The myopic viewpoint of the woke

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.