Two Football-Related Photos, Part 2: The Case of the Petulant Racist

Unlike Part 1 of this two-part essay, this isn’t about which team should have won in a closely-fought contest.  It’s about what you see here.  This is a still photo of a moment in a video posted on X on the official Texas Athletics account.  The video shows what turned out to be the clinching touchdown (technically, it tied the game; the extra point won it) scored by the Texas Longhorns to defeat the Ohio State Buckeyes in Austin on September 12.  There is then a pan showing fan reaction.

The score came with less than 30 seconds left in a game in which the Horns overcame a 20-point 4th-quarter deficit to take down what had been the #1 team in the country.  That, if you’re a football fan, especially a Texas fan, is pretty exciting stuff, as evidenced by the reaction of the young fans you see pictured here.  Indeed, there is little that is more American, more Texan, than celebrating a triumph on the football field.  What you and I see in this photo, Gentle Reader, is such a quintessential moment of Americana.

That is not, alas, what a creature called Bo French sees.  He posted the pic on his X account, writing “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”  Yes, really.  When his racist commentary was called out for being, well, racist commentary, he first doubled down with another tweet: “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners. It’s everywhere and far worse than any of us could imagine.”

This was followed, of course, by the whine/funds solicitation: “BREAKING: The radical left and their allies are attacking me. Join the thousands of patriots who are supporting our campaign here.”  (French is the Republican nominee for Texas Railraod Commissioner.)  Anyone who isn’t as big a xenophobic buffoon as French, you see, is a member of the “radical left.”  That would include folks like outgoing Republican US Senator John Cornyn and GOP Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, apparently.  Oh, and Karl Rove.  Buncha radical leftists, that lot…

If you’re not from Texas, Gentle Reader—or perhaps even if you are—you may not know that the Railroad Commissioner has literally nothing to do with railroads.  (It’s Texas, after all.)  The job actually entails supervision of the Oil and Gas industries—drilling, mines, pipelines, that sort of stuff—which of course are a rather big deal in this state.  French has little if any relevant experience and has said next to nothing about policy.  The Texas Oil and Gas Association and Governor Greg Abbott both endorsed his opponent in the Republican primary, with Abbott declaring that “His agenda would wreck the miracle that we have in producing more oil and gas than ever before.”

Ah, but he’s a sanctimonious bigot with a demonstrated history of racism, homophobia, both Islamophobia and antisemitism, and indeed about every form of prejudice one can imagine.  That’s enough for the average Texas Republican to think he’s just a dandy candidate.  It’s also worth noting that the only prominent Republican to say he’ll vote for the Democrat in the race is Rove.  Cornyn says he “might leave it blank.”  But as of this writing no one else has even suggested withholding support; most are indeed rallying around French.

Reporter Scott Braddock tweeted that “When the racism is embedded in a proposed law, Republicans around here vote for it.  When the racism is in a tweet during a tough midterm, they condemn it. Not that hard to understand.”  That’s a little cynical even for Curmie, but he does note that the condemnations from high-ranking Republicans do seem more than a little hollow if they aren’t accompanied by withdrawn endorsements.

Of course, as a couple of the articles linked about suggest, it’s not like these folks didn’t know what a racist asshole French is when they endorsed him to begin with.  Party unity and all that…  Yeah, he asked his followers whether Jews or Muslims are a greater threat to America, but boys will be boys, after all.  Sure, he’s used “gay” as a slur.  But… you know… that James Talarico guy is kinda baby-faced.

Anyway, let’s get back to that original post and its follow-up.  Former GOP Congresscritter Adam Kinzinger has a good analysis, and Curmie encourages you to read it if you haven’t already.  But there are some other points to make, too.

Let’s start by looking at that photo.  You’ll notice that if you look closely, the overwhelming majority of the people we see are white; it’s just that the dozen or so folks at the front are of South Asian descent.  Many if not most, perhaps even all, of them are American citizens.  French may regard anyone non-white as “foreign,” but it doesn’t work that way, even in Texas.

Especially striking here is the response of the students interviewed for Megan Menchaca’s piece on the brouhaha, published first by the Texas Tribune and subsequently picked up by CBS.  The students are described as being “dismayed but unsurprised” by French’s attack.  Again, Curmie encourages you to read the entire article, but wants to highlight in particular the commentary of UT sophomore Arsheeya Moreen:

If you were at the game, you know that picture is taken extremely out of context.  I'm gonna be completely candid. I think, as a politician, as somebody in the public eye, to take something like that out of context and manipulate it to fit your agenda and your views on a certain race is extremely unprofessional….

