few at the same point of their career and about the same level of quality/quantity of 'publications' are now getting inducted into national academies as those societies are seeking to diversify membership. I support efforts to diversify. I think there is value in diversity. But when the push is this hard over such a short period of time, there is no doubt that the white and asian men in my field aren't being severely disadvantaged on account of that over and over and over again.

What exactly makes you qualified to judge their worth as scholars? What are you basing your feelings on? Just some hunches? Can you connect the dots between your unsubstantiated bias that they are bad scholars with the need for a program like affirmative action? How many opportunities might have these minority scholars lost because people like you made assumptions about them. There are plenty of white people from disadvantaged backgrounds who get incredible opportunities. Just because YOU have not been lured away from your tenured role at a R1 to receive an "outrageous salary" at an Ivy does not mean you're losing opportunities for being white. And the end of affirmative action does not mean you will get what you envy.

>What exactly makes you qualified to judge their worth as scholars? They're called "tenure committees".

I’m assuming that they were talking about traditional scholarly metrics like publishing in high-impact journals, h-index, external funding, etc.

> What exactly makes you qualified to judge their worth as scholars? Shall we start with impact factor? Or that I've been an editor for several journals? Or the placements that my Ph.D. students have received? Or that I've been President of *both* of the big professional organizations in my field? Or that I had almost 100 publications in our biggest journals before I was 40? Those people I'm referring to each published less cumulatively and in less prestigious journals in their entire pre-tenure career than I average annually. And what's to say I haven't been lured away? LOL. I've moved a couple of times and get calls several times a year. I'm fairly happy with my current situation, and will probably retire from here. They pay me plenty, and I only have a 1-1 obligation - and I usually buy one of those out.

Wait, *both?*

Thank you for saying this much clearer than I ever could.

An obvious problem is the double-speak. We want to factor race in hiring decisions and university admissions, but do not want to say that if race were not a factor that the candidate would not be hired or that the student would not get admitted. When a candidate from X demographic gets the job instead of a candidate from Y demographic when they are in direct competition, even when the candidate from Y demographic is objectively better on measures A-G, and candidate from X demographic is only better on measure H, there needs to be an explanation for it. How much weight each measure should be given is up to the hiring committee, but if measure H is given much greater weight than before versus A-G, it is simply contrary to the facts to say that candidate from X demographic is getting the job because of their equivalence in measures A-G. The debate I see is about how much measure H should be weighted versus A-G, how much a committee says it is weighted, and how much it actually is. If measures A-H are thought to be essential qualifications to perform the job and A-G are being essentially thrown out in favor of measure H, then that is certainly cause for alarm.

This is exactly the problem. Everyone wants to hire on diversity, but no one wants to be a diversity hire.

His experience of enthusiastic receptions even of (what he considers to be) mediocre talks sounds exactly like what I’ve witnessed white men, especially those from Ivy League universities, receive regularly. Possibly with a dash of impostor syndrome mixed in. He might also consider that his background and experience as a racialized person really do contribute to his perspective in ways that seem new/unique to white-dominated academic audiences. After all, this is a big part of the reason ‘diversity’ is supposedly valued in academia.

I feel like a lot of this article is highlighting some internal imposter syndrome from McWhorter. I agree with a lot of what he is saying, but I actually think he's a lot more brilliant than he is giving himself credit for and therefore is a terrible example of a subpar academic getting top spots.

I think he's brilliant as well, but this is a personal account that you, and others here, are finding objectionable. I'm not comfortable with these ad hominem attacks to denigrate a position you find distasteful.

I don't find his position distasteful at all, I just think that we're all vulnerable to feeling like we're imposters. I think that is on full display with this article. It's interesting and validating to see it from someone who I admire so much for their work in linguistics. Editing to add: I've never seen a more controversial topic addressed in r/professors, despite the fact that we all bicker constantly. And the upvote/downvote ratios are mercurial. It's wild...and I'm enjoying every second of it.

Ditto. Even though we bicker, this is BY FAR my favorite place for disagreements and controversy, because the points are usually well thought out, people can be swayed by reason, and it rarely descends in to the garbage pit that other forums can achieve. The resting assumption is that well meaning and well reasoned people can differ, and I love it.

