Only a Liberal…

A video of Sonia Sotomayor has been found where she said this:

I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby. I am a Puerto Rican, born and raised in the South Bronx … With my academic achievement in high school, I was accepted rather readily at Princeton and equally as fast at Yale, but my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.

I have actually seen blog posts and reviews of this quote PRAISING her comments. As though her success is the ultimate justification for the disgustingly racist practice of affirmative action. Rather than just say she didn’t test well, she blames the test.

I am amazed at the number of people, of every skin pigment, who spend every waking minute making excuses for failure rather than spending their time finding ways to succeed. Among non-whites, a common excuse seems to be that its not their fault; it’s someone else’s fault. The test is biased, or the white guy is biased. I scoured the internet looking for an example of a “culturally biased” test QUESTION, let alone an entire test, and found nothing. Just vague assertions that “everyone knows” culturally biased tests are common. I guess if one non-white group scores lower than a white group, then, by definition, some assume the test is “culturally biased.” This is illogical. To prove a test is culturally biased, show me the question and explain the bias. There are three possibilities when investigating a correlation. A caused B, B caused A, or their correlation is a coincidence. In this instance, either the person caused the score for the test to be low, the test caused the score for the person to be low, or its a coincidence. You must provide proof, not weak vagueries.

Even if you accept the premise of a culturally biased test, Sonia Sotomayor was born and raised in America. Her culture should have been American, same as the people who made the test, so any bias against her would have been self-inflicted, by her mother to be exact. Choosing to culturally diversify yourself from the main culture of a country is a sure-fire way to fall victim to a test if, accepting the false premise, you come across a test question with bias against your particular culture.

And did we check the skin-color of the test-creator? Seems to me that would be an EXTREMELY relevant variable in determining the validity of a test, rather than simply relying on the resulting scores of the test.

Back to her admission… Sonia Sotomayor has admitted she was not qualified to go to Princeton, and the only reason she got in is because admissions looked past her test scores to her skin color. The fact that she appeared to excel there proves nothing. Just because a rule has an occasional exception does not make the rule invalid.

Standardized test scores are an objective and invaluable way to predict the success of students in college. The alternative is subjective criteria, such as personality, personal connections, and race. Once upon a time, colleges subjectively chose students based on who their daddy was, and whether they were white. That was racist and unfair, and so is affirmative action for EXACTLY the same reasons.

Another link to read…

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/11/sotomayor-in-her-own-words-on-tape/