There will always be racist people out there who feel OK with hiding behind a screen and commenting things about people that they don't know, but for a politician running for a public office to come out and say those same hateful things just takes it to a whole different level that you truly can't ignore anymore.

Curmie is old enough to remember—hell, people two generations younger than Curmie are old enough to remember—when Affirmative Action was the bête noire of the right.  They fought to remove consideration of the race of applicants in admissions decision.  They ultimately won with a 2023 SCOTUS decision.  But in one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for moments, the right discovered that the decision in fact lowered the number of white students, as the increase in Asians more than replaced the decrease in blacks. 

The mostly white right got what they thought they wanted: a meritocracy based on the individual.  We can argue, perhaps, about how and why a disproportionate number of Asian students go to UT.  Perhaps they (and their families) value education more and they work harder in high school to achieve their goals.  Maybe their outsider status focuses their attention.  It could be that the best Asian students are more likely to want to attend UT, rather than looking at similarly prestigious places like SMU or Rice.  (Curmie has literally no evidence of this; he’s just spit-balling.)  Or they could, as a group, just be smarter.  😉 What matters is that they have better credentials, and were admitted on that basis.

There’s also the complaint that seats at UT are being taken by outsiders, i.e., non-Texans, including foreign students.  State law, however, decrees that 90% of undergrads at the university be from Texas.  Indeed, only 5% of UT undergrads are foreign students.  Oh, and there are more out-of-state black players on the football team than there are white guys, total.  But it’s OK that those guys, many of whom we might surmise don’t have impeccable scholarly records, are at UT; they help the football team win.  And that’s important, right?  It’s those damned academically qualified Asian guys who are just cheering for the home team that are the problem.  <Sigh.>

If you want to argue that foreigners shouldn’t make up almost a third of grad students, you’re free to do so, but, going back to that tweet, they’re a lot less likely to be attending sporting events.  If you added up the baseball, football, basketball, hockey, lacrosse, and skiing events Curmie saw as an undergrad, it would probably total somewhere pretty close to 100, certainly several dozen.  As a grad student: one basketball game: because his dissertation advisor’s wife had something else to do that night. 

The right-wingers got what they wanted: race-blind admissions and, as Kinzinger points out, assimilation of minority communities into mainstream culture.  But there’s little that says “assimilated” into a place like UT more than wearing a university-branded t-shirt and jumping up and down screaming while flashing the “Hook ‘em Horns” sign when the team scores a big touchdown.  Turns out, the racists and dominionists just wanted someone else to blame for their own inadequacies.

Go figure.

A half dozen short takes...

A series of short takes… not topics I want to spend my usual 1000 or more words on, but worthy of comment. 

1. Students will know my politics. 

A Facebook friend I’ve known for roughly half a century recently posted a meme stating that “If your students know your political affiliation, you have failed as a teacher. Teachers are there to help students think for themselves, not think like you.” The second sentence is true… sort of. The first sentence is utter crap. 

Let’s start with the latter idea: if “think like you” means “agree with your conclusions,” then I wholeheartedly agree. I always want students who will argue, politely but emphatically, with each other or with me. We’ll get nowhere, either in the classroom or in society, if everyone agrees all the time: we would be reduced to choosing policies based on who speaks first rather than on what’s the best idea. 

If, however, “think like you” means that a teacher should model logical thinking, a pursuit of truth, a skepticism about likely partisan sources… well, in that case, I very much do want my students to “think like [I do].” 

But that first sentence is amazing in its over-simplified arrogance. In my current summer-school class, I have two (that I know of) non-binary students. If I respect them enough to use their chosen names instead of the “dead names” that show up on my role sheet, if I refer to them by their chosen pronouns instead of those applicable to someone else with their physical characteristics, those students—and the others—will know my politics. 

If, given the fact that in 1847 over ten shiploads of food a day were exported from Ireland to England, I refer to the mid-1840s in Ireland as “the Great Hunger,” as my Irish friends do, rather than “the Great Famine,” as many of the textbooks would have it, students will know my politics. 

If, in a different class, I make sure to point out that Congressman Joe Starnes famously asked Hallie Flanagan, the head of the Federal Theatre Project, if Marlowe and Euripides were communists, students will know my politics. 

If, in that same class, I suggest that Anatoly Lunacharsky may have had the coolest job title in history—Komisar of Education and Enlightenment—but one of the worst-ever jobs—serving as liaison between Josef Stalin and the Russian arts community—students will know my politics. 

