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A near impossible literacy test Louisiana used to suppress the black vote
- saagarjha 2y agoI’m curious if anyone has the solutions to these.
- jakelazaroff 2y agoThe point is that the questions are phrased ambiguously such that a reviewer can credibly claim that a "correct" solution is wrong. Take question 20: > Spell backwards, forwards Is "backwards" the object, with "forwards" describing how to spell it — as in, "Spell the word 'backwards', forwards"? Or is it being used as an adverb, telling you how to spell the word "forwards" — as in, "Spell backwards the word 'forwards'"?
- kyleee 2y agoKind of like modern App Store review. Google must have employed some history majors
- kelnos 2y agoWow, I hadn't even thought of that for that question. Disgustingly genius. The person administering the test can simply tell the person who took the test the opposite interpretation of however they answered, and that's it for their ability to vote.
- malfist 2y agoWhat's even worse about this is this test wasn't given to everyone who wanted to vote, only those who gained their right to vote after the civil war. White people were "grandfathered" in, literally.
- jakelazaroff 2y agoIt reminds me of the Simpsons episode with the spelling bee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sn5wyBDxn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Sn5wyBDxn4 > "Your word is 'weather'." > "Which one? Can you use it in a sentence?" > "Certainly! 'I don't know whether the weather will improve.'" (obviously the joke doesn't work as well written out)
- KingMob 2y ago"Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
- usea 2y agoAlso the Simpsons scene with the Smokey Bear statue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-q-3fPYw_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-q-3fPYw_Y > "Only who can prevent forest fires?" [You] [Me] > Bart selects "You". > "You pressed 'You', referring to me. That is incorrect. The correct answer is 'You'!"
- tharkun__ 2y agoA prime example of why "unionization" is good: You only need two people to do this differently and be told the opposite by the administrator (preferably the same one but not necessarily) and you've proved that it's BS. That's all theory of course and in practice I bet people did talk about this afterwards and figured out it's BS and it didn't help either way. But it's easy to "find out" (and then try to do something about it) if you stick together. But if nobody sticks together on it and tries to do better for themselves by themselves, everyone does worse for themselves in the end.
- jeffbee 2y agoGreat, and now that you realize this you also realize why all these other right-wing schemes to suppress the vote are also unconstitutional. If you put some random jerk in a position to deny someone the right to vote based on ID card or signature rules, you have created a system for discriminatory disenfranchisement.
- kelnos 2y agoI think I've already got a pretty good handle on the modern-day disenfranchisement techniques, thank you.
- lostmsu 2y agoWith the comma the second interpretation seems inapplicable to me.
- jakelazaroff 2y agoIt’s awkward, sure, but other questions use commas in that way. Question 19, immediately prior: > Draw in the space below, a square with a triangle in it, and within that same triangle draw a circle with a black dot in it. In that case, “a square with a triangle in it” is fairly unambiguously the object, which would make the sentence construction “[verb] [adverb], [object]” — exactly the same as the second interpretation of “Spell backwards, forwards”.
- onionisafruit 2y agoIt seems inapplicable to you, but it will probably seem very applicable to the test administrator who doesn’t want people like you voting.
- stared 2y agoAnother possible solution is "backwards, forwards". Without quotation marks, this task is inherently ambiguous.
- nomilk 2y agoReminds of the Spelling Bee scene in the Simpsons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWyYTJKOtDU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWyYTJKOtDU
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoAnd by "spell", do they mean just rewrite the word(s), write the word(s) with a s p a c e between each letter, or go to the examiner and spell it verbally?
- phildenhoff 2y agoA solution is available here: https://mrsjcoonan.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/2/23625108/literacytestkey.pdf https://mrsjcoonan.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/2/23625108/liter... But, my understanding is that the test is purposefully opaque, so that any answer can be considered “wrong”, at the discretion of whoever’s running the test.
- jampekka 2y agoIt doesn't have answers for the last two and I think the number 16 is wrong (the circle is encircling the right corner). Also 25 doesn't fit on the line. Would be interested to see what share of population would get all of those correct (if it's even possible). I for one wouldn't. Sadistic stuff.
- csallen 2y agoTheir answer to #14 is wrong. They crossed out "m" and should've crossed out "l".
