Rudi Can't Fail (in fact, Rudi Can Yale) | Blog Posts

The NYT has a long article, To Be Black at Stuyvesant High, on a young heroine of diversity, Rudi-Ann Miller, who practically singlehandedly has kept multiculturalism alive at Stuyvesant H.S. by being one of only 40 African-American students out of 3200 at NYC's premiere exam-only public science and math school.

She has also had enough of the grumbling at Stuyvesant that black students do better in the college-admissions game because of their skin color.

Rudi will have to assuage her hurt feelings next year at Yale.

Hey, wait a minute, what kind of African-American girl born in the 1990s is named Rudi anyway? Isn't there some foreign country where "Rudie" is close to being the national nickname?

If you followed the complaints of Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier about how Harvard's affirmative action slots tend to go to students who are not the descendants of American slaves, you won't be surprised to find out from later on in the article that Rudi attended through seventh grade Campion College in Jamaica, a Jesuit school that her father, a Jamaican accounting executive recently relocated to the New York area, calls the finest in that country. (Campion College's website boasts that 14 of its graduates have gone on to win Rhodes Scholarships.)

A commenter notes:

As a Stuy alum who had many Black friends, I find it disappointing that the article didn't inquire further into the community of Black students who do make it to Stuy. While there is of course diversity within the Black community, I can testify that most are either the children of immigrants or products of inter-racial relationships. This is relevant because it shows that many are either of higher socio-economic status, or similar to the potpourri of second-generation immigrants who dominate the school. The real issue is why there are so few from the entrenched black communities, in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx who aspire to attend Stuy.

One reason is offered in the article:

Sometimes, Mr. Blumm said, blacks and Latinos who do well enough on the entrance exam to get into Stuyvesant are lured away by prestigious private high schools, which offer them full scholarships and none of the issues that even elite public schools have to contend with, like tight budgets and overcrowding.

By the way, is this the first statistical graph to be published in this century where blacks are represented by the color black? I thought there was some sort of Rule of Randomizing colors where one one graph blacks are, say, white, and whites are brown, and Chinese are green, and Mexicans are red, and then on the next graph blacks are blue, whites yellow, Asians purple, and Latinos white? I dunno, this graph could be setting a dangerous precedent by making it easier for readers to make sense out of racial data.