Here is an example of how you can be blinded when you view everything through the prism of race.
My former colleague Will Bunch recently wrote a heartfelt column about the declining number of African-Americans going to college. Such a decrease might be worrisome, and Bunch helpfully published a graph to illustrate the column. l
See the heavy black line? It shows that African-American college enrollment has declined from a high point of 14.9% in 2012 to 13.3% in 2019. OK, that’s a decline of 1.6%, even though Blacks are about 13% of the population.
But wait. The same chart shows that the 13.3% is an increase of Black enrollment since 1976, when it was 10%. The larger view shows Black enrollment is up, despite a recent downhill blip.
At the same time, the chart shows an increase in Hispanic enrollment from about 3% in 1976, to 20.3% in 2019. Asian enrollment more than tripled, from about 2% in 1976 to 7.4% in 2019. So numbers for both brown and yellow students are up.
But the Big Story — as they might say on Action News — is the top line. See it?
White enrollment, more than 80% in 1976, has suffered an astonishing collapse of some 30 points, to 54.3% in 2019. This suggests that factors other than race might explain declining enrollments, but you would have to look for those factors. It’s so much easier to grab the race club.
In journalism, a story is anything an editor says it is, but Bunch did not invest a single word about the educational calamity affecting whites. Why? Maybe it against his usual narrative of white privilege? Or maybe it’s just not ”newsworthy” to the woke, who are so heavily invested in identity — as long as it is not white.
There is a bigger story here according to the numbers, and this is not the so-called “white fragility speaking.
HAPPY MONDAY !!!
palllie,
Well said, my friend. So, does this mean that the woke is making room for minorities at the cost of the white’s education ?
Tony
Sadly, for the woke there is never any doubt that their view is the correct one.
The old saying, “figures lie and liers figure”. Individuals have used charts and numbers to support their points of view. Sometimes (not many) Will Bunch reports facts. His biased opinions are difficult to digest. I read the paper (inquirer) over the internet because no other alternatives exist for local news. I am glad to see you call out discrepancies when you read them. Thanks
Bunch is one of the several reasons I cancelled my Inky digit subscription after decades of reading the paper. His hysteria and bias know no bounds. Back when they allowed comments on Inky articles, folks in the comment section often outright questioned whether one of the commenters on his columns was indeed Bunch. No confirmation.
It brings me joy that Bunch spends all day looking for things to complain about
I still don’t get the whole ‘woke’ thing. What does it mean to be ‘woke’? I’m awake, and all I see around me is silliness involving race, quotas, how much hate hurts, et cetera. I just wanna go back to sleep!
And this whole silliness about declining Black admissions to college can be solved overnight: simply forbid any non-colored people or Asians from attending college. Then, take every Black college applicant, no matter how bad his grades, and pass him along in college like the high schools have done. (Those of you ready to leap on my ‘non-colored’ usage, I posit the question: isn’t a ‘person of color a colored person’? E.g., if I do a painting in blue and call it ‘a painting of blue,’ am I not correct to say it is also a ‘blue painting’? Let the breast-beating BS begin!
Yo, Vince – I guess that makes you colored white. Right?
Only an albino can claim to be white, right?
Of course not Vince! Ain’t you woke yet??
There’s lies, damn lies, then there’s statistics!