How Affirmative Action Turned Kendrex White Into a Killer

Yesterday, 21-year-old University of Texas at Austin junior Kendrex White went on a stabbing spree, attacking at least four students, killing one of them.

But yeah me and [deleted] were eating at cilantros truck at a long picnic table. Then at the end of the table some guy comes up in a bandana and stabs the knife into the table and looks all of us in the eye. I thought it was just some theatrical stunt or something tbh..He pulls the knife out without saying anything and turns around to slash some guy in the back of the neck. The slash victim grans the back of his neck and yells (people look at him and I await some "gotcha statement). But then....The attacker walks to another guy and stands him in like the kidney region in his back. Some guy yells run and we all bold to mccombs.

By most accounts White had previously seemed normal and even "nice," although he had appeared a bit stressed or depressed recently. His Twitter account is filled with friendly tweets and jokes. It's true that there are frequent links to gangsta videos and memes, along with many uses of the word "nigga," but I assume this is fairly standard among his peers - most of them are retweets that had obviously been making the rounds. There are also many links to Bible quotes about love.

A pinned tweet, put up last year, is a gangsta GIF - "Nigga be you, fuck to be cool." Underneath, is the last tweet he made, a few hours before the attack. It reads "Yahushua," the preferred name for God among certain Christian/Jewish sects, some of them quasi-black supremacist.

According to his Twitter profile, White was a biology major and pre-med who hoped to become a doctor. He was a member of the Black Health Professionals Organization.

The University of Texas is the US News and World Report 56th ranked school in the country, and according to one source, has the 2nd most competitive undergraduate program in Texas.

White had no business attending UT.

I'm basing that partly on an online Prezi presentation he made as a freshman or sophomore. The presentation was put up on July 9, 2015, the last day of classes for the first Summer course term at UT. It was titled "The controversy of Racism and Police brutality in America."

Before they take it down, I'm going to reprint it here, in full:

The video shows black parents giving their black children "The Talk" about the police

This video was taken down. I have no idea of its original contents.

A few commentators have already pointed to the presentation, with its references to racism, police profiling and the Ferguson riots, to argue that White was being indoctrinated to hate the police or white people, etc. But my purpose is not to argue that. Pretty much all American college students these days are victims of this sort of indoctrination attempt. Many are influenced by it; some see through it; others ignore it or play along to get good grades or whatever. It's simply a fact of contemporary college life.

Rather, I want to draw attention to how childlike, crude and simple White's "Prezi" was. Given the date, I assume it was some sort of final presentation for the class. And I assume (though I don't know this) that it earned him a passing grade. He went on to complete his sophomore year and then begin his junior year.

That it was a final presentation for a freshman or sophomore class at a relatively high-ranked college is grotesque. It would have been out of place as a freshman high-school presentation.

My almost six-year-old daughter could almost have put it together. Your young son or daughter could have, too.

And by grotesque, I'm not criticizing White for it - even though we now know he turned into a murderer - but rather I'm referring to his teachers, who condescendingly demanded and expected so little from their Affirmative Action students in the guise of "helping" them.

So, Kendrex White had no business studying at UT, let alone being a pre-med there. I assume that eventually, after wasting three years of his life on the supposed doctor track, he himself realized this. He wasn't going to make it.

But why? Who did this to him? Why did they lead him on and then pull the rug out? Why were other students, white students, perhaps, apparently succeeding when he had failed?

He'd fix that. Someone would pay.

Or so goes one theory. I think it's largely true.

Do not misunderstand. Most of us, experience major disappointments in life, and sometimes we believe, rightly or wrongly, that they were a result of unfairness or injustice towards us. But most of us don't go on murderous stabbing sprees to make up for them. Kendrex White is fully responsible for what he did.

But I think that what he did is an example - an extreme example, of course - of what Affirmative Action does to many black Americans. The title of my post was meant to be provocative. I obviously don't believe that Affirmative Action generally turns black people into mass stabbers. But in this case, it just might have.

And it has nothing to do with the color of anyone's skin per se, but everything to do with an institutionalized system that sets a certain class of people - in this case, people who happen to have certain skin color - up for failure.

Imagine that at every turn, you were given a sort of break, always advanced ahead of where your abilities or attainments would have otherwise placed you. If you noticed that your peers were constantly outperforming you (as they naturally would if you were always put into a competitive category above where you should have been) you are told, implicitly or explicitly, that this is only temporary. Perhaps the standard measurements underestimate you, for one reason or another. Or perhaps there's something else - racism? - that's making you consistently fall short of your peers. Now imagine that you come to a point where you aren't given that break - you finally have to take the tough biology course where they can't just waive you through - or take some sort of standardized test - the MCAT's, perhaps. So, you fail. Not because you're inherently stupid to lazy or anything like that, but because the whole way along people who claimed to be helping you were consistently mismatching you by placing you where you didn't belong, or at least, didn't belong yet.

I think you would be frustrated, perhaps even angry. I certainly would be.

Over forty years ago, the economist Thomas Sowell argued that Affirmative Action caused black students to be consistently mismatched at all levels. Among other things, he looked at the abnormally high dropout rates of blacks at elite schools, including Berkeley. Sowell's point was not that black students were inherently likelier to drop out of school, but that the phenomenon was the natural result of policies that systematically placed them, so too speak, over their heads. Those students who scored 350 on their SAT's were placed in schools that were at the 500 level. Those that scored 500 went to schools at the 650 level, and so on.

Now, of course, the process can continue, sometimes almost indefinitely. A mismatch doesn't always mean failure, and you can often continue to the next stage. But in many cases - though certainly not all - things will catch up. You graduate but then can't cut it in law school. Or you make it through law school but can't cut it at the law firm.

And again remember, not cutting it law school simply means not cutting it at the level of law school you shouldn't have been admitted to in the first place, given your abilities. You might have done just fine, one step down.

Indeed, if they hadn't tried to "help" you, you might have been a successful lawyer from a 20th ranked law school. Instead, you're a failure at Harvard.

Or you could have excelled at community college, and then perhaps have gone on from there. Instead you're a washout at UT.

Affirmative Action has been one of the greatest disasters of modern liberal social engineering, not because it's unfair to whites - although in a sense it is - but because it's unfair and damaging, tragically so, for so many blacks.

To say nothing of how it damages race relations as a whole.

It would be wrong to now call Kendrex White a victim - the victims yesterday were obviously the innocent people he attacked - but let's just say that others who probably went through similar experiences to what he went through, and who didn't convert their frustrations into violence, might have a bit of a claim.

And again, it doesn't have to turn out badly. Read Michelle Obama's turgid and awkward senior thesis at Princeton. It also appears wildly out of place - if a bit better than the work of a child, it's not exactly what one would expect from an Ivy League pre-law student. Michelle Robinson would fail out of a couple law firms before meeting her husband and living happily ever after. And, of course, Barack Obama would partly parlay his Affirmative Action breaks into winning the highest office in the country. So, yeah, sometimes Affirmative action works.

It didn't with Kendrex White.

Kendrex White's teachers, and their fellow Affirmative Action enablers will of course never blame themselves. Who needs to, when you can always blame "racism."

Or Donald Trump.