In Deleted Tweet, Ibram Kendi Claims Minority Status Paves the Way for Successful Admissions

Stunning admission:

Kendi

This is the same man who talks in circles on the concept of “racism,” a concept upon which all of his writings depend: At the Aspen Ideas Festival in 2019, when asked to define racism, Kendi earnestly answered: “[It is] a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity, that are substantiated by racist ideas.”

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 3 Comments

  1. Avatar of Bill Heath
    Bill Heath October 31, 2021 Reply

    Please tell me you’re not just now figuring out that he’s a con man, and not a very good one at that.

    1. Avatar of Erich Vieth
      Erich Vieth October 31, 2021

      Bill I knew he was misguided as soon as I read his theory that a disparity ALWAYS means that there is racism at work. Not as many “black” oboe players as “white” ones? That means racism, per Kendi, as though different groups of people might not have developed different constellations of interests. I was charitably thinking that Kendi was sincere in his misguided unsubstantiated beliefs until he pulled that recent Tweet. Pulling that Tweet proves that he is clearly situated in con man territory.

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth November 16, 2021 Reply

    Wilfred Reilly on the “Affirmative Action Privilege”:

    Several things about this whole tempest-in-a-teapot fracas are worth discussing in more detail. First, there is substantial evidence that Kendi was probably right. His widely mocked original tweet was not simply a product of his imagination, but instead based on a carefully conducted survey project from the team at Intelligent, reported on by The Hill. This study, which involved more than 1,200 Caucasian American students contacted using the Pollfish platform, found that almost 35 percent of white college applicants (among those surveyed) had lied about their race on applications, and 48 percent of the students who lied claimed to be “Native American” or American Indian. A remarkable 48 percent of male applicants, as opposed to 16 percent of female applicants, engaged in significant dishonesty about their race. And, indeed, 77 percent of students who lied were accepted—from my reading—by at least one college to which they were dishonest.

    I, a cranky Methods professor, do have some questions. Notably, was there a control group of some kind? And if not, what was the college acceptance rate for those students who honestly identified as white? These caveats aside, however, the survey data seems quite plausible. Colleges do not, in fact, conduct DNA tests to verify the racial background of everyone who claims to be one-fourth Cherokee, and the self-reported diversity of the student population currently enrolled on U.S. campuses certainly is increasing.

    In 2015-16, years before today’s “racial reckoning” really got off the ground, 45 percent of all American undergraduate students identified as being members of “a race other than white.” This represented a substantial 15.1 percentage point and 51 percent overall jump from the 29.9 percent figure reported as late as 1996. There are fewer Native American students enrolled today than Intelligent’s data would indicate, but this could easily be the result of applicant versus on-campus student data being collected by different university departments (as is sometimes the case), or of students who self-report as partly Native being counted as more than one race or as Hispanic/Latino—two categories which make up 23.1 percent of the student body when combined.

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