If, in still a different class, I discuss the process of choosing a theatre season and emphasize the importance of having enough good roles for women and for people of color, students will know my politics. 

Most importantly, when I am honest enough to tell students my political opinions so they can factor that information into their decision as to whether or not to agree with my conclusions, rather than pretending to an objectivity that is ultimately impossible to achieve, students will know my politics. If that’s failing as a teacher, so be it. 

2. Taiwan is a country. 

Curmie is old enough to remember when then-President Gerald Ford proclaimed in a debate with Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.” It’s probable that he misspoke, that he meant to argue that despite the USSR’s military and economic domination, the people of, say, Poland, proudly maintained their national identity. But that’s not what he said, and he was portrayed, not unreasonably, with failing to recognize the political reality of Eastern Europe. Many historians believe that single line cost him the 1976 election. 

A similar moment played out recently involving a considerably less important figure than the President of the United States. This time the offender was wrestler and B-movie actor John Cena. There’s a twist, though, and not merely in the status of the speaker. You see, in a promotional spot for an upcoming movie, Cena had the audacity to call Taiwan a country. Yes, it’s a country, but the fine folks in Beijing—you know, the ones whose lies about the coronavirus exacerbated the pandemic—were sore offended, because despite… you know... reality, Beijing still regards the island as their territory. Absurdly, organizations like the United Nations have allowed them to perpetuate this fraud. 

But whereas American diplomats might need to tread carefully around a vexed topic, there’s nothing to prevent an apolitical celebrity from speaking the truth. Well, there is something: money. Cena wants his movie to sell in mainland China, so his tough guy image melted faster than ice cream in a Texas summer when confronted with angry tweets from Beijing. Cena immediately apologized—in Mandarin, no less—to “China and the Chinese people,” deploring his “mistake,” and groveling rather embarrassingly. 

The good news is that his renunciation of the reality that he himself had described was met with derision from across the political spectrum. When, after all, was the last time Keith Olbermann (who called the apology “shameful”) and Tom Cotton (who declared it “pathetic”) agreed on anything, including that grass is green? The almighty dollar still reigns supreme, even in the communist world, but maybe we’re coming to understand that there might be some circumstances in which it shouldn’t? Baby steps. Baby steps. 

3. Calling out hypocrites is a good thing. 

Curmie is no great fan of President Biden (“lesser of two evils” isn’t high praise), but I do appreciate skill at political gamesmanship, and it doesn’t get much better than pointing out the fact that a goodly number of GOP legislators have been claiming credit for various provisions of the American Rescue Plan, a.k.a. the second pandemic package: the very bill they had voted against. And he read out their names! In a just universe, none would be re-elected; this is, alas, somewhat less than a just universe, but embarrassing the hypocrites can’t be all bad. 

4. Lying with statistics. 

President Biden gets credit for what Curmie just described, but he also gets called out for crass political posturing. Whereas any attempt to reduce hate crimes, especially violence, is a good thing, exaggerating the extent of, in this case, anti-Asian activity is a good way to look silly. So the hype surrounding the need for new anti-hate legislation, much of it coming from the White House, is really so much balloon juice. Left-leaning news sites breathlessly report some 6603 “hate incidents” in the year between March 2020 and March 2021. That figure is drawn from the report of an organization called Stop AAPI Hate. And there are… let’s see… a little over 23,200,000 Asians and Asian-Americans in the US. So 1 in 3514 Asians experienced some kind of bias in that year. Oh, and over 83% of those incidents weren’t crimes: verbal harassment and shunning may be despicable, but they’re not criminal. So let’s amend that number to 1 in over 20,000 who endured violence, civil rights violations, vandalism, etc. 

We also see that “Anti-Asian hates crimes increased by nearly 150%, mostly in N.Y. and L.A.”. That sounds bad. But if we’re going to call out Tucker Carlson for using statistics to deceive, we need to do so here, too. Yes, New York and Los Angeles saw significant increases: from a total of 10 cases in those two cities in 2019 to 43 in 2020. Curmie is having trouble disentangling numbers for the city and county of Los Angeles, and isn’t sure which is being referenced in the increase of 7 to 15 cases there, so let’s just look at New York: 28 cases for a total Asian population of a little under 2,000,000 (apologies that the best source I can find is Wikipedia). The East Asian population is just under 750,000; that’s probably the more relevant figure, but if the case numbers say “Asian,” then perhaps the larger number is indeed more accurate. Even limiting the population figures to just four East Asian nationalities: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese, the average East Asian would go for roughly 27 years without experiencing a 1% chance of a race-inspired crime. This is not exactly cause for panic. 