- kelnos 2y agoTheir answer to #14 is wrong. The first part ("draw a line under the first letter after 'h'") is done correctly, with a line under "i", but the second part ("draw a line through the second letter after "j") is wrong. They should have drawn the line through "l", but they drew it through "m". At first I thought "oh, they're just using a slightly different, but perhaps reasonable, meaning of "second letter after". But if that's the case, then they used a different meaning of "first letter after" for the first part. #16 is also wrong: it calls for a black circle overlapping the left corner of a triangle, but they drew it overlapping the right corner. And for #25, they wrote it out, but all of it did not fit on the line, and did not write the terminating ":" in the text, so that's technically incorrect too. (And it's debatable whether or not they were supposed to write out the text that's inside the triangle, or the "gotcha" of writing out the text in the question.) I love that they gave up for the last two questions. I imagine most people who were forced to take that test did so too, assuming they even made it that far in the allotted time.
- mrbuttons454 2y ago
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 2y agoWhat's the right answer to "Write down on the line provided, what you read in the triangle below"? The triangle contains "Paris in the spring".
- tilt_error 2y agoActually: Paris in the the spring 'the' comes twice
- jampekka 2y agoThat's diabolical. But it's not certain if even that's correct. Depends on how the comma should be interpreted.
- kelnos 2y agoAnd the person who answered wrote the last two words such that they're not "on the line provided", so regardless of which phrase they're supposed to write, they got the question wrong. Assuming they did write the correct thing, and assuming the test administrator would be unusually generous about the placement of the words, they still got it wrong: they left off the colon at the end.
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoThat's one trick part of the the question (a common trick, a lot of people don't read two "the"s in a row), but the other answer could be "what you read in the triangle below" as that's what the question states. The other trick is that the line could be too short depending on your handwriting, in theory disqualifying the tested person regardless of what they write down.
- valval 2y agoIt’s not a real test.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- purpleblue 2y agoThe sheer unadulterated racism from the past is horrifying and sickening. Sure, we still have work to do, but I'm glad we've come so far in the last few decades.
- Spooky23 2y agoIt’s still here. We dress it up as voter ID or something similar.
- anonfordays 2y agoVoter ID is not racist.
- defrost 2y agoLike many such policies it's not explicitly racist .. as a procedure it simply disenfranchises some demographics more than others; lower income brackets, people that have had difficult housing and record keepng pasts, indigenous voters on reservation lands lacking mailbox addresses, etc. It's a mystery how that appears to proportionally exclude along racial and ethnic lines but it's assuredly not that by delibrate intent. Just a happy accident really?
- giraffe_lady 2y agoA fun fact is that this is specifically the question the academic framework of critical race theory was formed to address. How can systems that are not explicitly racist, that may actually have racial equity as explicit goals, still create racially disparate outcomes. It's an interesting area of study! No wonder people hate it.
- anonfordays 2y ago[flagged]
- KingMob 2y agoIt certainly is, because the laws are passed with the intent that they won't be applied equally. Incidentally, this is one of the things critical race theory actually talked about: how laws can be non-discriminatory on the surface, but deliberately created and applied in a discriminatory manner. To trot out Wilhoit's Law again: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."
- akira2501 2y agoIt's possible. It was designed to be. It was used because southern Blacks actually did have a lower literacy rate than Whites at the time and this was seen as the most expedient "filter" they could create. The real racism was in all the ways to bypass the test. Grandfather clauses, land ownership clauses, "demonstrated understanding" options. Most White people challenged by the test wouldn't ever need to actually confront it. These weren't the only requirements either. You had to be of "good character" and "understand the duties and obligations of citizenship under a republican form of government" and to be able to "read _and_ write." Finally even if you were Black and managed all of this it wasn't at all a guarantee that your registration or vote would be accepted. Sometimes this understanding would be communicated in an act of violence. The test is a tiny archival curiosity created by a much more overt system.
- tptacek 2y agoIt's not possible. Several of the questions have multiple valid answers. It's pretty obvious what the scheme is.
- akira2501 2y agoThat comment is a reflection of my pedantry and I don't think we're actually disagreeing. It's not possible to know the right answers because there never were any. This means the test has no predictive power, not that it's impossible, and again, since some Whites unable to prove education did have to contend with this, it was designed that way intentionally. I feel "near impossible literacy test" is a terrible description. The "intentionally ambiguous literacy test" would be more apt. More worrying is I am unable to find a definitive provenance for this document. It suggests it was used in the early 1900s but the print quality and format seems unusual in several ways to me. Which is why I attempted to reduce it in favor of considering the rest of the system.
- not2b 2y agoThe reason that it is impossible is that there is no possible set of answers that would require the test-giver to acknowledge that a test-taker passed the test. Anyone the test-taker does not like can be failed.
