Law Professor: Black Students Are Failing Because Their Moms Are Poor And Single

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A Texas law professor says that Black and Hispanic students are failing in school because they are being raised by mothers who are single and poor. Lino Graglia, from the University of Texas at Austin, made similar remarks to both the BBC and to the Huffington Post:

“I can hardly imagine a less beneficial or more deleterious experience then to be raised by a single parent, usually female, uneducated, and without a lot of money,” Graglia told HuffPost Live host Marc Lamont Hill Tuesday. Professor Graglia pointed to test scores on the SAT and LSAT, where he said “blacks generally score hundreds of points lower than whites and Asians”, to buttress his claim that affirmative action translates to admitting “the blacks… that come closest to meeting the ordinary standards. And these are going to be the most advantaged blacks.” Hill pushed back hard at the idea that affirmative action is strictly a black issue. “When you look at someone like George Bush, he had two standard deviations below the norm for Yale, and yet no-one is screaming about affirmative action,” Hill said.

Graglia has a long history of racially-controversial — some might say, racist — remarks. “In the mid-1980s, Graglia was considered by President Ronald Reagan for a newly created federal judgeship on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, but he eventually was withdrawn in late spring 1986 due to controversy over articles Graglia had written about desegregation busing as well as remarks Graglia made which were alleged to be racially insensitive,” Wikipedia notes:

Graglia became controversial when he made a speech on UT campus in 1997 in which he noted that “blacks and Mexican-Americans can’t compete academically with whites.” The speech was at a meeting of the Students for Equal Opportunity on the topic of the Hopwood v. Texas case, which ended discrimination against UT Law applicants who were not members of a designated ‘minority’ group. The comment was widely reported and generated discussions across the country. In an article titled The Affirmative Action Fraud, published in 1999 in the Journal of Urban and Contemporary Law, Graglia cited The Bell Curve, a book by professor Richard J. Herrnstein and American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray, to assert the following:

Blacks are not in fact ‘underrepresented,’ but rather ‘overrepresented’—that is, their numbers are disproportionately high—in institutions of higher education once IQ scores are taken into account.

 

The University of Texas at Austin is the same school that is home to Mark Regnerus the anti-gay author of a flawed study that wrongly asserts children of same-sex couples are not a successful as children raised by opposite-sex couples. That so-called study, its funding, and supports tied have all been revealed and debunked in these pages, repeatedly.

The University of Texas at Austin is also under attack for procedural issues surrounding a fracking study, including issues of conflict of interest and inappropriate levels of disclosure.