Read it.

“You’re never without an alibi.”

That’s the tagline of the new smartphone app Alibi, whose splash page is filled with a jerky, lo-fi video of a protest, putting the visitor in the midst of a whirl of yelling policemen, chanting participants, and omnipresent journalists snapping photos. It consciously evokes a kind of paranoia from the outset. Where am I, what kind of an alibi do I need, and how is this technology going to help me get one?

Founded by Jeff Myers and Ryan Salla, the app passively records audio, video, and location data on Android smartphones (it’s not yet available on iOS, and seems unlikely to be in the future given Apple’s store policies of not letting politically controversial tools into their system), and saves the previous hour of information on-demand, so a user always has proof of where they were and who they were with—just in case it becomes necessary. Given the recent killings of Michael Brown and many others in ambiguous violent contexts, Alibi is being pitched as a kind of preventative measure. “If there’s an instance of police brutality and someone has this on, that would be the best scenario,” Myers says.

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

Over the last half-century, enormous efforts have been expended by individuals to get their groups, such as blacks, women, Jews, homosexuals, and Hispanics, certified as authentic victims of society. Just since 2013, the “transgendered” have achieved cultural validation as designated victims, while other potential identity politics groups, such as left-handers and the working class, seem to be fading ever further from the limelight of concern.

But what about nerds? Will they be able to use the enormous wealth and cultural influence they’ve created over the last few decades to achieve recognized protected status? Or will they be increasingly demonized as “hyperwhite”?

…

Because they are better at thinking about ideas than about people, nerds are particularly prone to misinterpreting women by taking what they say at face value. Nerds don’t know much about what women like, so they use logic, which fails.

Read it.

Another thumb-sucker from The Atlantic.

When Carthan was a young boy, he says he’d have risked punishment for simply walking past the Jones mansion without a proper reason. “I look at the house now, how beautiful it is and well-built it is. I was told slaves built it,” Carthan said, sitting at his desk in the central hall, surrounded by his political memorabilia. “And I think about how well they lived back then, and how we lived back then. This house is huge. There are five bedrooms. It has three full bathrooms. We didn’t have bathrooms at all.” He pauses to let the contrast sink in. “It’s something to focus on,” he says.

But as the mansion’s flaking paint makes clear, the transformation was about a transfer of local power, not wealth. Families like the Joneses have long since left Tchula, taking their business and money with them. The remaining community is 97 percent black and achingly poor.

And, of course, the question that is never explicitly asked, much less gets answered, is ‘Are these people better off now than they were then?’ Such questions undercut The Narrative, something that a Voice of the Crust like the writers in The Atlantic are conditioned from childhood never to do.

In the Delta flatlands and the hillier country to the east, the landscape is dotted with towns and cities that figured prominently in the civil-rights era. Like Tchula, many of those places are now languishing.

Well, then, how did that whole ‘civil-rights era’ thing work out for you? Confrontation of injustice is often necessary but equally often reaches the point of diminishing returns, and the people who don’t keep their ultimate objective firmly in mind will almost always lose their way and wind up in a swamp (sometimes literally). There’s an old saying, ‘You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar’, and like most Old Sayings it contains a lot of truth. The question ‘How can we get white people to treat black people with respect?’ is entirely different from the question ‘How can we make the lives of white people Hell as payback for the Hell they have made of ours?’, and it remains unclear which question the ‘civil-rights’ people are working from — the available evidence is that they consider the two as equivalent, and as long as that is the case, they’re going to be unhappy with the results.

“Businesses don’t want to come to a town like Tchula,” observed Anthony Mansoor, who owns a hardware store downtown. “That bothers me. The people in this town worked so hard to get to where we are today, and in a lot of ways, things are better. But the town is broke. That’s the bottom line.”

Gee, why is that? Nobody seems to know, or want to. Every business in American isn’t run by racist white people, although you’d never know that from reading Voices of the Crust like this one. Why don’t they leave and go somewhere there are jobs? It’s happened before. The real bottom line is that black people in America have been sold a bill of goods by a Crust who need them as a victim class whose problems allow the modern Left to ride into power and whose votes can be bought in order to keep them there. It’s not complicated at all.

Read it.

