Blacks, Hispanics and blogging

Heather Mac Donald:

As for minorities, the skills gap in reading and writing means that, at the moment, a lower percentage of blacks and Hispanics possess the verbal acumen to produce a cutting-edge blog. For decades, blacks and Hispanics have scored 200 points below whites on the SATs' verbal section. Black high-school seniors on average read less competently than white 8th graders; Hispanic 12th graders read only slightly better than white 8th graders. And those are just the ones who are graduating. In the Los Angeles school system, which is typical of other large urban districts, 53 percent of black students and 61 percent of Hispanic students drop out before graduating from high school; most of the dropouts exit in the 9th grade. Assuming, generously, that those dropouts have 5th-grade skills, they are unlikely candidates for power blogging.

Here's Steven Levy's minimum prescription for joining the ranks of Alpha blogging: "You have to post frequently . . . link prodigiously," and, like one technology guru he describes, spend two hours daily writing your weblog and "three more hours reading hundreds of other blogs." If you have difficulty reading, you're probably not going to find that regime attractive. Obviously, many individual blacks and Hispanics possess more than the necessary skills to power their way into the top 100 blogs. But diversity zealots don't look at individuals, they look at aggregates. And in the aggregate, blacks and Hispanics lag so far behind whites in literacy skills that it is absurd to blame racial exclusion for the absence of racial proportionality on the web. Junking “progressive” pedagogy, with its absurd hostility to drilling and memorization, is the only solution to the education lag; diversity bean-counting is window-dressing.

No one has succeeded in closing the skills gap yet, but over the years we've developed numerous bureaucratic devices to paper it over. These devices will undoubtedly prove highly useful in addressing what Levy calls the web's "diversity problem." Levy proposes, as an initial matter, that the power-bloggers voluntarily link to some as yet unspecified number of non-male, non-white writers. The history of 'voluntary' affirmative action efforts need not be rehearsed here; suffice it to say, once 'voluntary' race- and gender-conscious policies are proposed, mandates are not far behind.

The great thing about blogs is that they allow you to write what you want and link to sites that you find interesting. If blacks and Hispanics want their blogs to become more popular then they should write about subjects that others find interesting. Graduating from high school would probably help too.