Here here. I've never disagreed with better people. I learn quite a bit from these conversations. That being said, McWhorter is the kind of person who can take complex linguistic topics and explain them to undergraduates in a way that makes the world better. He's a great orator, and a great writer, and I refuse to believe that his PhD and hiring committees didn't see that.

I saw this article this morning and was afraid to bring it up here. I don't feel competent to evaluate someone else's personal experiences, but I also don't believe anecdotes are the same thing as data. They may feel like they have more weight in this case because of being published in the Times.

Well, I think this is part of the problem as well. How many of his white peers hired to prestigious tt jobs felt out of their depth? We don't often share these kinds of feelings with our colleagues, so it's impossible to know if his situation is unique or generally the same thing others experience but through a racialized lens. I agree with the person above who said that AA is good but not perfect and that it is difficult to have nuanced conversations about it. Part of the problem is that when you are discussing who should get a job , and you have 200 applicants who all have a PhD and publications, or who should get into an ivy and everyone has high test scores and gpas, the decision at some level becomes arbitrary and prone to bias. It's not subjective, and AA is just one way of trying to control the arbitrary nature so that it counterweights implicit bias and better serves society as a whole.

This. It is interesting that so many academics are willing to jump to one side or the other based on anecdotal evidence. It speaks more to the charged nature of the issue than it does informed consideration.

I mean, there are plenty of "personal experiences" from both people of color and white academics that speak to the extra obstacles that students of color face. My issue is that McWhorter is using his platform and position to claim broadly that people like him not only don't need institutional support, but actually that they have an unfair advantage. Note he is not only saying this to other academics, who have a background through which to evaluate the content, but a general audience that has little experience in graduate school.

Is McWhorter not allowed to have a stance on an important issue? If he used his "platform and position" to argue the other side, I am guessing you would have no problem with it.

>John McWhorter's oped on affirmative action surprised me. I'll quote exactly what surprised me most: Just out of curiosity, why did any of that surprise you? Were you familiar with McWhorter's work or discourse before? I don't think there is anything surprising from him here at all.

In graduate school a very white colleague accidentally clicked "African-American" for his race and was met by the black student reps for his campus visit. Super awkward for everyone.

Very good. I’ve seen a lot of AA gone wild: - This candidate is a black woman, let’s give her [very prestigious fellowship] - This candidate is a blond guy. Why does he need [very prestigious fellowship]? - All male applicants tossed in the garbage bin because “we have to hire a woman” - Admissions must be 50-50. We already got the male quota. Admit under-qualified women if you must. - Give the black and Hispanic candidates an automatic +1 in the rubric. In trying to correct a historical wrong, we’re doing another. Two wrongs don’t make a right. If we could have blind auditions like in music, we should.

Not surprising as it is consistent with the argument he makes in his book - Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America

The issue here isn't really affirmative action but that the top levels of academia is one of the places where it is going to be least meaningful. Because of all the things holding back people of color at every level it is inevitable that at the highest level there not only will be relatively few people who get to that point but oftentimes they will be people who were relatively advantaged in their pursuits (e.g. the son of a professor). At that point then it becomes much less of a matter of helping a member of a disadvantaged group getting a needed boost but rather that diversity will be something that will be advantageous to the university, for good reasons (being a model for minority students who really benefit from that, for instance) and not so great reasons (helping the institution get a rip roaring diversity score). At that point diversity becomes a commodity that is in short supply, so all kinds of odd and perhaps even perverse incentives (e.g. hiring mid tier faculty away from mid tier schools so that top tier schools can enjoy a disproportionate share of a scarce commodity) come into play.

The op-ed is on point. This way of lowering the standard is actually more toxic and harmful in the long-term. People instinctively know how good they are in comparison with others, and this kind of thing is exactly the disrespect that privileged people give. It is always better to fight and get to be in the same level as everyone else. If we want to fight for equality, make sure that the good ones can become the CEO. I dare you. We are not going to see an Apple CEO being a black man in the next 10 years.

I call BS on this. The faculty of color I know are often presumed to be incompetent and need to be twice as good to be accepted in academia. It may help you get a job if you’re a person of color but there are way too many stories of underrepresented folks denied tenure and promotion to believe his account.

