THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

It *was* the policy for this year.  I’m not sure how much it really matter that they rotate the “racial slots” on an annual basis, but note that although there are four black slots and eight white slots for the three grades, every office had at least one black slot given, and “reporter” had two.  There were two out of three white VP slots.

I see nothing to indicate that in previous years that all the presidential slots were allocated to blacks.  What I do see is that when they decided to allocate four black slots to four offices, they decided not to allocate one slot per office.

Do your research; find the actual memo next time.

But you know what?  Even if you hadn’t completely failed on the details of this story, it wouldn’t make it any less reprehensible that a public middle school, in 2010, did not allow a single black student to run for class president.

"Do your research; find the actual memo next time.”

You talking to me?  What exactly did I get wrong?  Not that it matters in the least.  Who the hell are you?

The headline now reads: “Miss. school board reverses race-based election policy “.  Probably they received a bunch of complaints.

The changed the headline again.

The subhead now reads “Under former policy, some class positions rotated by race each year” - a much more neutral and factual statement.

When I logged into my computer a 4pm the subhead was “Blacks not allowed to run for Vice-President”, which is true, but the complaining parent, who chose to move out of the district, had a white child who was not allowed to run for reporter (blacks only) and was then encouraged to run for president (whites only).

Either way, I don’t like it - it’s assigning people by their race. However, I can see why they did it - they set up quotas. 1/3 of the students were black, so 1/3 of the offices were reserved for blacks. Which offices were rotated each year. They feared that without the quotas, no blacks would ever be elected.

I agree the headline is misleading and the policy was reprehensible even if well-intentioned and in somebody’s mind, fair.  Aside from what seem to be obvious problems with such a policy (the whole “violates Title VII” problem), it also places a burden on students who might want to run for, or support someone for, the wrong office in the wrong year.  A lot of dumb educational policy tries to even out things that don’t really even out.  School A gets a fancy theater and School B gets a gym.  Only your kid, who loves theater and has two left feet, is assigned to School B and there’s no appeal.  This is much the same thing.  If you’re of the wrong race in the year you could run for president, tough patooties.  Someone of your race can run next year, but how does that help you?

And of course, we all know it is impossible for anyone but a white male to be president of anything in this country so long as white voters are the majori . . . oops, guess not.

post #1: proof that you’re despised mgl.  Even when mgl makes a non-offensive, how-on-earth-could-you-disagree-with-me post like this one, he gets jumped. On his own blog, no less.

To be fair to the article, when the information first hit the internet it was in the context of one year’s form which had no slots for black students to run as president (in any of the 3 grades).  Sometimes articles are updated to take into account new information before the headlines are, so I’m not sure how much was msnbc being intentionally misleading and how much just the vagaries of reporting in a world where news is constantly updated.

#6, why would you even write that?  Did I do anything to you?

I’m joking mgl.  Relax. 

I’ve got a pretty thick skin, but that wasn’t too funny…

Now, if you had said “dislike” or “have issues”, I can deal with that..

You’re right - when I read your comment, I realized that my diction, tone, and phrasing were poor.  I read a lot of this blog, and I marvel at the fact that you attract passionate criticism for even the most mild-mannered of comments, as was the case here.  Apologies for the misunderstanding/offense.

#7 - I think the headline was poorly worded because it conveyed an interpretation which was not backed up by the article. If the article was written with insufficient information and then had to updated, in this particular case, I think that’s even worse, as it shows the reporter went to press without fulling researching the story.

"Are legitimate news agencies allowed to mislead readers in order to get them to read the articles?”

But what does that have to do with MSNBC?

Minesweeper, np.  I actually didn’t realize you were trying to be funny.  I do appreciate that you recognized that my original post was 99% non-controversial yet I still got lambasted for no apparent reason.  And the guy didn’t even have the juevos to come back and state what I had gotten wrong…

Lebanon had a similar policy, not for high school class offices, but for real offices that set policy for the country.  The President had to be a Christain, the Prime Minister had to be a Shiite Muslim, and the Speaker of Parliament had to be a Shiite Muslim.

These things are ugly, and didn’t work out too well in the Lebanese case, but may be needed in situations where you have a bunch of well defined and hostile groups that have to somehow live together.

But who said the school kids were hostile? The school tried quotas to ensure minority representation, but neither side of the political spectrum appears to comfortable with that in 2010. My problem is that it’s a policy that deals with people only as members of groups, not as individuals. And isn’t putting group rights, privileges, subjugation, etc ahead of individuality the racism none of us want to see?