Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Which Do You Choose?
Posted on September 25, 2003 in Reading Social Justice
It’s scarey when a fucking comedian has a better handle on the real situation than your leading radio, television, and print pundits:
I had a baseball coach pose this question to me: “You have two guys run down to first. They have equal times, but one has much better form. Which one do you choose?”
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 mother 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 a 1,120. You’d take the black kid, right?
Except, I forgot. The white kid’s dad was your roommate in college. You spray-painted 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.
(Excerpted from Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, p. 258)
A quick reflection by the average disgruntled white male should reveal something: it’s not the black kid or the Latino or the woman who is stealing your rightful place in the university, it’s the rich brat — the George W. Bush.
We will be an egalitarian, race-blind society when the son of the President of the United States gets the job he deserves pumping gas instead of getting pushed up because of his connections. It’ll be a great day when we stop taking a body builder and former killer android film star as a serious candidate for governor because he has the money to buy air time and give expensive homes to archbishops.
Angry white guys, let’s work for that as a goal and tell the Right to stick their class warfare where the sun don’t shine.