- terminalbraid 2y agoIn a similar vein, linked are math questions Russian universities would give to Jewish students to filter them out in entrance exams. https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556 https://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1556
- incompatible 2y agoAustralia had something similar to implement its "White Australia" policy. Apparently, British authorities objected to explicitly racist rules. So the scheme they came up with was that the border officials could, at their discretion, ask somebody coming into the country to pass a dictation test to prove their literacy. The test could be administered in any European language. Very few people managed to pass. Details: https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-australia-policy https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-aust...
- jeethate88 2y ago[flagged]
- eesmith 2y ago> any European language And the immigration officer could pick the language you were to be tested in. Which led to one account I read of an immigrant who was polyglot with an interest in different languages. He could handle all of the languages the officer tried, until Welsh. As I recall, this ended up in court, where the judge allowed the immigration, and pointed out that none of the immigration officers could understand Welsh themselves.
- troad 2y agoThe person was Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovak communist, who arrived in 1934 for a speaking tour to raise awareness of what was happening in fascist Germany, and who the Australian government found far too 'revolutionary' to let in. The full story is quite fun. He was initially refused permission to disembark, which he solved by leaping five metres from the ship, thereby making landfall (rather literally). The government then tried to exclude him using a dictation test, which could indeed be in any European language, and the test he failed was administered in Scots Gaelic. Some controversy arose when it turned out that the person giving the dictation test couldn't themselves understand Scots Gaelic, but the High Court ultimately ruled in Kisch's favour for the somewhat amusing reason that Scots Gaelic was 'not a European language' (at least within the meaning of the relevant law). [0] Australia has a long and not-particularly-storied history of extreme border restrictions. Laws banning non-white migration persisted in one way or another until 1973, and in the subsequent fifty years Australia has done progressively more insane things to keep people out, including removing all of Australia from the Australian migration zone (so migrants never actually 'arrive' in such a way that might give them a right to seek asylum), using the navy to put people that arrived by sea back on boats and launching them vaguely in the direction of other countries, keeping people actually accepted to be refugees (!) off-shore in remote Pacific island concentration camps for years, and - during COVID - criminalising its own citizens leaving Australia for two years (and briefly even the return of Australian citizens home). [1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Kisch_from_Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Ki... [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56953052 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-56953052
- nneonneo 2y agoNote: there are questions about this test's authenticity. Per a note on https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-test.htm: > [NOTE: At one time we also displayed a "brain-twister" type literacy test with questions like "Spell backwards, forwards" that may (or may not) have been used during the summer of 1964 in Tangipahoa Parish (and possibly elsewhere) in Louisiana. We removed it because we could not corroborate its authenticity, and in any case it was not representative of the Louisiana tests in broad use during the 1950s and '60s.] Each parish in Louisiana implemented their own literacy tests, which means that there wasn't really much uniformity in the process. Another (maybe more typical) test: https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf https://www.crmvet.org/info/la-littest2.pdf
- InvaderFizz 2y ago[flagged]
- edflsafoiewq 2y agoIt may be from after 1942 and the "correct" answer is simply wrong.
- kelnos 2y ago> That literacy test seems reasonable Except not, because any test whatsoever should be disallowed when it comes to voter registration.
- shiroiushi 2y agoI think voter registration itself should be disallowed and banned. Why should voters need to register beforehand? You should be able to just show up on election day and cast a vote. The entire process of voter registration is nothing more than a means to disenfranchise voters.
- M4v3R 2y agoIn many parts of the world voter registration is a perfectly normal practice and no one challenges it. The biggest reason for having it is that it disallows voting multiple times. What in your opinion makes the voter registration disenfranchising for voters?
- 23B1 2y agoThis very same cynical and manipulative approach is used today by many apps, websites, forms, data harvesters, data resellers, marketers, tech companies, and governments - with the same basic purpose.
- hammock 2y agoAnd captchas
- inreverse 2y agoLeaving aside the topics of authenticity and the questions' historical context, it's interesting that the article claims that "most" of the questions are impossible, while >80% have a single clear interpretation. For example, "draw a line under the last word in this line."
- undersuit 2y ago“one wrong answer denotes failure of the test”
- tptacek 2y agoYeah? Which word do you draw the line under?
- happytoexplain 2y agoIs there a word trick here I'm missing? I can only interpret it in the face-value sense of underlining the last word, "line".