What better face for the Democratic Party than a straight white gender-conforming male worth $1.6 billion who gave up finance capitalism for cronyism? This billionaire’s political career is a study in what money can buy: His support for Obama bought him a speaking gig at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, and the $74 million he spent in the 2014 cycle got him White House access, Democratic votes against the Keystone pipeline, and a presidential veto threat. I cannot be the sole political junkie who is curious as to how much an endorsement by Hillary Clinton actually costs. $10 million, $20 million—if Steyer were to run, we would find out.

Democrats, being shameless, wouldn’t bat an eye. The party of AlGore and Nancy Pelosi has no problem with rich white people buying the votes of non-rich non-white (stupid) people by complaining about other rich white people.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Following up Masha Gessen’s article in The New Yorker, here’s an NYT column on the apparently burning issue of just how big a threat white racists are to poor Dzhokhar Tsarnaev over his not looking white enough.

Sure, he’s white, but not white-white.

Of course, unprivileged discriminated against nonwhites like Professor Nour Kteily of the Kellogg School of Management should not be subjected to such indignities. It’s hard enough for upper middle class Lebanese to get by in the racist hellhole of America when they come here from Canada to share with us ignorant Americans their world-famous Lebanese wisdom on how different ethnic groups can all get along. (E.g., Should your ethnic group shell your neighbors’ apartment buildings with heavy artillery or just stick with sniper fire? Perhaps mortars make an ideal compromise?)

Yeah, I can see that as a problem.

Read it.

Another thumbsucker about how oppressed women are, from the New York Times. (They should take a look at ‘speaking while white male’ if they want to examine oppression.)

Read it.

Björn Söder, who is also a Deputy Speaker in the Swedish parliament, wrote the comment on Facebook after 12 people were killed in the Charlie Hedbo offices in Paris earlier this week.

On Friday morning, the Dagens Nyheter newspaper reported that Swedish MP Veronica Palm of Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s Social Democrat party had reported Söder to the police for racial agitation (hets mot folkgrupp).

“It’s not legal to offend people based on their race, and I think this should be treated as racial agitation,” she told the paper.

Remind me again what ‘race’ Muslim is. (The Thought Police are everywhere in Sweden.)

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I don’t recall seeing a complaint before about secret ballots, but it struck me that in the age of the Social Media Justice Warrior, the idea that citizens — many of whom are no doubt racist and sexist — are allowed to vote however they want in the privacy of the voting booth without any electronic paper trail exposing them to the threat of public shaming and advertiser boycott would increasingly seem intolerable.

Read it.

Your guilt is the main weapon wielded by the politically correct. Take it away.

Watch it. And feel free to laugh.

Another thumbsucker from the Los Angeles Times.

Many farm laborers are essentially trapped for months at a time in rat-infested camps, often without beds and sometimes without functioning toilets or a reliable water supply.

And of course such conditions exist nowhere else on earth, and especially not in Muslim countries.

Some camp bosses illegally withhold wages to prevent workers from leaving during peak harvest periods.

And that is totally the fault of the United States.

Laborers often go deep in debt paying inflated prices for necessities at company stores. Some are reduced to scavenging for food when their credit is cut off. It’s common for laborers to head home penniless at the end of a harvest.

Any resemblance to college students after graduation is purely coincidental.

Those who seek to escape their debts and miserable living conditions have to contend with guards, barbed-wire fences and sometimes threats of violence from camp supervisors.

Any resemblance to Communist dictatorships like, say, Cuba is purely coincidental.

Major U.S. companies have done little to enforce social responsibility guidelines that call for basic worker protections such as clean housing and fair pay practices.

Which is, after all, their primary job, and forget about making a profit.

Read it.

And there you have it.

Read it.

Pretty much everyone is all over this story, but what the heck: why not pile on? The Obamas are trying to catch the wave of racism that supposedly is sweeping across the land. They may live in the White House, but hey–they are still subjected to racial bias. No, they don’t mean getting preferential treatment when applying to colleges and law schools, or being taken seriously as a presidential candidate after two undistinguished years in the Senate, or getting a $300,000 job with a hospital for no discernible reason.

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

The exchanges during marches have been even sharper at times. One night in Oakland, African Americans staged an alternative demonstration to avoid “march-jacking” by mostly white megaphone-wielders.

