re: #181 lostlakehiker

The words of that MLK quote are good and true. But some on the left call it `combating discrimination’ when they throw out test results because they don’t like the results, and when they set the bar at different heights for different races when it comes to law school admission, medical school admissions, and the like.

Discrimination can be done subtly enough that the only way to detect it is through a statistical comparison of the outcome. If you administer a test and 90% of white people pass it and only 10% of black people do, then given a large enough sample size one can quite confidently say that there’s something wrong with the test. As for admissions, the bar isn’t actually set differently; race only counts between people equally qualified. The expected outcome can be determined taking into account how many qualified members of the minority race are in the applicant pool. If the actual admissions vary widely from that, then some other factor is at work, which is to say that someone involved in the admission process would have to be engaging in racism.

The central tactic of wingnuts regarding race issues is that opposing racism requires engaging in racism. They’re lying.