The New York Times obituary of Harold Levy, a chancellor of the New York City public schools, includes this passage:
Appointed on an interim basis by the Board of Education in January 2000, explicitly against the wishes of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Levy, a small, energetic man who arrived at his new office in a pinstriped suit carrying a pillow embroidered with "No Good Deed Goes Unpunished," faced daunting challenges directing the nation's largest public school system.
It was a behemoth with 1.1 million students, 84 percent of them from minority groups; 78,000 teachers whose contracts were expiring and whose ranks faced heavy retirement losses; an aging infrastructure of 1,145 schools, most of them overcrowded and decrepit, and a $13 billion budget that experts called inadequate.
I'm about the last person to go around with a microscope seeking race-related things to be offended by, but describing a school system with a large percentage of children "from minority groups" as being a "daunting challenge," akin to an "inadequate" budget or a "decrepit" infrastructure seems to me to be jarring, cringe-inducing. It's an example of what president George W. Bush called the soft bigotry of low expectations. At the very least, it runs counter the the more conventional liberal wisdom that diversity is a strength. Merely being from a "minority group" is not necessarily an indication that a student presents a challenge to a school system. Some minority groups, such as Jews or Chinese Americans, place a high cultural value on education and do well enough that they wind up over-represented, relative to their presence in the population, in places that select on the basis of academic performance.
If a Republican political candidate or judicial nominee said something like this, the Times would have a field day with it. Yet when it comes in the faux-authoritative — fauxthoritative? — voice of the news columns of the Times itself, Times editors and probably a lot of readers, too, just race along past the embedded assumptions.