White students can be suspended and expelled from school at higher rates than Asian-descent students, and they are. Yet no one calls it discriminatory; in fact, almost nobody even mentions it.
Boys can be suspended and expelled from school at higher rates than girls, and they are. Yet no one calls it discriminatory; in fact, almost nobody even mentions it.
When black and Hispanic students are suspended and expelled from school at higher rates than white students, however, it’s a different story. Then not only is it called discriminatory, but the government will pressure schools to “equalize” the numbers. Yet as Professor Thomas Sowell put it in 2014, “Unless you believe that black boys cannot possibly be misbehaving more often than Asian American girls, what does this political numbers game accomplish?”
The answer: the implementation of social engineering.
And this is exactly what was visited upon schools under the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations. It’s high time, too, says a parents group, for the Donald Trump administration to counter this folly and restore sanity.
Fantasy-world Policy
To reiterate, at issue here is application of a racial double standard. Example: A white student and a black or Hispanic one will commit the same offense. Yet while the white youth may be punished, the non-white kid may not be — in the name of “fairness.”
As for the effort to restore actual fairness, Fox News writes (without mentioning that Obama also pushed the unjust policy):
Grassroots parental rights advocacy group Parents Defending Education (PDE) is urging the Trump administration to reverse “unconstitutional” Biden-era policies that penalize schools for racial disparities in discipline, as outlined in a Dear Colleague letter issued by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Education (DOE) in 2023.
The Biden-era document pushes schools “to adopt racially discriminatory discipline policies” or face the loss of federal funding, according to PDE.
“Despite clear Supreme Court precedent holding that disparate impact alone cannot support a Title VI violation, the School Discipline Letter states that racial disparities in school discipline outcomes are prima facie evidence of racial discrimination, even when a school’s disciplinary code is race neutral,” the group wrote to … Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon on Thursday morning. “Moreover, the letter threatens school districts with the loss of federal funds if they do not adjust their procedures to eliminate such disparities.”
Equality Is So Yesterday
One may wonder how the mandating of unfairness could be justified. Well, as mentioned above, it boils down to “disparate impact” (DI) theory. What’s that?
DI became a standard in 1971, with the Supreme Court case Griggs v. Duke Power Company. (No relation. The only power here is brain power.) The theory essentially states that if different groups perform differently on a given test or fail to measure up equally to a given standard, that yardstick by definition may constitute illegal discrimination. DI was the vehicle used to force police departments and other agencies to lower standards for minority and women applicants. Of course, this meant enforcing actual inequality of opportunity in the name of equality of outcome. As an example, I reported in 2014 on how Obama’s DOJ sued the Pennsylvania State Police for treating women equally.
Schooling on School Punishment
Returning to school discipline, the issue is almost universally misrepresented. An example is a 2022 report by the educational watchdog group the Learning Policy Institute. It writes of expulsions and suspensions that such “exclusionary punishments have deleterious consequences and disproportionately impact students of color.” Yet this claim is deceptive — some would say deceitful.
After all, it’s only true if, somehow, Asian-descent Americans are now no longer “people of color.” (And some leftists do seem to want to designate them as honorary white people.) Just consider that as the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) informs, 13.7 percent of black students were punished with one or more suspensions. This was, the organization writes,
followed by 6.7 percent of American Indian/Alaska Native students, 5.3 percent of students of Two or more races, 4.5 percent each of Hispanic and Pacific Islander students, 3.4 percent of White students, and 1.1 percent of Asian students.
This means that whites were suspended at a rate approximately 3.1 times higher than Asian-descent students — a significant disparity. The story is similar with expulsions, too.
The Con
Yet you wouldn’t know the above from most reportage on the subject. (In fact, after some fruitless research, I finally had to use Grok AI to find the NCES statistics. That’s how well hidden the Truth is.)
Rather, media typically frame this as a white vs. non-white issue. Whites are used as the gold standard even though they only get the silver medal here, being a distant second. It’s as if Asian-descent students don’t even exist. And why?
Because as far as the left-wing narrative goes, they can’t exist.
If people knew Asian-descent kids, not whites, were the crème de la crème in the school-discipline phenomenon, they just might get the funny idea that unjust discrimination actually has nothing to do with it. They just might conclude that the punishment impact is “disparate” because group misbehavior is disparate.
By the way, this racial phenomenon is apparent across the board. By most any social measure (e.g., income level), what can be said about blacks vs. whites can also be said about whites vs. Asian-descent Americans.
But it’s not said because the goal is to beat the drum on “white privilege.” Talking about “yellow privilege” won’t get you more funding or new laws and programs — it will only get you canceled.
