Above is the electoral map for Mitt Romney among white men. Even in states like California and New York, white men voted for Romney. Identity is crucial in presidential politics, but there is some danger that our society will continue to amp up these kinds of divides, and that elections will be more and more about male versus female, Anglo versus Hispanic, black versus white. The fact that one political party seems bent on being the White Male Party seems all the more likely to entrench this divide.
This kind of awareness has now surfaced in the Virginia State Board of Education, which is trying to implement different score goals depending on your race:
It looked at students’ test scores in reading and math and then proposed new passing rates. In math it set an acceptable passing rate at 82 percent for Asian students, 68 percent for whites, 52 percent for Latinos, 45 percent for blacks and 33 percent for kids with disabilities….
At a meeting of the state board of education in late September, Patricia Wright, Virginia’s superintendent of public instruction, defended the new policy.
“Rest assured, all of us hold all students to the same academic standards, but when it comes to measuring progress, we have to consider that students start at different points,” Wright said.
At some point, we are going to have to look into ways of transcending race in this country. This is really not good, when state-level educators are producing racist state standards.
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