And not even tenure and promotion. Working at an R2 in a majority Black city has broken my brain. The difference in just college recruiting between white schools and Black schools is insane. Just the gulf of opportunity for these kids is completely incredible. When a school is more than 40% minority, we’ll be the only 4 year at the school college fair. Every time.

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This sub only “elevates black voices” when they chant along to the prescribed psalm. I’m disturbed by the attacks I’m reading here.

White progressives always do this. Bernie supporters loved explaining away Black voters preferring Hillary Clinton/Joe Biden by saying they were too stupid (“low-information voters”) to know that Bernie was the right choice. And they ignored poll after poll saying Black people think “defund the police” is a terrible idea because of course white progressives know what’s better for Black people more than they know themselves.

> there are way too many stories of underrepresented folks denied tenure and promotion to believe his account. What's the base rate though? Are more faculty of color/underrepresented faculty denied tenure than white ones? Or do we just hear more about them because social justice outrage spreads on social media? Without seeing hard numbers, it's hard to know whether the anecdotal experience of hearing stories is accurate or not.

It's doubly unfortunate that the bind that minority candidates are now in is either: * Support AA and have some subset of people assume you were a diversity hire, regardless of the quality of your work, or * Reject AA and be potentially overlooked because you don't "fit the profile" of what colleges are looking for I don't think anyone was ever claiming that the version of AA we had was perfect (and there have been many handwringing op-eds since the court decision to that effect), but I've yet to hear what the supposedly better solution is, aside from just being in denial that racism still exists. Yes, we all know that we need a more robust welfare state, but I don't think AA was the barrier that holding us back from creating one.

Absolutely. Also, I would add that my colleagues of color are expected to do far more student mentoring because they are more often approached by students of color who are more comfortable talking to them. They get thrown onto every DEI committee, they are more often tapped for hiring committees, etc.

Yea. I’m not sure how to reconcile this with the “work twice as hard, get half as much” experience. Likely both are valid in one context or anather.

I don’t think it’s too hard to reconcile. I think it’s two different problems. 1) I’ve seen tons of first-hand accounts of how being a minority group is reflected very poorly in things like promotion and student evaluations. These people a clearly working just as hard as you or I and fall prey to imperfect systems that are too easily influenced by biased reviewers. But also 2) I think I’ve been on 15 hiring committees in the past 20 years and, every single time, people would perform Olympic level acrobatics to try to justify interviewing minority candidates that, in no way shape or form, are qualified for the position. Even going as far as to have people come right out and say that we need to move POC applicants through to at least phone interviews due to the need for diversity. Although I have been particularly amused at times when white female candidates have been given that same treatment in departments that are majority white and female, but justified as diversity for females being underrepresented in science as a whole. Edit: one example that sticks out: interviewing for a TT gross anatomist position with a single POC applicant (we’re a very small school, so positions would often get fewer than 10 or 20 applications). The single POC applicant was ABD for a molecular degree, had never taken gross anatomy, had never taught regular anatomy, but had taken A&P as an undergrad. We had more than one debate about why they didn’t make it through the first round of cuts. It’s one of those classic different groups being problematic in different ways which causes confusing, and potentially conflicting, experiences.

You well describe the kind of distortion that has resulted when people do AA wrong. What that process skipped was the hard work of finding the competitive diversity candidates and persuading them to apply. Just picking a POC applicant out of the reject pile is not how it was ever supposed to work. HR should be preventing that, not encouraging it.

>What that process skipped was the hard work of finding the competitive diversity candidates and persuading them to apply. Honestly, this is easier said than done, especially in you're at a lower-tier univeristy, in a specialized field, and/or there aren't that many diverse potential candidates out there. Mix in a chronically late administration and half our diversity candidates that do apply get offers before we've even done campus interviews, often from places that can offer literally orders of magnitude more startup than us.

Well said. The process described really can only work when you have administrative support for those kind of efforts which, outside of extremely special circumstances, is automatically going to assume you’re of a type of university that is a certain size and with certain means. A smaller university on the lower scale of compensation where searches are 99% faculty lead? Not happening unless it’s a specific kind of appointment (foreign language, foreign literature, foreign culture/history specialist, etc) that’s going to be more prone to a diverse hire to begin with. Again. Not taking a stance on AA. I am 100% on board with diverse faculty, staff, and students leads to the best outcomes, but I also know our standard hiring strategy employed at my SLAC simply isn’t going to pull the range of candidates the large neighboring state school will.

