Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

You choose the one with the bad form. You can coach him to use good form and he'll
beat the other guy.
In the same way, blind adherence to SAT scores and GPAs is ridiculous. Take two
kids, one white and one black. The white kid's in private school, has educated parents, opportunities
to travel, intensive SAT tutoring. He takes the SATs three times and submits his
highest score—1,280. The black kid is brought up by a single mom who didn't graduate from
high school. No books in the house, works after school, shares a room with two brothers. No
SAT tutoring, takes it once, gets an 1,120. You'd take the black kid, right?
Except, I forgot. The white kid's dad was your roommate in college. You spraypainted
the dean's car together sophomore year. That was fun! Remember the look on Dean
Whitehead's face? Oh, and your brother does a lot of business with the family. Hard not to
take the white kid.
Of course, most white kids don't have these advantages. But almost no black kids do.
We don't live in a race-blind society. Two professors, one from M.I.T., the other from
the University of Chicago, proved it with an elegant experiment. The professors selected
1,250 job advertisements in Boston and Chicago. To each employer, they submitted two pairs
of made-up resumes. One pair of highly qualified candidates and one pair of average candidates.
In each pair, one had a "black" name like Tamika or Tyrone and one had a "white"
name like Amy or Brad. The professors found that the "white" names were 50 percent more
likely to be called for an interview than the "black" names.
George W Bush was the beneficiary of affirmative action. In more ways than we'll
probably ever know. He got into Yale after a lackluster career at Andover. What people don't
realize is t 'at, like the University of Michigan, Yale had a point system when Bush applied in
1964. George W received five points for being the son of a Yale graduate, twenty points for
being the grandson of an extremely important Yale graduate, who was a U.S. senator and a
Yale trustee, and a point for being a cheerleader at Andover. He almost didn't make it,
though, because he lost ten points for showing up drunk to the interview. Fortunately, he got
thirty points for being a Bush with over a 920 on his SATs, and he slipped through.
I'm not saying that all Republicans are racist or that all racists are Republican. That
would be a reprehensible overstatement, akin to something Ann Coulter might say. But if
Ann were a Democrat, she would point out that, after years of declining during Clinton, black
poverty is now on the increase. And she would make great use of the fact that youth poverty