• Guess what’s racist this week? Mainstream media reporting on Ukraine!
Behold the Washington Post:
Opinion: Coverage of Ukraine has exposed long-standing racist biases in Western media
Putin’s criminal invasion of Ukraine has generated an inspiring wave of solidarity around the world, but for many — especially non-White observers — it has been impossible to tune out the racist biases in Western media and politics.
Yes, it’s “impossible to tune out racist biases in Western media and politics” when you suffer from racial tinnitus. To paraphrase the definition one medical dictionary offers for the malady: “The noise you hear when you have tinnitus isn’t caused by an external sound, and other people usually can’t hear it. Tinnitus is a common problem. It affects about 15% to 20% of people, and is especially common in older adults deranged liberals.” Or as many have put it, if you constantly hear racist “dog whistles,” you’re the dog.
• So we’re getting rid of the SAT and ACT for college admissions purposes, and going by other means of selecting students. What could go wrong?
Of course it is. But NBC News has decided that recommendation letters should be abolished, too:
This college admissions season, let’s end the odious, racist practice of recommendations
. . . Studies bear this out, revealing harmful disparities in letters of recommendation that favor white male applicants in everything from college admissions to medical residency placements to internships. . . If our institutions genuinely want to evolve past tired tokenism toward true equity and inclusion, then banning letters of recommendation would be an excellent start.
So how about we just move to random lotteries for college admissions and solve the problem once and for all?
• Chaser: I like to point out to students that the core argument of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” is taken directly from Thomas Aquinas, in particular Question 96, Article 4, Objection 3 of the Summa Theologica.
Well now, the Financial Times reports this week:
In 1961, MLK taught a college class. Its syllabus might be contentious today
Late in 1961, Martin Luther King Jr took a breather. . . But in the fall of 1961, he slowed down just enough to teach a college class. We happen to have a list, in his own handwriting, of the readings he assigned. The course ran at breakneck speed through major figures in the history of western political thought, starting with Plato’s Republic and followed by selections from Aristotle’s Ethics and The Politics. Then came Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli and Hobbes, before moving on to Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and “the Utilitarians” Bentham and Mill. His students did not exaggerate when they remembered “an immense amount of reading” for the class.
Today, we would recognise the course King offered as a “great books” course in western political thought. Before even considering the ideas contained in the books on King’s list, his syllabus would be criticised now for being made up exclusively of “dead white men”.
In fact I have shown these two slides to my own classes:
As the FT observes, “Note also the careful selections, showing King’s close familiarity with the source readings. Plato’s Republic almost in its entirety and selections from Aristotle’s twin treatises on Ethics and Politics including Book I of the Politics.”
Who knew that King was a white supremacist? (Or is that just the tinnitus again?)
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