Just pointing out that claims that the Republicans were once the party of freedom are actually true, and today neither the Democrats or Republicans are anything approaching a party of freedom or equal opportunity.
I’ll happily throw stones at both, though, because they both suck. Vote Green!
…but register Republican. That way you get to vote in the primary. I voted against W. four times.
All I’m saying is that I could pass it, and anybody who had to take tests just like this in school could pass it.
That’s why the test exists. The black folks in the area didn’t get to go to a school with tests like this. Neither did the people they called “poor white trash”.
Incidentally, I took a test on HIPAA compliance recently, where one of the questions was “is such-and-such a service available from 8am to 5pm daily?” (the service in question is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year). The correct answer is NO, it is not available 8am to 5pm daily. Would you get that question right? Not if you continue to approach it with the Aspergatron dialed up to eleven, you wouldn’t! No bonus check for you, and if you angrily protested it based on proper Aristotelian logic you’d better also polish up the old resume.
Do you get it now? It’s not about logic. It’s about understanding the format, which you haven’t had to do before.
You could not pass this test because most every question has several possible answers, all of which can be declared to be wrong based on the whim of the person grading it.
Even If all the questions were completely clear and guaranteed to be understood by anyone who could read, the ten-minute time limit is unfair.
If the object is to prove that they can read, why wouldn’t the same test be valid after 20 minutes, or 30 minutes?
Also, one mistake? I don’t care how smart someone is, one mistake is too easy to make for it to be an instant fail.
Actual Southerner here. At this time in the South, although busing was legalized, there was a huge disparity in education and in fact that disparity remains today.
I recently went to the Rosa Parks museum where they showed how they fought for integration of the buses. The one piece missing was that after that was done, all the white people fled the city and stopped using buses. (My grandmother lived in Montgomery, AL - in the white section; her maid in the black section where I also went a few times - this was in the 80’s. They also had a separate Jewish country club because the Christian club wouldn’t accept Jews.)
I grew up the 80’s in a town that had one black family and worked at a fast food restaurant where the black people all came in from almost an hour away (a nearly all black town) to find work.
It would be very simple even today in many Southern cities to figure out which polling places needed the “tests,” and which did not due to the massive segregation. And yes, a lot of black adults who grew up in segregation and were not at this time in school were illiterate. Even today this is true in many areas of the South - my sister is a grade school teacher who has taught mostly in rural areas of Mississippi and Texas. One year she had to jump from her normal first grade up to sixth - where she found she needed to teach the same material to the kids because most could not read at even a basic level.
Busing may have addressed some problems but, whites would move to avoid going to a district that was mostly black. And it didn’t fix the issues for the people who were already grown and raised in legally segregated schools.
Yep, I have to agree. Even though I honestly believe I could pass it given plenty of time (and of course, I wouldn’t have to, since I have proof of literacy) it’s pretty likely I’d make at least one typographical error if I had to do it on the spot in under ten minutes.
Even up here on the border between the North and South that disparity lingers. Delaware’s educational system has many problems, mostly related to social class and income, but the parents of African-American children are more likely to be poorly educated and thus less likely to be high earners or socially privileged.
Here’s the cool thing, though. The next generation will be different.
I live on Long Island, NY. The racial breakdown in our school district: 90% white, 8% asian, 2% black.
Kids today have it way too easy. I bet you couldn’t find a 6th grader who could answer this in 10 minutes at 100% accuracy these days!
Also, yes “spell backwards, forwards” is ambiguous. It needs the quote marks to distinguish:
There is some disagreement about how accurate the common claim is (seen in Wikipedia, among other sources) that the first use of the term Melungeon was from church meeting minutes in 1813, but certainly by 1840 there is what appears to be the first PROVEN use of the term as seen here.
The whole point of the way the test is structured is that it is completely up to the whim of the examiner whether you pass or not. You can’t get a single wrong answer. If you are doing OK, but they don’t want you to pass they wait for an ambiguous question and say you chose the wrong of the two potentially correct answers and explain the logic to you. Oops, you’re illiterate.
Are you saying the keys to the test that were provided by the state were discarded, and never used? If so, where did you find that information?
Whoof. My immediate family is more diverse than that. I get your point, I think? White people have most of the valuable US real estate, and that’s not changing quickly…
Hello, it’s obvious.
What world do you live in that you’d want to defend something so obviously corrupt.
If you are trying to say that I have no proof, yeah big deal. We all cherry pick and go with our gut after all is said and done and whether or not you are good comes down to how you use your intuition and whether it is to jerk your-self off or to inform your rational self of some pretty obvious things.
This was used to exclude blacks arbitrarily. It is obvious, unless it is completely made up. I will allow that is possible, but it hasn’t come up so far, so I assume it is authentic.
People lie, were you aware of that?
The Slate article mentions the registrar would be the ultimate judge of whether an answer was correct. It links to some Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement pages - this and this - which describe scoring as up to the discretion of a board of three. They also mention some of the unfair tricks used, like the shifting interpretations brought up here, or selectively taking writing to mean handwriting. Where did you find information about there having been a key?
Oh my god I think the only correct way to answer IS actually to cross out the 1.
It says “necessary”, not “sufficient”. Crossing out any number is necessary. Or maybe you cross out everything but the final 0.
I clicked through to see the full test in the Slate article and as I made my way through the second and third pages I just got sadder and sadder. Imagine you only have 10 minutes, and as you try to plow through these brain teasers as fast as you can you hit this:
Write down on the line provided, what you read in the triangle below.
So you frantically read this:
Paris
in the
the spring
I can’t believe they used this optical illusion (I mean I can of course, but god almighty). If you google “paris in the the spring” you’ll see it listed under illusions, word tricks, psychology tests, etc. Nobody seems to realize anymore that this is actually a literacy question that someone with a fifth grade education should be able to answer.
No, no, you are trying to make the number into one million. you are NOT trying to make it below one million, it is simply the number below that sentence.
Or this beauty -
Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here.
Oh ow just while typing this I noticed something. I was assuming that the correct answer was “right”. If you take the first ‘right’ as in “go right ahead” or “go right in the front door” though you could legitimately read this thusly -
Write right from the left to the right as you see it spelled here.
In which case this becomes a variant on the (usually spoken) riddle that goes something like “Argentina is in South America. How do you spell it?” The answer is “it”.
Seriously I am not a violent person but if I could pop into the room just as whatever creepy sniveling monsters finished making this test and were giddy with the “humor” of it, I would sooo like to break my knuckles by knocking the teeth right out of their f*cking (man can I say that here? I’m new to the threads) mouths.