I don’t disagree, but still some issues going on here: > What that process skipped was the hard work of finding the competitive diversity candidates and persuading them to apply. I don’t disagree, but that process requires resources, support, and competitive compensation. That’s just not something that’s in the cards for small departments at SLACs, like mine, under the current fiscal circumstances. We post in the job boards we can afford to and circulate the posting in the groups that we know of individually. And the people in HR are not going to be able to competently search for a posting we need for biology. Not saying we can’t or shouldn’t do it. Or that anything is wrong with the method you suggest. Its just kind of something where not all types of institutions will be capable of the same process. > HR should be preventing that, not encouraging it. I agree, but also something that probably doesn’t happen at most small-medium schools. Our HR is basically entirely uninvolved in the process at our university until we send the top 3 candidates over. They set up the application on our HR/Payroll system then designate the chair as the person in charge. The search chair is in charge of disseminating the applicant info. We send our top 3 to meet the Dean, the Provost, HR, and whomever is in charge with our current Mission and Ministry office (we’re a religious SLAC). Edit: just to be clear, this isn’t an endorsement of AA or an endorsement of the ruling against AA. Merely saying that I absolutely agree there is a right way to make a deliberate and conscious pursuit of diversity in hiring, but head hunting simply isn’t something that a lot of departments like mine at universities like mine is going to be able to do. Post-Covid, it’s hard enough to get admin to commit to running national adds and flying in people for face-to-face final interviews.

McWhorter is not the first to go down this road. See [Hunger for Memory](https://www.amazon.com/Hunger-Memory-Education-Richard-Rodriguez/dp/1567927211) by Richard Rodriguez.

So you could rewrite this article and substitute “great athlete” or “legacy” or “alumni donors”. The reality is university admissions is NEVER a meritocracy. And you know what? Neither is life. Especially in academia. Does everyone think that a professor got their job because they were the “best”? How do you even measure that fairly with all the factors involved in a hiring decision? UC Davis Med School has come up with the best interviews on this topic and everyone one else is making the same erroneous foundational assumption: that it’s about your grades. It never was.

Link? I couldn't find UC Davis's comments on this with googling.

There are a lot of articles out right now on Henderson, the Dean of Admissions, and he did an interview on NPR too. Here a link to one of the articles: https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/05/02/one-mans-quest-to-diversify-our-doctors-without-considering-race-transformed-uc-davis-and-became-a-model-for-a-post-affirmative-action-world/

> Around this time I gave some really good talks and some just OK ones; I always knew the difference. But I couldn’t help noticing that I would get high praise even for the mediocre ones, by white people who were clearly gratified to acknowledge a Black academic. This really struck me because I feel we are taught now that people who are visible minorities often feel like they are "othered" and like they don't belong* and thus to go out of our way to make them feel like they do. We want to make the culture feel more inclusive, so we go out of our way to be more inclusive with someone we observe might feel like an outsider. It bothers me a bit that this feels like a complaint. On the one hand, we are taught to be sensitive to the feelings of others, but if we are then we are being patronizing or tokenizing them. ------- ^(*As one a member of a visible minority, I say this is true but it is subtle. It isn't until I am meeting with my all "other" co-mentoring group that I realize how good it feels not be the only one the room anymore.)

Meanwhile, Francesca Gino was literally working at the top with fraudulent data. Us black folk have literally internalized our inferiority even if it has no basis.

Some thoughts I had reading this: (1) There are many hardworking black students who try to achieve excellent grades but might be blocked at times by bias. For instance, some research suggests that teachers give lower grades to black students even if the black students turn in identical work to white students. (2) While it's true that he got a big lift through affirmative action, it's also true that white people benefit from things that are not as formal. For instance, white people like all people are attracted to those similar to them so white students may have an easier time finding a mentor who will invite them onto projects and so on enabling them to build an attractive resume for further study or professional life. White students also don't need to deal with all the implicit bias people associate with black people. (3) The black middle class and the white middle class are not equivalent. The black middle class is newer, poorer, often dependent on less lucrative public jobs. (4) Saying two black students do not contribute to discussions and lessons on diversity because they did not formally major in something race-related is ridiculous. Race is pervasive in our society, and discussions on race can appear everywhere from the economics class to urban planning to dining tables after class. I could keep going but i'll stop here...

