The GAO [General Accounting Office] found that black students get suspended at nearly three times the rate of white students nationally, a finding consistent with previous analyses. The Obama Education and Justice Departments viewed that disproportion as proof of teacher and principal bias. Administration officials used litigation and the threatened loss of federal funding to force schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions radically in order to eliminate racial disparities in discipline.
The argument is essentially this:
1) Black students get suspended at a higher rate than white students.
Therefore
2) Teachers and principals are biased against black students.
Clearly, this is a howling non sequitur. (Non sequitur is Latin for it does not follow.) To make the above into a valid argument one would have to add something like the following premise:
0) Black and white students are behaviorally equal: equally well-behaved or equally ill-behaved.
In the presence of (0), the conclusion follows.
But (0) is manifestly false. For support of this claim, see Mac Donald's article:
According to federal data, black male teenagers between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white male teenagers of the same age (the category “white” in this homicide data includes most Hispanics; if Hispanics were removed from the white category, the homicide disparity between blacks and whites would be much higher). That higher black homicide rate indicates a failure of socialization; teen murderers of any race lack impulse control and anger-management skills. Lesser types of juvenile crime also show large racial disparities. It is fanciful to think that the lack of socialization that produces such elevated rates of criminal violence would not also affect classroom behavior. While the number of black teens committing murder is relatively small compared with their numbers at large, a very high percentage of black children—71 percent—come from the stressed-out, single-parent homes that result in elevated rates of crime.
The same pattern of invalid argumentation is found across the Left. Leftists regularly assume that different groups are empirically equal. They then incorrectly take the fact that there is no equality of outcome as proof that something nefarious was at work whether racism or sexism or ageism.
But what explains the eagerness of leftists to adopt such an obviously false assumption?
I proffer an explanation in The Secularization of the Judeo-Christian Equality Axiom.
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