“We’re all trying to make sure the white guys with megaphones don’t take over the whole conversation,” said Eileen Santos, 37, a Filipino resident of Berkeley who has been to several marches. “We’re having more brown and black voices, and that’s good.” …

The conflict has been most visible with clashes between predominantly young white vandals and black people who try to stop them. Several times in Oakland and Berkeley, African American residents have run out of their houses to yell at white vandals who split away from protests to burn and smash things in the street.

“I cannot stand the spoiled, white privileged kids in masks — and yes, that’s what most of them look like — trying to take over the message by destroying things,” said Moni Law, 54, a housing counselor who lives in Berkeley. She and other black demonstrators have blocked groups from breaking windows at several marches, as have white activists.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Having watched the evolution of environmentalism among liberal Democrats in the Los Angeles area over the last 45 years, it’s really hard to take seriously the notion that modern liberalism is about Hope and Change and Opportunity and Equality and the Masses. It’s a lot more about: We’ve got a good thing here and we’re going to keep it.

…

Lots of people in Los Angeles own a vacation home in the desert near Palm Springs, because that is a big expanse of what was Republican terrain (although Sonny Bono’s widow lost the Palm Springs seat in the House to a Latino Democrat in the last election). But Los Angeles is already a desert so the appeal of getting away to an even hotter desert has always eluded me. Getting away to the beach, however, is a great idea, which is why people like Rob Reiner do it, and don’t want you to do it.

Read it.

The video resumes during a confrontation with an individual the videographer identified to Campus Reform as Dr. Miller’s graduate assistant. The assistant, who was seated directly behind the attendee, accused him of suppressing people’s rights. When the attendee asked how he was suppressing people’s rights by filming, Andrea Jenkins jumped in.

“She’s not saying you are suppressing people’s rights, but that you are exerting your white privilege,” Jenkins said.

“I went up to Andrea after the event and informed her that I found what she said offensive, because I am the son of a Syrian immigrant,” the attendee told Campus Reform.

“You guys are instilling the same racial division that you are supposedly trying to combat,” the attendee claims he said.

Read it.

In an email announcing the contest, MoveOn urged applicants to “make a 30-second ad to wake up America to the crisis of big money in our politics.” In its call for submissions, MoveOn declared: “The scale of the problem is clear. The corporate wing of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts keeps insisting that money is speech and corporations are people. Shadowy, unregulated front groups are pouring unprecedented amounts of money into elections.”

American Commitment has answered the call with a video starring Tom Steyer, perhaps the biggest left-wing gazillionaire funding Democratic campaigns in 2014. He is certainly the biggest hypocrite funding Democratic campaigns this year. American Commitment’s video contest submission is aptly titled “America’s biggest hypocrite.”

Petard, prepare to hoist. (Oh, and go vote for the video. You’ll be glad you did.)

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Is this the guy that’s the fight promoter? I can never tell one crazy black guy from another.

Read it.

The primitive folk assessed by many archaeologists as being the original native Americans – that is, the Clovis people – killed and ate the lovable prehistoric elephants that inhabited the continent alongside them, scientists say.

Read it.

The world’s largest retailer, best known for low prices on everything from detergent to dining room sets, has become a significant player in the financial services market by doing what it does best: cut costs and appeal to budget-conscious shoppers.

Cue Democrat angst.

“It’s cheaper than anything out there and there are no overdraft fees,” he said of Walmart. “I’ve never had a problem.”

But bank executives do. They say that Walmart can offer low prices on financial services because the chain has cherry-picked services not subject to the layers of regulation that banks face.

Unlike check-cashing services, banks are required to lend in urban and suburban communities, provide direct insurance on deposits, and make detailed reports to several federal and state agencies, said Richard Holbrook, chairman of the Massachusetts Bankers Association and chief executive at Eastern Bank.

“We’re not afraid of competition,” Holbrook said. “We just want to make sure the rules are the same.”

Future of Capitalism can read between the lines:

The line “we’re not afraid of competition” from that banker made me chuckle. Of course he’s afraid of competition, which is why the banks are working to get regulators to prevent Walmart from competing with them. The regulators will probably do what the banks ask, and pile more rules on Walmart, because the competition from Walmart demonstrates that competition works better for consumers than regulation does, which is not a point regulators are eager to make. Notice that when people say “we just want to make sure the rules are the same,” they usually aren’t talking about reducing rules, but increasing them.