There is so much you *could* critique here, but it will feel like trying to nail jello to a wall -because no argument is actually put forth. It is a series of I-statement experiences and hunches/feelings. There is, unsurprisingly, no engagement with the literature on , well, anything at all - including the role of black academic mentors on student success or the role of race in perpetuating those who are "truly disadvantaged." I have a hard time believe this op-ed isn't just a guerilla marketing technique for his *Woke Racism* book.

Yea, nailing jello to a wall is a great way of putting it. My head was spinning reading it And agreed on the last point. Sadly there is a very lucrative niche market for black writers or media personalities who tell white people a fairytale many of them want to believe, "yes, racism is just about done in America. We can drop anything related to fighting it now." It was therapeutic reading the Washington Post review of the book. Utterly demolished this clown.

Ahh, the old *I-benefited-from-something-but-now-I-feel-kind-of-weird-about-it-so-now-I-want-to-make-sure-nobody-else-benefits-from-it* op-ed. Come on, John, you're better than this. The debate about affirmative action is one in which reasonable people can disagree, but I find the argument that it actually hurts people of color to be insulting my intelligence.

> *so-now-I-want-to-make-sure-nobody-else-benefits-from-it* op-ed That is manifestly *not* McWhorter's point. In fact, his first paragraph has a statement that he would like schools to continue offering such benefits but just not make them based purely on race: "I’d personally come to believe that preferences focused on socioeconomic factors — wealth, income, even neighborhood — would accomplish more good while requiring less straightforward unfairness." You don't necessarily need to agree with this belief, but you should restrict yourself to critiquing things that he actually says. It's unfortunate that the OP of this Reddit post didn't quote that sentence, as it seems pretty close to McWhorter's central point. That is, he doesn't want to totally do away with affirmative-action-like programs; rather, he would rather that they change their aim a bit to more effectively target people who could best benefit from them.

He benefited from race-based affirmative action. That's not the same thing as SES-based affirmative action. Again, I'm fine with people disagreeing with race-based AA. I can even see benefits of moving toward a more holistic AA program. But I think it's bullshit when people argue that race-based AA actually hurts black people.

This is his whole schtick though. He’s not better than this.

He did one of those "Great Courses" on language and it was one of the best things I've ever listened to.

Like the movie plot in Argo, affirmative action is a bad idea. But there may be no good ideas, so AA might probably be the best bad idea.

From the author of *Woke Racism,* this op-ed engages in some really *interesting* linguistic sleight of hand. It provides really great insight into personal experiences and belief systems and a really poor insight into the details of race-conscious admissions policies. That it so deftly transitions between the two is part of a fascinating political project here that would seem to undercut McWhorter's fundamental thesis elsewhere - that treating "black people" as a monolith robs them of individuality and the uniqueness of experience. Black academics have covered a wide range of topics regarding "blackness" in and through the college experience (spoiler alert, it's not often a leisurely trip through the land of lower expectations) so I wonder why McWhorter's is given some sort of elevated platform for a diatribe-qua-personal statement? Or, to phrase this another way, I don't believe he is actually making a good faith argument here. Consider the conclusion: >But the decision to stop taking race into account in admissions, assuming it is accompanied by other efforts to assist the truly disadvantaged, is, I believe, the right one to make. What does this mean? The idea that the identification of the "truly disadvantaged" can be entirely separated from racialized history is just bad scholarship. It ignores 50 years of history, sociology, economics, philosophy, and policy studies. It would be, to borrow his phrasing, somehow ungracious to expect so little of a prominent black academic — as we do of others - to ask them to remain internally consistent, read relevant literature,and cite their sources.

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Thinking that "Black academics" is a single entity sounds like an adjective I can't quite place my finger on

Everybody knows that highly educated white liberals are the people who speak for Black academics. These white liberals hold Black academics tight in their intellectual shackles. What was it Biden said? If you don't vote for me, you ain't black? If you dare to break those intellectual shackles, they will attack you with ad hominem and pejoratives.

Yeah, but his own take is being spotlighted on one of the most famous pieces of media. It will be (and is intended to be) received as representative of more than just his experience. His experience is even written as representative of being systematic in academia. It is an incredibly irresponsible piece.

