Hinderaker: “Black Studies Majors Don’t Become Astronomers”. Damn.

What would Eclipse Day 2024 in the US and Mexico be, without Hinderaker whyte-splaining away known barriers to high paying STEM jobs, for kids of color?

Right. It would be… a “normal Monday” — at Powerline.

His tonight drips with the contempt of his seven-tenths of a century of wholly unearned privileges — first at Dartmouth, then Harvard. [For the record, he personally couldn’t hack a STEM major at either institution, in the late 60s and early 70s.] Yet, oddly — he didn’t come from a single parent home — he came from a repressed, emotionally-barren, dusty, rural Dakota one.

Here’s his invidious racism in context:

…As to why any scientific fields have been “mainly out of reach for Black folks,” I can only point out that 1) single-parent households are not, on average, conducive to academic achievement; 2) a culture in which kids who get good grades in school are disdained [sic] for “acting white” is fatal to academic achievement; and 3) black students who are encouraged to major in Black Studies and similar fields don’t become astronomers. Those factors are evidently more than 50 years of affirmative action have been able to overcome….

He may be the most embittered, cynical 70 year old whyte codger I’ve ever met.

But this might as well ultimately be chiseled into his tombstone… as it (like all else he writes, and the man himself) is fading into irrelevance, as the world moves on from his cramped, and sad… world views.

Out.