- tptacek 2y agoSorry, no votes for you; it was "word". No, wait, you needed to underline every occurrence of the word "line". Again, no idea if this test is real, just, that's the gimmick.
- happytoexplain 2y agoI get that the idea is that some questions create ambiguity using wordplay or subjectivity, but do you really think this is one of them? Your examples seem like a stretch even in the context of being unfair on purpose.
- reverius42 2y agoYes, because it is well known that these tests were in fact designed to be unfair on purpose (to a specific racial group). So it's not a stretch to think that these "unfair on purpose" examples are realistic.
- esalman 2y agoTIL voting right depends on literacy in America. Illiterate people have more rights in third world countries apparently.
- baumy 2y agoNo, this is incorrect. This has not been the case for 60 years now. These tests were discontinued as part of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1964. That information is in the linked article, which is short and only takes a minute to read. This example was also far from universal, certainly across the entire USA but even in Louisiana. edit: reading other comments, it isn't clear whether this information is even true for a small subset of Louisiana 60+ years ago
- esalman 2y agoTIL yet another way MLK changed America.
- pjc50 2y agoThe US talks up its history of freedom, but wasn't really a fully democratic country until the moon landings.
- refurb 2y agoAnd by that definition much of Europe isn’t fully democratic?
- pjc50 2y agoMost of Europe never had the level of formal, legal racism of the US. But it is worth remembering which European countries were dictatorships at around the same time (Spain, Portugal, Greece) and that Eastern Europe came to democracy even more recently.
- cto_of_antifa 2y ago
- KingOfCoders 2y agoWhat a strange idea for someone from Germany. Here you are registered as a citizen and get a letter to your registered address and you take that to the voting station. Vote. Done.
- ndbsbwbw 2y agoBecause, yes Germany has always been fair, democratic and non discriminating.
- cedilla 2y agoAlso because residents of Germany have a duty to always maintain an accurate registration of their current address with the county. So the German state actually knows where its voters live, making voter registration superfluous. In case that was sarcasm, then I have to disagree. The current German state has an excellent track record when it comes to voter enfranchisement. Its shortcomings with the democratic process lay elsewhere. The last really questionable action relating to elections was the questionable ban of the communist party - in 1956.
- rKarpinski 2y ago> The current German state has an excellent track record "Current state" is a convenient wording to exclude 1933-1990
- cedilla 2y agoWhy would I exclude 1949-1990?
- rKarpinski 2y agoThe current German state was made in the 90's. Personally don't think the German Democratic Republic had an excellent track with enfranchisement.
- 2y ago
- cranium 2y agoFeels like one of those psychological tests used to induce stress before evaluating other tasks (knowing the person is on edge). Any test that needs 100% accuracy to pass when you are under pressure, filling ambiguous and unimportant questions, is simply bullshit. It's design to make you fail at will if you think about it. Even one ambiguous question is sufficient to fail an otherwise perfect submission: just say the answer was the other way around.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- valval 2y agoI think the weight of your vote should come from the amount of taxes you pay, up to some cap. Can someone explain to me like I’m 12 why this is a bad idea?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- slg 2y agoBeyond anything else, intentionally designing a political system around disenfranchising a class of people seems like a bad idea from a human rights standpoint. You're creating a system in which the wealthier citizens can systematically take the rights away from the poor. I think you know how that can go wrong considering you're asking this question specifically on this post out of all posts.
- potato3732842 2y agoAll extant and historical systems explicitly disenfranchise some people, children, criminals, foreigners, etc.
- krapp 2y agoAnd we should work to remove such disenfranchisements from the system rather than simply accept them as a law of nature.
- e44858 2y agoWhy? Most people find it beneficial to disenfranchise criminals, don't want murderers walking free and hurting you. Why should people support policies that hurt them?
- ImPostingOnHN 2y agoCitizens convicted of crimes are citizens just like you (I assume) and I. I don't think most people find it beneficial to disenfranchise them. One obvious use case for not disenfranchising citizens convicted of crimes, is a politician who criminalizes opposition, thus making it impossible to vote them out. As for policies which hurt people: policies favoring old folks often hurt the majority of people, but there isn't a big push to disenfranchise old people.
- DeathArrow 2y ago[flagged]
- alentred 2y agoEven if you pretend that questions are just accidentally ambiguous, the difference is that subjects are supposed to answer 30 questions in 10 minutes with zero mistakes. This is deliberate and virtually impossible to accomplish.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- az226 2y ago[flagged]
- llamaimperative 2y agoIt’s wild the type of contortions a person can fold themselves into instead of saying, “yeah this was meant to fuck people out of their rights.” There should be no test at all, rushing was not the problem, and the likelihood of prejudice was the entire point. Because it was made by racists. Who were trying to achieve racist goals. Much clearer this way.