5. You can’t make this stuff up. 

(Alleged) serial sexual predator Kevin Spacey will appear in his first acting role since the proverbial fecal matter interfaced the whirling rotors some four years ago. The role: “a detective investigating a false claim of paedophilia.” Bloody hell.

6. It’s actually OK to produce No Exit.

Students—it’s unclear exactly how many—at Western Washington University sought to cancel the production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, claiming it ignores matters of gender and sexuality (among other things).  Curmie is, shall we say, unconvinced.  

I first read about this incident on Ethics Alarms; I e-mailed that site’s proprietor, Jack Marshall, saying I would be responding, but I might be writing more than would qualify as simply a comment.  He suggested I send him my commentary and he would post it as a Guest Post.  I agreed.  So, here’s my post; I do suggest that you read Jack’s earlier post on the subject (and follow the links he includes) to be better able to understand what I’m talking about, since my remarks were intended to be read by people who were already familiar with the basics of the story.

A Response to the Cruz Amendment

Over at Ethics Alarms, Jack Marshall excoriates Senate Democrats for not supporting an amendment by Senator Ted Cruz that would deny federal funding to any college or university which “discriminates against Asian Americans in recruitment, applicant review, or admission.” Jack closes his piece with this: “There is no persuasive argument to be made in defense of those 48 Democrats. I challenge any reader here to present one.” 

The following started out as a comment to his post, but sort of kept going long past comment length.  I won’t clutter his page with this missive, but perhaps the following may be at least a partial response to his commentary...

I’ll take up that challenge, Jack. Sort of. 

That is, I would suggest a couple of reasons to be skeptical of this proposed legislation. They require a little more abstract reasoning and a little more knowledge of the way admissions operations work than the average politician is likely to be able to muster. I hasten to add that I am not defending the rationale that diversity is such an inherent good that it overrides all other considerations, but (for example) discussions of The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World or Fires in the Mirror in my Advanced Play Analysis class have always benefited enormously from the presence of students with different demographic profiles. 

But to the matter at hand… First off, it’s difficult to assert with any authority that discrimination is actually taking place, since no one can agree on what elements of a student’s record ought to be weighted more heavily: grades? class rank? standardized test scores? extra- and co-curricular activities? recommendations? interviews with admissions personnel and/or alumni? Should legacies count? Should the ability to pay tuition without institution-funded financial aid? Should the inability to do so count? All of these elements are part of the admissions evaluation process at universities, especially those at the elite level. (At my university, a student with a certain class rank and/or board scores is automatically offered admission. But we’d ultimately end up accepting probably 95% of the students rejected by Harvard or Yale.) 

Grades are “objective”; except of course, they aren’t. Students take classes with different degrees of difficulty. Someone who gets a 90 in calculus and a 75 in phys ed is a better student than one who gets a 95 in phys ed and an 80 in algebra, but will have a lower average. Moreover, it almost goes without saying that the #20 student in a class of 400 at School X might be better or worse than the #1 student in a class of 40 at School Y. Using sports as an example: I happen to live in the small city where one of the top half dozen soccer players in US history went to high school. He was, of course, all-conference, etc. But an all-conference player in that league today might be lucky to get a scholarship to a Division II university, let alone even hope to become a star for the national team. So how do we compare, if all we know is “all conference”? 

Of course, pols of both parties seem enamored of standardized testing as the ultimate arbiter of student (or teacher) success. The closest thing to an objective means of comparing students is to give them exactly the same test under exactly the same circumstances. But even such an endeavor is problematic, even apart from such considerations as recognizing that Student X is fighting off a cold, or student Y’s mother just got diagnosed with cancer. Someone, a mortal, designed that test, and the questions are almost by definition going to favor someone who knows precisely those concepts, terms, or formulas over someone who may have mastered different, but equally important, material. I remember a question on one of those tests that asked me to figure out the Earned Run Average of a baseball pitcher. The question provided the formula, but because I knew baseball and statistics, I could glance at the multiple choice responses and determine the right answer in perhaps two seconds. Someone fully as adept at math but who didn’t know baseball would have spent a lot more time, and perhaps been rushed at the end of the exam, omitting questions or not having time to really think them through. 