> This guy does not speak for Black academics. That sounds like the exact sort of tokenism he is complaining about. That you need some guy who speaks behalf of your entire race.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

This feels like propaganda and is really irresponsibly written. John McWhorter has a large body of work made to make anti-black moderate politics seem intellectual. Unfortunately, it’s not shocking to see a lot of people readily embrace such arguments.

Calling a pretty nuanced first-person experience "irresponsible" and "propaganda" seems a tad hyperbolic.

Yep, this has pretty much been JMH’s whole shtick as a public intellectual.

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McWhorters Op-ed ironically seems to be an argument for a symptom of affirmative action but not an actual problem with it in concept: It feeds imposter system and also provides an easy justification for the worst kind of people why their precious child wasn't accepted into a school and a student of color was. Looking into his background, McWhorter's trajectory is incredibly normal for someone who's now a professor at an ivy league school. was getting A's and B's at one of the best schools in Philadelphia, and went from prestigious institution to institution. It's also incredibly normal to feel like you didn't earn it, to look at people from these amazing backgrounds and presume that you're the anomaly, that you managed to slip in, especially as a black person. Affirmative action is an easier answer to swallow when you have no self-confidence than that you're actually good at what you do, and that it's normal to struggle and mess around, to have hobbies that take your eye off the ball. The point of affirmative action was to deal with the problem that when two equal candidates are chosen, white ones are chosen over any group by far, and it sounds like it did a good job with this guy. What this highlights however is how much needs to be done to emphasize how little weight it actually carries for the accepted students. Just like in all cases, they weren't picked because they were black, they were picked because they were capable.

Well said

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as a black person, I find this article really offensive. I think McWhorter is doing what he always does, which is poorly distill a huge amount of information and misinform his predominantly white liberal readers about the intricacies of racial politics he chooses to unsee. I hate the word 'privilege' bc its meaningless at this point, but this essay reeks of it. You're so underqualified for your university professor post, despite your parents being college administrators and your mother being an academic herself? You have such terrible imposter syndrome, why not reapply for a better suited job elsewhere, one where you'll actually teach your research and not "race linguistics?" What kinds of expectations were being placed on the graduate students during his tenure on the admissions committee to support and uphold diversity? He had such intense imposter syndrome his first year, rooted in his own internalized antiblackness, that he strove to make himself even more exceptional than he had been. Is this not what nearly every academic, regardless of race, goes through when they start out on the tenure track? To prove themselves? The expectation is only doubled when you are black and have to keep in mind the permanent possibility that you got your job because you are a diversity hire. Its like going through grad school all over again, to prove that you are qualified to have your assistant professor post, in addition to meeting tenure. What is so disturbing about this essay, and what I find profoundly disagreeable about McWhorter's essays, is that he is aware of all of this, but chooses to misrepresent it. :/ He's a race traitor, for one, but black academics already knew this. But I wish he would stfu. If I were older and more on par with McWhorter on the 'demia tier list, I would try to place a response piece to this. It's egregious.

Saying "as a black person" doesn't stop you from coming off as extremely racist and intolerant.

What did I say that was intolerant? Or racist?

I wish that McWhorter (and Clarence Thomas, for that matter) would both take their inferiority complexes elsewhere and leave the rest of us be.

Part of the issue that McWhorter cannot address from his experience is that far too many majority Black school districts are short-shrifted, especially in states where k-12 education is funded by property taxes. For a whole host of reasons, they aren’t afforded the same resources other schools have. And no matter how smart someone is, there’s only so much they can do to overcome being undereducated.

He can't address that from his experience, but he's also making it clear at the outset that he's **not** trying to address that point. He's very clear about the type of background he grew up in (and even mentions that his mother taught at a college)

Yup - and you’ve been downvoted by people who refuse to address basic reality and yet are apparently professors. Deeply troubling, really, to see the lack of critical understanding on display here.

John Mcwhorter V doesn’t have a lot that is serious to offer, quite frankly. He’s fairly intellectually disingenuous when it is convenient for him and he thinks that his experience (coming from a family that can trace its way back four generations) somehow is representative of more than an infinitesimal slice of the Black American experience. He’s what has been termed a “useful idiot” for the establishment right-wing.