- JohnMakin 2y ago> It’s wild the type of contortions a person can fold themselves into instead of saying, “yeah this was meant to fuck people out of their rights.” I'm mixed race from a family that is predominantly made up of PoC - these conversations used to infuriate me, now they just fascinate me. To me, trying to understand what motivates such lines of thinking is really important. Is it denial, naivete, rationalization, or is it something more insidious? I can never tell. Particularly the viewpoint, which is surprisingly popular amongst supposedly educated people, that racism doesn't really exist anymore/isn't a big deal anymore, which at least from my perspective, seems to fuel these types of comments. To the GP comment, I'm not trying to tear you down, I'm actually quite interested in what people commenting stuff like this have to say, because I truly cannot understand.
- jiriknesl 2y agoI know, from a human rights point of view, this is very problematic. But imagine, if only people who can really understand written text, who can calculate, who understand how legal system works, who have basics of logic could vote. Of course, those tests shouldn't be that ambiguous, but if they were phrased a bit more clear, these would be very simple. At the same time, English has changed in the last 50 years. That phrasing might have been common back then.
- pjc50 2y agoImagine what would happen if you put a "who won the US 2020 election?" question on the form.
- hn_acker 2y agoAs of the end of 2021, about 65% of Republicans responders to relevant surveys believed that Trump won the 2020 election [1]. I'm hoping that the percentage has dropped to below 50% by now. [1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/02/viral-image/no-most-americans-dont-believe-2020-election-was-f/ https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/feb/02/viral-imag...
- a5c11 2y agoThis is the key problem of democracy, the educated part of the society is always minority.
- hshshshshsh 2y agoI don't think education do much. People still stupidly vote for one of either republicans or Democrats based on trivial psychological reasons. If education played some role you would probably might have seen an alternative party/form of government emerging over time as people became more educated.
- gljiva 2y agoKnowing facts and applying algebraic formulas indeed doesn't seem to be doing much, but I guess education about logic, critical thinking, biases, fallacies and debate _would_ play a role _if such education was emphasized_.
- rbnabv 2y ago[flagged]
- even_639765 2y ago[flagged]
- majewsky 2y agoThis is not a blog.
- oersted 2y agoThere's obvious utility in learning about the specific tools and methods that have been successfully employed in the past to enforce covert oppression in a democracy, so we can collectively protect against them. If you want a more down-to-earth argument: it's just plain interesting and there's good constructive discussion to be had about it. PS: The website is called Open Culture: The best free cultural & education media on the web. I'm not sure what you mean by "tech blog", if you are referring to HN, non-tech posts are fairly common here and they are valued.
- even_639765 2y ago[flagged]
- dghf 2y agoHaiti, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia and Greece all abolished slavery before the UK did.
- detruzs 2y agoMaybe. But they are not necessarily doing as good a job enforcing it. https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/ https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/map/
- even_639765 2y agoDoes this undermine my point ?Or underline it? For the first 5,000 years of human civilization, slavery was an accepted institution by all peoples everywhere.
- deleted 2y ago
- elzbardico 2y ago[flagged]
- robocat 2y agoYour implicit premise is that we vote for policy. Democracy works despite the majority not understanding much about policy. One critical strength of democracy is that it allows voters to remove the current politician - even if that politician would rather not be removed. Where would you pick your line? Small moves of the line change the size of the disenfranchised group. And I have to admire your chutzpah of suggesting tests to create a disenfranchised group on an article showing serious flaws with testing... Of course you haven't suggested a single way to fix any flaws. I sincerely hope you are not working in any engineering role.
- hammock 2y ago> Democracy works despite the majority not understanding much about policy. Citation needed
- MeetingsBrowser 2y agoI don’t think it’s right to put any sort of filter on which citizens are allowed to vote. Any filter immediately becomes a tool to limit the number of voters for the opposition. We already have arguments over what should be considered a felony , gerrymandering county lines, etc. Seems like requiring a certain level of education would just incentivize more attacks on public education
- tivert 2y agoThe test images look like they were written in Microsoft Word. Is this example fake?
- alanbernstein 2y agoWhy? Because of the typeface and the numbered list?
