Is tolerance intolerant?

[Rev. Rye]

To be fair, the SAT questions are a lot less questionable than they used to be:




The analogy section that contained the biggest offenders was removed from the test in 2003.

That said, the racial gap in the SAT scores remains depressingly high. And it looks like the cycle of inequality is a major factor in how it's remained. And it doesn't even need a vast cycle of active racism in the Jim Crow mold to keep going like Bennyboy thinks a lot of us think. The unconscious racism that we tend to exhibit either way is more than sufficient to keep it going. And that makes it even harder to fix than the older, blatant caste system. It's one thing to strike down laws that allow employers to openly discriminate against people of another race. It's another thing entirely to try and fix our unconscious biases. How the fuck can we fight the unconscious processes of our mind? And how can we properly do it on a societal level? It's the fucking unconscious!

As someone who's lived with mental illness (specifically depression and OCD), a lot of the time, this racism seems a lot like it. For instance, a few months ago, I got worried about the intonation of my guitar. I spent hours working on the exact bridge placement needed for the 12th fret to be in tune with the open string. And then, when I got it done, I'd set it down for a few minutes, and then, something would drive me to come back and try again. I knew I got it right, but try telling the part of my brain that was nagging at me, and at one point, made me wake up in the middle of the night to check that everything was in its right place. And it's kind of the same thing with unconscious racism. On some level, most of us know intellectually that ideas of racial superiority are bullshit, but, on some other, unconscious level, whether it's nature or nurture, there's something that keeps us from really acting like it. And it all ends up with a situation where we say that black people are potentially equal, but, when confronted with the fact that there's still a long way to go, we just deny that anything's wrong. And how an otherwise intelligent person can end up putting their foot in their mouth over racial issues.

And also, the SAT itself is going out of fashion; when I took a standardised test in high school, it was the ACT and we were told the SAT was falling out of favour.