John McWhorter - Standardized Tests Aren’t Racist: How Brown Kids Can Ace the Test to Get Into New York’s Stuyvesant

Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, and Mary Macleod Bethune are turning in their graves, and I would like to have even known what Maya Angelou and Ruby Dee thought of statements like this.

 Overall, the racism argument just doesn’t work for this case. Black students from Stuyvesant fan out to middle schools in black neighborhoods every year to spread the word to students about the test you need to take to get into it. Plus, the city helps. There are free—free—test prep courses available.

The school’s administrators achingly wish there were more black kids. If this is institutional racism, then the term is devoid of meaning. The problem here is information flow.

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