The Roots of White Anxiety: American Meritocracy Disrepects Red America

[grasswire]

Originally printed in NYT, reprinted today in The Oregonian

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/07/the_roots_of_white_anxiety_ame.html

..............snip

Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Latino applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out recently on the conservative website Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family's socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications. This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars "for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students," leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.

But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study's more remarkable findings: While most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school ROTC, 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or "Red America."

This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren't racial minorities; they're working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

This breeds paranoia, among elites and nonelites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited -- that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist handpicked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with Third World immigrants, and so forth.

[grasswire]

1. There are so many possible rebuttals to this piece.

1. If they want to be thought intelligent, stop parroting idiots!

2.

[LARED]

2. Sounds like the author checked out DU

Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what's being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the tea parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

Sadly way too many DU'er fit that description.

[Rabrrrrrr]

3. Wow - leave it to a left-behind rightwing fuck to totally misread, misinterpret, and then spin

someone else's work.

And it's totally loaded with code words, and makes the huge assumption that all rural and working-class white Americans are conservative republicans.

Totally untrue.

If the fuckers want to know why the conservatives are being left behind from the good colleges, they need look no further than their home-schooling Creation-science curricula, their xenophobia that keeps their kids out of mingling with others and expanding their worldview, and a constant repetition from their loudmouths and their "pastors" that knowledge is fearful and ungodly.

If they want their kids accepted at colleges and universities that are accredited and half-way fucking decent, then they need to actually educate their kids about the real world.

I'm a middle-class working-class white guy, and went to college with mostly working-class white guys - at a private, accredited, insanely-difficult-to-get-into US World and News recommended college.

But for the most part, they'd all actually been educated and weren't ignorant, racist, bigoted, world-fearing assholes who want to turn America into a Christian fundamentalist hellhole.

[grasswire]

4. May I suggest writing that as an LTTE?

Or at least a comment on the web site?

Those of us who were raised in middle class America and didn't turn to wingnuttery need to refute this piece of tripe.

[Rabrrrrrr]

5. I'd love to, but I'd have to register and they want my email

and it's all a great big pain in the ass.

neonzx seems to have hit well what I was saying, though, and do it in a lot fewer words! lol.

[Recursion]

6. Umm... I think we read different articles

and makes the huge assumption that all rural and working-class white Americans are conservative republicans.

Where does the author do that?

I read the author as saying:

A) if an applicant is white or asian, he or she is more likely to be accepted to a private university if rich, and less likely to be accepted to a private university if poor.

B) if an applicant is black or hispanic, he or she is more likely to be accepted to a university if poor, and less likely if rich.

The author points out that leads to a bunch of colleges with kids from rich white and asian families and poor black and hispanic families. Left out of this are poor white families (and rich black and hispanic families; but there are much fewer of these).

It sounded to me like the author was saying to make sure that among the white students you accept, you get some who are poor and from rural areas. Which seems reasonable to me.

[Rabrrrrrr]

7. Because I listen to and read a lot of rightwing "Christian" stuff, and I know the code they use

and that article is filled with it.

It is indeed saying what you pointed out, and there are some legitimate potentially troubling factors in there - but with a sub-text, for the audience that knows the code, of "See, the white Christian* male is getting the shaft again in America and there's that damn liberal elite colleges doing it".



*and when these assholes say "Christian" they really mean rightwing, Republican, conservative, evangelical/fundamentalist Christianity.

[applegrove]

8. So being a red state type right winger is recognized as a disadvantage

when it comes to college or university. I could have told you that.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. Ross Douthat is the NY Times' replacement for Bill Kristol

Not quite as dumb, but evidently young and without any real life experience.

The readers' comments in the NY Times mostly told of how few working class whites even try to get into Ivy League schools.

[grasswire]

10. yes, young and opinionated. Kind of like Luke Russert.

Douthat was born in San Francisco, California, but grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.<6> He attended Hamden Hall, a private high school in Hamden, Connecticut. Douthat graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2002, where he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While there he contributed to The Harvard Crimson and edited the Harvard Salient.<7> As an adolescent Douthat converted to Pentecostalism and then, with the rest of his family,<8> to Catholicism.<9> His mother is writer Patricia Snow.<10> His father, Charles Douthat, is a partner in a New Haven law firm.<11> In 2007 he married Abigail Tucker, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and a writer for Smithsonian Magazine.<11> He and his family live in Washington, D.C..<12>

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. So he's thirty and has been affluent all his life

I figured as much.

[roxiejules]

11. The divide deepens

I think one should consider the possibility that the liberal movement is being tainted by the tactic of calling everyone on the other side a racist or Christian blankety blank.

[yurbud]

13. I remember in my conservative days knowing that being in CAP or church

activities weren't exactly the best thing to put on resumes or college apps.