Read it.

The family of a teen shot and killed while allegedly taking part in a June 30 armed robbery is asking if killing the 16-year-old was really necessary and whether it was truly an act of self-defense.

He pulled a gun on a guy who was faster on the draw. Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Aside from a congenital propensity to lie, of course.

Hillary Clinton claimed that, at the moment she and her husband were signing up for $18 million in book deals, they were “dead broke.”

Harry Reid (who lives in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel) said liberals are getting bullied by Republican billionaires but the Democratic Party “doesn’t have many billionaires” behind it.

Joe Biden (family earnings: $407,000 last year plus a free house, driver, meals, etc.) claims, “I don’t own a single stock or bond. . . . I have no savings accounts . . . I’m the poorest man in Congress.” (Triple fail: Joe isn’t poor, isn’t in Congress and wouldn’t be the poorest member of it if he were.)

Right here in New York, we’ve learned that City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the daughter of a wealthy doctor who left a $6.7 million inheritance, took advantage of a no-interest loan intended for underprivileged New Yorkers to buy a Harlem townhouse. Then she forgot to declare the rental income on required city disclosure forms. The townhouse you and I helped buy her for $240,000 is today worth $1.2 million.

The more Democrats insist on their proletarian cred, the more absurd it gets. They’re no longer just holier than thou: Now they’re prolier than thou.

Read it.

Like the U.S. government, the New York Times isn’t sensitive enough to Latino culture to use terms like “mestizo” or “mulatto.” They can’t even use the words in this article, much less in one about George Zimmerman. But Latin Americans use those terms: for example, here’s an article about mestizo Bolivians protesting that they should be be allowed to check “mestizo” on the Bolivian census. (Leftist President Evo Morales is a member of a specific Amerindian tribe elected on a tribal rights platform, and he wants everybody in Bolivia to officially identify with a specific Amerindian group rather than with the mestizo majority: classic divide and rule politics on Evo’s part.)

…

It has always been absurd that only Hispanics get an ethnicity, so now Arab activists are trying to cash in on that absurdity by getting a second official ethnicity for themselves. (Can we get the neocons upset over the Arab ethnic preference push? They still swing some weight.)

Read it.

he roommate of released U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl testified Wednesday about the freed soldier’s questionable mental state and demanded that Bergdahl be prosecuted as a deserter for the “ultimate betrayal” of allegedly leaving his post in Afghanistan and endangering fellow U.S. troops.

Retired Spc. Cody Full, who served with Berdgahl in the Blackfoot Company and was his roommate, declared that Bergdahl’s “desertion was premeditated” and that the released U.S. soldier “should not be characterized as serving with honor and distinction,” as Obama administration officials have maintained.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The notion of nomination by category is offensive on the face of it. MLK’s dream that people be judged by the content of their character and not the color (or shape) of their skin has turned into its opposite. Now pigment and plumbing are everything. If, in the wretched past, 1/16th black “blood” made one black, it is now a point not only of pride but of privilege. Heck, you don’t even need to prove your racial bona fides. Just FEELING that your cheekbones are high and that makes you a Cherokee is enough to land a coveted teaching position and be mentioned as a possible First-Runnerup Substitute Woman should the Low Information Voters be persuaded that a Benghazi is not a fancy sports car.

Can you imagine that it won’t even take until 2020 for the Perpetually Furious Grievance Crowd (PFGC) to demand a Gay President? A Hispanic Vice President? And why just a regular old boring gay person? That’s offensive to the Transgendered – the gay president should be a former man, now a woman, who is a lesbian. And why should the Hispanic Vice President be a citizen? How unfair to the undocumented! (assuming by then there are any undocumented left who haven’t been made voting citizens).

Eugene Volokh examines one of the dirty little secrets of Identity Politics.

Apparently, if you’re a successful minority, then you’re really ‘white’ for victimology purposes.

Read it.

Must have gotten their signals crossed or something. It’s so hard finding good help these days….

Jim Goad sees behind the curtain.

After endlessly bemoaning the fact that blacks haven’t reached economic parity with whites in America, he writes:

In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much.

I’d like to believe that, but first I’d have to see Barack Obama’s school records while ignoring the fact that he was raised by relatively affluent whites.

