Jake Lybberty reports Justice Clarence Thomas's saying in My Grandfather's Son that "like every other black law student, I was uncomfortably aware that blacks failed to pass the bar exams at a much higher rate than whites . . . ." At first Justice Thomas assumed that racial discrimination must be to
blame. But that explanation did not hold water, since each exam was graded anonymously, by several different graders:
I assumed that the disproportionate black failure rate was conclusive evidence of racial discrimination, but the more closely I looked at the facts, the more apparent it became that I was wrong. At that time each question on the bar exam was graded separately by a different scorer and each completed exam identified solely by number, thus making it impossible for the graders to tell which examinees, if any, were black.
Even if the graders could spot black candidates by their language, which seemed unlikely, the better explanation was that black law students had received inadequate preparation:
In any case, the inability of a black law student to write and speak English properly wasn't evidence of discrimination by the graders--it was an indictment of the quality of the education he had received.
Nor did it make sense to argue, as the NAACP did, that "if a neutral examination produced disparate results among the races, then it could be considered discriminatory." The real culprits, Justice Thomas thought, were the people responsible for the useless education these young people had received."
Read about it on Jake Lybberty's blog, On Life and Lybberty.
Posted by Mary Campbell Gallagher, J.D., Ph.D., President
BarWrite and BarWrite Press
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