So it’s perfectly possible that a student taking a standardized test would score better or worse, perhaps even appreciably so, were they to take the exam a week earlier or later. But this isn’t even the biggest problem. Those who argue for significant weight for SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT (etc.) scores do so based on a fanciful belief that performance on standardized tests measures skill or intelligence. It does not. In fact, they measure test-taking ability. To provide just two examples from my own personal experience as a standardized test-taker: 

I was pretty good at math when I was in high school, so in my junior year I was among the 15 or 20 students who took a standardized test under the auspices of the American Mathematical Association, or some organization like that. The test was difficult; no one could be expected to finish it in the appointed time. And it was scored like Jeopardy: harder questions were worth more points, and you literally lost points if you answered a question and got it wrong. I got a negative score! Still, I was asked back the following year, after several months of taking a class with the worst math teacher I ever had, and a couple of months with the next-worst. I adopted a different strategy… and got the highest score in the history of the school. Was I as bad as my junior year score? Nope. Was I the best math student in however long my high school had been administering that test? Not even close. 

Skip ahead a few years. I took the GRE some five or six years after the second of the two freshman-level math courses (Calculus I and Intro to Finite Math) I took in college. It was 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday. I’d had about four hours of sleep, and I was more than a little hungover. Perfect conditions, right? I got a perfect score in math. Is it plausible that I deserved such a score? I suppose so. The test I took, unlike the subject exam in math, didn’t really test anything past algebra and a little introductory probability. But no rational person would think that my math skills exceeded my verbal skills (my verbal score was good, but not perfect). 

But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, wait, there’s more. There are studies that show there is little correlation between board scores at one level and performance at the next. More to the point in the current discussion: I remember reading about (as opposed to reading) studies which concluded that the average African-American student with a certain board score would outperform the average white student with that same score. I forget the exact figures, and I’m not sure I could find them now, but the following provides the general idea: on average, a black student with a 1080 SAT score would get better grades in college than a white student with an 1100. I don’t recall that Asian-American students were included in the findings, but I would suspect that the same principles would apply. So should we be comparing the scores themselves, or their predictive value? 

Of course, multiple studies have shown that these tests tend to privilege affluent white males: precisely the stereotype of the GOP pol. Were I of cynical disposition (perish the thought!), I might be tempted to suspect that the Republicans are using Asian-American rights as a front for their attempts to codify white preference. Wait, Republicans being as virtue-signaling and contemptuous of actual reality as the Dems? Surely not! 

Be it noted: for all my distaste for standardized tests to measure, well, anything, I still use them in considering whether a particular student should be admitted into our program or receive some of our sparse scholarship money. This is different, however, from believing that a higher score on the SAT or ACT makes for an inherently better student. Taken as part of an overall assessment, a good score will do a student more good than a bad score will, but by itself it’s merely a statistic. Another sports analogy: the best shooter in the NBA will never have the highest field goal percentage, because he’s shooting a lot from 3-point range, where 40% is excellent, but there are centers and power forwards shooting well over 50% because they never take a shot from more than 5 feet from the basket. 

So if the question is whether discrimination is a good idea, the answer is of course not. But the phrasing of the amendment opens up a lot of questions without answering any of them, especially about what, exactly, constitutes discrimination. Catch phrases and gotcha politics on either side of the aisle aren’t going to solve any problems. An admissions policy which privileges class rank over SAT scores would probably benefit African-American students over Asian-Americans, but it is not inherently discriminatory, any more than a strategy that reverses those priorities would be. And certainly a procedure which attempts to predict success at the collegiate level rather than judging success at the high school level doesn’t seem to me to be problematic, although it could be called discriminatory, I suppose. 

I don’t want some federal judge to decide how my alma maters, my employer, or indeed any other college or university runs its admissions process, absent clear and convincing evidence of actual discrimination as opposed to simply that which could be construed that way. I’m not suggesting that we ought to break existing laws to advance a cause. There are no doubt cases in which the disparity in qualifications between accepted applicants of Group X and rejected applicants of Group Y is so profound that racial discrimination (against Asian-Americans, perhaps against whites) is the only plausible explanation. In such cases, the legal system does indeed need to be employed. 

What I am suggesting, however, is that the Cruz amendment smacks more of politics—“look, we got the Dems to vote against equal rights!”—than of ethics. It seems too broad a statement to ensure just administration without further clarification. In something like collegiate admissions, one person’s discrimination is simply another person’s (ethically legitimate and comprehensible) difference in priorities. 

As a career educator at the college level, I’d probably have voted against the Cruz amendment, too… although I’d be fully aware I was walking into a trap.