Word: inferiors
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Some academicians, like Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and Richard Herrnstein, say racial differences in I.Q. test scores show that black people may be genetically inferior to whites. The evidence that has been advanced to support this claim is entirely worthless. Jensen himself, in a recent article in Behavior Genetics (April, 1974) has conceded that the basic data gathered years ago by Cyril Burt--the evidence Jensen himself used to prove his hereditarian theories--is spurious. Furthermore, the I.Q. test themselves are notoriously biased against black people...
Another group, including former Harvard professors Daniel P. Moynihan and Edward Banfield, claim that black children are unable to learn because of their allegedly inferior culture. Through the process William Ryan has aptly characterized as "blaming the victim," these men would have us believe that if many black people live in slums it must be because they like it there--not because they can't get housing elsewhere. Their "culture of poverty" notions do not point to the main sources of poverty in America: racism, unemployment, and lack of money to buy decent health care, decent homes, decent services...
...that the quality of teachers and schools, particularly those aspects of schooling that cost money, like small classes and enough supplies, have no bearing on how much children learn. Their readers are left to conclude that, since black pupils tend to score lower on reading tests, they must be inferior. They somehow fail to notice not only that black schools are more poorly funded, but that many teachers--influenced by theories like these--go into their jobs with the attitude that black children can't learn, and so make no serious attempt to teach them. A study by Lenore Jacobson...
...find these remarks shocking and indefensible. It is inconceivable that so many applications could be appreciably inferior to those of white students, even by standard admissions criteria. Even so, those criteria themselves ignore the facts that (contrary to popular myth) racist college professors often unjustifiably give low grades and poor recommendations to black students, and that GRE tests are culturally biased against blacks...
...emblem. For centuries they have resented their position as a nation of 5 million people with its own language, democratic tradition and legal system, but without so much as a single self-governing political body. "We have an entire nation that has been submerged into believing it is inferior," says Author Robert Shirley, 46, of Edinburgh's Heriot-Watt University. Recalls Hugh MacDiarmid, the country's greatest living poet: "When I was in school, you were punished if you lapsed into the Scots dialect. You were never taught much more about your own country than, of course, what...