Google's Little Race Problem

Google is in the wokey headlights just now because it doesn't think that the graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) meet its exacting standards. Paul Mirengoff has the whole procedure.

See, Google has ranked colleges as follows: "elite," followed by "tier 1" and "tier 2." But HBCUs don't make the cut for "tier 2." So they are ranked as "long tail."

Racist! Google is racist!

Now I have a classification system for liberal bad behavior: Left's Conceits, Left's Crimes, Left's Errors. Well, why not? And I think that this siti-yation -- as they say in Treasure Island -- contains all three. And I'm not sure that this doesn't always apply.

Left's Errors aspect: Back in the Sixties, a second after the Civil Rights Act was passed, liberals decided that merely criminalizing racial discrimination wasn't enough. That was their first mistake. Why? Simply because it is one thing to judge that, say, having a whites-only fountain is discrimination; it is another to say that, because a particular corporation does not have a racial makeup that matches the racial proportions in the community, this represents discrimination.

Left's Conceits aspect: The second problem is to imagine that we evolved and educated liberals could, with politics and government, right the wrongs of yesteryear with top-down liberal-led programs of racial discrimination that we call quotas, or affirmative action, or diversity, or allyism, or fighting "systemic racism." It is a conceit, often found around ruling classes, that any political program it advances will achieve the results expected. Unfortunately there is Science™ that shows that this is not so. It is called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Even La Wik recognizes the Law of Unintended Consequences as a Thing.

Left's Crimes aspect: As the Paul Mirengoff article articulates, the whole quota/affirmative action thing has seriously hurt Blacks. it goes like this:

1. "Elite" universities tend to recruit black students with qualifications somewhat below the white and Asian students -- good but not great credentials -- in order to meet their racist diversity goals.
2. "Tier 1" and "tier 2" universities are forced to accept "mediocre black students" to meet their racist diversity goals.
3. "Long tail" universities like "HBCUs are left to select from a pool of applicants with credentials insufficient to warrant admission to good non-HBCUs even with the benefit of racial preferences.

"Expert agree" that the mismatching of black applicants to university results in lower overall achievements for blacks. Google finds that “HBCU computer science students struggle with the most basic of coding, algorithms and data structures.”

I think that the "mismatching" problem is a crime. But that's just me.

Of course, this also comes under my Little Darlings problem. When you accept the overlordship of the ruling class, and become its Little Darlings, as "the workers" once did, and then women and minorities and now LGBT+, you will thrive under the sponsorship of the ruling class until the day that you are no longer politically useful. Then, like the soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army that invaded Russia, you will be left by the roadside, probably to die of hunger and disease, certainly of despair.

And it is notable, I would say, that the abandoned Little Darlings don't really ever cotton to the reason for their despair.

Do the white working class today blame the 19th century reformers for their plight? Or FDR for eight years of top-down failure in the Great Depression? Or the compulsory unionism that made US steelworkers and autoworkers uncompetitive with the world market in the 1970s?

Anyway, it hardly matters. The damage is already done. As I say, the only question in the aftermath of lefty conceits, crimes, and errors is the size of the butcher's bill.

Will it be a butcher's bill on the scale of a Stalin or a Mao, or simply the abandoned folks "dying of despair" in rural America?

We can only hope.