Read it.

It’s not a joke, they really believe this stuff.

Kimberly Morin of Manchester Political Buzz Examiner reports that teacher David Pook, who claims to have “helped write the standards,” said during a recent Common Core debate at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire, that Common Core was necessary because of “white privilege.”

From Wiktionary: “From Old French privilege, from Latin privilegium (“an ordinance or law against or in favor of an individual”), from privus (“private”) + l?x, legis (“law”).”

So where is the private law in favor of white people? It actually runs the other way, but of course nobody dares speak of ‘black privilege”.

Steve Sailer reveals the awful truth, just in case you don’t read the Barbados Free Press regularly, which I’m sure you do.

A college roommate of one of my sons said, “Here in America, everybody calls me black, while back home in Jamaica, everybody calls me white.”

Read it.

“Even though Media Matters advocates for card check and other pro-union policies, they have fought tooth and nail against a union in their own office. It’s time for them to stop their hypocritical opposition and start respecting their own principles,” the petition reads. “It hurts the legitimacy of the progressive movement when organizations like Media Matters ‘talk the talk’ but don’t ‘walk the walk.’”

Steve Sailer pulls the curtain back on some inconvenient truth.

It’s quite interesting how Americans find Eric Holder’s ancestry invisible to them. Most of Eric Holder ancestors weren’t black. His recent ancestors were middle class mulattos in Barbados who carefully avoided marriage to blacks. (See the last chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” for a description of how people who look like Gladwell and Holder were bred.) Holder grew up in a middle class West Indian enclave in NYC that tried (and in Holder’s case succeeded) keeping out black American influence.

As some people only smoke or drink ‘socially’, so Eric Holder is only black ‘politically’.

Read it.

On the faculty discussion board, a staff member posted a complaint about a student walking around barefoot in a building. A response is what set off the larger discussion:

One professor wrote: “My approach would be to assure this student that going barefoot is not against the rules because the assumption is that by the time they reach college, students are expected to understand why wearing shoes is expected on campus. If s/he disrespects his or her peers and the college community enough to (un)dress like a hillbilly here, I would say, then s/he should be prepared to be dismissed as one, in whatever pursuits s/he favors, in the preference of someone more attuned to proper decorum and respectful behavior.”

A professor who was troubled by that response forwarded the comment to the Appalachian studies email list with the question: “Colleagues, if you read the following on your institutional discussion board in reference to a complaint about a barefoot student, how would you respond to the professor?” The responses came quickly. Many were furious that a faculty member would feel free to to talk about “hillbilly” behavior in this way.

One suggested response was: “Spit on their car.”

Read it.

People who are worried about climate change emit far more carbon dioxide in their daily lives than the average American, according to data gathered by a new app that can track one’s carbon footprint.

Ian Monroe, the chief executive of Oroeco, told Grist that his app, which syncs social media data and online shopping habits to estimate users’ daily carbon emissions, reveals environmentalists to be some of the biggest “carbon polluters.”

Read it.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the ‘minimum wage’.

Read it.

“The actions of Media Matters executives have placed employees in the impossible position of continuing to produce content espousing pro-labor values for an employer who is challenging our right to unionize,” the statement says. “Not only is management subjecting Media Matters employees to arduous NLRB procedures, the actions of their attorneys indicate Media Matters executives object so tenaciously to our union that they appear willing to prevent employees from ever having the opportunity to vote on the matter.”

And that really tells you all you need to know about the American Left.

Read it.

Despite huge donations from the Service Employees International Union and numerous blog posts advocating for unionization in other industries, Media Matters for America is actively resisting allowing its workers to join the union.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The Other McCain is on the case.

The ongoing conflict between radical feminists and transgender activists, which I first noticed in January and revisited last night in the context of the Dana McCallum rape case, has escaped the notice of mainstream liberal journalism. Liberals tacitly side with the transgenders in pretending that the radfems — a/k/a TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) — have no legitimate grievance.

What the TERFs perceive is that male-to-female transgenders are cynically seeking to usurp and co-opt the “feminist” label for their own advantage, thus shunting aside biological women and demoting them to second-class status within their own movement.

Read it.