- tivert 2y ago> Why? Because of the typeface and the numbered list? Yes, the typeface. And the numbered list looks suspicious too, now that you mention it. Also the kerning (look at the renderings of fi and fr in the document). It wouldn't be the first time something like that gave away a forgery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy. I've seen documents from the 60s and earlier, and they never look like someone banged them out in MS Word with Times New Roman.
- hn_acker 2y agoCheck nneonneo's comment [1]. The test pictured in the featured article was retyped and reformatted from an earlier version, though the test itself might not be authentic. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41909793
- ClownsAbound 2y ago[dead]
- jccc 2y agoDoes anyone think it might be important to note in the head that this is 1964? (That’s actually in the article’s own headline.)
- isleyaardvark 2y agoNo, because the article was not written in 1964.
- JohnMakin 2y agoAs other commenters have noted, in Louisiana specifically, these types of tests would have been per parish and would not have been uniform. For a bit of a happier perspective and a personal american story - I descend from this area from emancipated slaves. The farm they worked on was given to them when the owner died, and they became prominent and educated members of the community and established a legacy that still exists today. I am always amazed at the adversity they must have faced when achieving success in reconstruction era - but from my research at least, the really bad systemic stuff didn't come til 40ish years after emancipation, like the "one drop" laws and stuff that was attempting to roll back the progress made during reconstruction. It's a really fascinating part of history I always try to learn more about.
- monkeydreams 2y ago> It's a really fascinating part of history I always try to learn more about. I suspect the regressive cultural backlash at the US at the moment as the "next generational" response the the civil rights campaigns in the mid-late 20th century.
- potato3732842 2y agoIn my personal opinion directly race based stuff is behind us at this point. There's only one generation alive today who remember a time where it wasn't just taken for granted that all races have equal potential to yield high (and very low) achieving people and that generation is above "shaking things up" age. I think regression will be along some other axis. My personal two suspects are a) some variant of gender roles and the way they've changed since the 1960s and b) the widespread acceptance of cultural diversity being a good thing and the idea that there can not be superiority between cultures. The "goodness" of both of these things has been challenged quite a bit recently either directly or by shifting circumstances on other fronts causing people to need to think more critically about those subjects. In contrast, the goodness of not being racist (at least on a first order level) has been sailing along quite successfully recently.
- jen20 2y ago
- giardini 2y ago[flagged]
- riotnrrd 2y agoIn your rush to condemn it, did you actually read the linked article? Let me quote: "These tests [...] were “supposedly applicable to both white and black prospective voters who couldn’t prove a certain level of education” (typically up to the fifth grade). Yet they were “in actuality disproportionately administered to black voters.” Additionally, many of the tests were rigged so that registrars could give potential voters an easy or a difficult version, and could score them differently as well. For example, the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement describes a test administered in Alabama that is so entirely subjective that it measures the registrar’s shrewdness and cunning more than anything else."
- llamaimperative 2y agoThe bad news is this "enlightened racism apologist" trend seems to be on the uptick. The good news is that they're so unfathomably ignorant of basic historical facts (as you demonstrate) that it's easy to prove they're actually mere average-intelligence racism apologists.
- sgnelson 2y agoI feel like a rather large number of individuals are missing a key detail about these questions. It was intentionally about ambiguity. It was intentionally designed to allow the test grader to decide pass or fail, regardless of what the "correct" answer was. Do you realize that these "tests" weren't graded by an impartial judge. They were graded by people who saw it as their duty to deny certain individuals the right to vote. Too many "rational" people who think that these were just clever word games and that "they seem fair," when being unfair was the entire point. As if the law, and the test givers were going to treat the people taking these tests fairly. I guess it's nice to have so many people who seem to think that the system would treat these people rationally and fairly. But that wasn't how it was. (Also, if you do think that, I highly recommend you go read some history books.)
- myroon5 2y agoWhite-only primaries only ended in America 80 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Allwright https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Allwright
- p0w3n3d 2y agoThey are quite difficult for me, as a foreigner. I can imagine that this was impossible to pass (if they are real of course) for a person who wants to exercise their rights. It comes with a lot of stress induced by difficult to understand and catchy quieries. I imagine that one can always create a language typical to some group and impossible to overcome by people outside of this group. I'm trying to learn music as a person who has never attended music school, and even though there is a lot of terminology in English available in the internet, the terminology in my country is different, uses different symbols and are inaccessible for me. My kids learn them, when I see it I cannot make anything of it, because of different coding of the same ideas (like intervals, minor major etc.) in the system that is imposed in my country