WaPo:
Obama downplays affirmative action as an issue
(snip)
In an Associated Press interview Thursday, Obama said affirmative action can be made an “afterthought” when problems such as malnutrition, poverty and substandard schools are dealt with, and “everybody has a level playing field.”
No such thing. See Murray and Hernstein, The Bell Curve.
Malnutrition, poverty and substandard schools are symptoms of racial differences, not causes. If you transvert an inner city school district to their cities’ suburbs, you would have a great school district. Likewise, if you transvert the “good” suburban districts to the inner cities, they would get bad all of a sudden. How good or bad a school district is depends on whether the district’s students want to learn, which itself is a function of intelligence, which in turn is a function of race.
This is President Obama’s attempt to triangulate the affirmative action issue out of the public consciousness, so that it doesn’t hurt Democrats in 2010 and himself in 2012.