MSNBC host Alex Wagner attempted to argue that the IRS was actually the victim of the recent investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups that were seeking 501(c)(4) status.

Is there a more thoroughgoing Voice of the Crust than MSNBC?

Read it.

‘You’re a racist!’ ‘No, you’re a racist!’

Read it.

Beyond that, we should enjoy the irony of environmentalists suddenly discovering property rights after cheering on every erosion of property rights in favor of unlimited government regulatory power for decades.  In fact Steyer will lose his legal challenges because of precedents over 100 years old for projects like Keystone—the same precedents that determined the outcome of the now-infamous Kelo case in 2004. See, for example, Strickley v. Highland Boy Gold Mining Company from 1906, or Dayton Minnig v. Sewall, a Nevada Supreme Court case from around the same time.  Both held that it was in fact okay to take private property from A to give to B if B’s private enterprise had some kind of public benefit.  Not to mention Berman v. Parker in 1954, which argued that private property could be taken because “The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive.”  Well, that’s nice.  (See also the 1981 Michigan case, Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit.)

Read it.

The Obama campaign offshoot known as Battleground Texas, which was caught on hidden camera by James O’Keefe allegedly violating state law by encouraging volunteers to copy voters’ private telephone numbers from registration forms into their get-out-the-vote database, has doubled down on the practice, claiming that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott himself sanctioned their conduct in his previously issued legal opinions.

According to Jay Root of the Texas Tribune, Battleground Texas–which is attempting to “turn Texas blue” in helping Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis–now claims that telephone numbers on voter registration forms are “public information.” The group’s lawyer, Graham Wilson, cites Abbott–Davis’s GOP opponent–declaring in 2010 that Dallas County “may not withhold the telephone numbers” from a requestor.

Yet Abbott’s opinion clearly applies only to the county itself. There is also a world of difference between copying telephone numbers directly from voter registration forms–in apparent direct violation of Texas state statute–on the one hand, and filing a formal request through the relevant public authorities, on the other (see below).

Wilson tries to dodge that argument, claiming that a separate opinion from the Texas secretary of state allows volunteers to “copy the relevant information from the application in writing just as you would be able to do if you went to the registrar’s office and pulled a copy of the original application.” The key phrase, however, is “relevant information.” State law does not, apparently, bar copying the name and address from a registration form. It does, however, single out telephone numbers–which Wilson apparently does not try to deny.

Read it.

Because God knows that EVERYBODY in the United States has free, high quality education, so we need to air-drop money on an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT continent.

Read it.

Google, in an effort to aid environmentalists worried about deforestation, now has a website, an online forest monitoring system, that tracks deforestation in real time around the world. Called Global Forest Watch, it uses curated maps with in-depth reporting regarding forests around the world.

Too bad they won’t think of doing the same for individual liberty — that would be a map I’d be interested in — but, then, individual liberty has never been a priority with the ‘progressives’ at Google; and we live in a world in which more people appear to be concerned about the disappearance of trees than in the disappearance of freedom.

Read it.

Some people are better than others? Burn the witch!

As it happens, Canada is an excellent laboratory for the authors’ theories. And the Toronto District School Board, with its 250,000 students – one of the most ethnically diverse populations in the world – offers the perfect natural experiment. The TDSB conducts detailed demographic analyses of its students and their performance. The data strongly confirm the group differences described in The Triple Package. (My thanks to education consultant Paul Bennett, whose excellent blog, Educhatter, led me to this trove of information.)

The first surprise in these data – for those who haven’t hung around a Toronto schoolyard lately – is that only 29 per cent of the TDSB’s students are white. The next largest ethnic groups are South Asian (24 per cent), East Asian (15 per cent), and black (12 per cent). About three-quarters of the kids were born in Canada, but only a fifth of the students have two Canadian-born parents. More than two-thirds are from immigrant families with both parents born outside Canada.

The second surprise is that there is almost no link between academic success and family income among immigrant groups. More than half of all East Asian students (Chinese, Hong Kong and Korean) come from families that make less than $50,000 a year. But they blow the other kids away. Between 85 per cent and 89 per cent of them score at levels 3 and 4 in Grade 6 math. The school board average is just 60 per cent. Most South Asian students do well too, even though 70 per cent of them come from homes with incomes of less than $50,000 a year.

Read it.

And try to keep up….