One of the many remarkable things about activists who want to remake society, and invert every hierarchy that civilization has ever had in the name of “equity,” is how aggressive and totally unflinching they are. They don’t ask permission, they just do it. And they do it in such great numbers, in so many different areas, that it’s impossible to even keep track of them. Even if you object to their project, as most people do, there’s no way to keep yourself fully informed about what’s happening, simply because of the scale of the whole operation.
Here’s a recap, which is nowhere near exhaustive. In just the last couple of months, we’ve learned that the LAPD is relaxing its standards for new officers in order to recruit fewer white males.
We’ve heard that the San Francisco school board will lower entrance requirements, and that the Regents Exam in New York will soon be optional for high school graduates. (As the New York Times put it, “The test had once been seen as a hallmark of academic rigor, but high-stakes graduation tests have fallen out of favor nationally.”)
We’ve also been informed that the law school admission test, the LSAT, will drop its challenging “logic games” section, supposedly to help blind applicants.
Meanwhile, some medical schools — like U.C. Davis — have started ranking applicants not based on merit, but on the supposed “hardships” they’ve faced. Pretty much everywhere you look — whether it’s air traffic control, or airline piloting, or Silicon Valley, or even the National Association of Zoos and Aquariums — standards are dropping in order to increase “diversity,” meaning to make everything less white, less male, and less Asian.
So you might think, with all that in mind, that it’d be impossible to be shocked anymore by any industry that decides to lower its standards in the name of diversity. After all, if everyone’s doing it, how surprising can any of these initiatives really be?
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That’s what I thought, until a couple of days ago, when I learned about a new plan to “diversify” what is, frankly, one of the least rigorous and least demanding professional fields of all. This is a field that I genuinely didn’t think could possibly lower its standards, given how low they already are.
Here’s NBC News Washington to explain:
They’re now lowering the standards for social workers because not enough people with “darker skin” are passing the test, apparently. It’s important to stop the clip there for a second to underscore how insane this segment is, already. This black woman, Sarah, is saying that she desperately needed to find a black therapist for treatment because she needed a therapist with the same “views” that she has. And for that reason, she couldn’t tolerate having a white therapist, or a Hispanic therapist, or an Asian therapist. NBC News never challenges this reasoning, or the implications of it.
So let’s consider those implications. The first assumption, of course, is that you can only benefit from having a therapist who sees the world exactly like you do. That’s just a given in this segment because indeed, the vast majority of “therapy” is really just paying someone to agree with you. That’s all it is. There’s no science behind it. Patients self-select doctors who tell them what they want to hear, and doctors know that. In fact they have a word for this, it’s called “affirmative care.” That’s why the doctors tell children they’re “transgender,” or have “ADHD.” Their job is not to offer pushback or conduct any kind of independent diagnosis of symptoms. If they tried anything like that, they’d probably get fired for transphobia on the spot. This is how therapy and counseling works these days. But it’s not how it’s supposed to work.
In theory, the person counseling you should be someone who quite specifically does not see the world the way you do. The whole reason you are in counseling is that there is a problem with the way you see yourself and the world. You want — or should want — someone from the outside, someone who sees it differently, to offer guidance.
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But the more interesting part of that clip is how Sarah asserts that the only way to find a therapist who thinks the way she does, is to get a therapist with the same skin color. The term “racism” gets thrown around a lot, so I won’t use that term. A better (or at least mildly more creative) term for this is “race essentialism.” At its most extreme, race essentialism is the belief that your race determines your abilities, your personality, and all of your other characteristics.
This is a perspective that, if it’s endorsed by a white person, will result in Merrick Garland sending a SWAT team to that person’s door at 6 AM. That person will be branded a domestic terrorist and banned from school board meetings. But if a black person endorses race essentialism, live on NBC News, then nothing will happen. In fact, NBC News will endorse what she’s saying.
But let’s continue with the clip, so we can get to the argument from these activists — these racists, these race essentialists, whatever you want to call them — for why the social worker exam needs to change. Watch:
Let’s go over those statistics one more time. Between 2018 and 2021, roughly 76% of whites passed the bachelor’s level test the first time. Sixty percent of Asians passed, followed by 53% of Hispanics and 33% of blacks.
For the most part, those rankings mirror the normal distribution of SAT scores, with one very notable exception. This social worker exam is one of the few tests you’ll find in which Asian test takers perform so poorly, relative to the overall pool. Normally, as with SATs, Asians are in the lead. But in this case, they’re in a distant second place.
There could be a number of reasons for that. Most likely, all the talented Asian test takers are busy with the MCAT or the LSAT or the GRE or some other test, which can get you a better job than being a social worker. But in any event, the point is that no one at NBC News even pretends to care about the relatively poor Asian performance on this test. Instead, they’re laser-focused on the low number of black students who pass. That’s really their only focus.
For my part, I will admit that I take some pride in the fact that white people are beating Asians in at least one category. We have to take our wins where we can get them.
Now, we’re led to believe that the 33%pass rate among black test takers is de facto evidence that the test is the problem. Somehow, these tests are racist. But how? I decided to look into this test by going on YouTube and checking out some study sessions, to see if I could identify any racist social worker questions. I was looking for dog whistles, microaggressions, slut shaming — everything you can think of. I didn’t find any of that. Instead, as I predicted, I was bored to tears.
I won’t subject you to all of it, small sample will suffice:
Spoiler alert: the answer to that particular question is “regression.” The video goes on like that for an hour. Incidentally, the training session you just saw was run by a black woman. At no point does she say the test is invalid because it’s racist, nor is there any way a reasonable person would find the test to be racist. All of the questions are like this one. They’re anodyne to the point of inducing death by boredom.
After looking into the questions that social workers are asked, I have to admit, I didn’t detect any racism. But maybe that’s just because I have a very untrained eye. NBC News, as you saw, quotes an expert, a college professor named Michael Massey, who tells us that the test isn’t capturing cultural nuances, and is making the profession less diverse: “We have great social workers of color who came to social work schools to serve their communities, and they’re not being allowed to do it despite rigorous preparation at school,” he says.
Of course, it’s not clear why “preparation in school” should matter more than a standardized test, especially in a field like social work, where there’s a glut of for-profit diploma mills that specifically advertise to black and Hispanic populations. At major institutions, like Tulane’s School of Social Work, the pass rates are much higher, for every demographic group. But putting that aside for a second, the implication is that the test is somehow flawed. But nowhere in this NBC report does anyone — including Michael Massey — explain specifically what’s wrong with the test.
Let’s take stock of where we are. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever activists and elected officials in D.C. are now trying to pass a law eliminating the testing requirement for social workers — entirely. Watch:
It’s a pretty funny clip. This woman, with the “Consortium for Child Welfare,” has to tell the reporter that the whole purpose of licensing requirements — whether it’s in medicine, or law, or any other profession — is to ensure that you have competent people in the profession. That’s how you protect the public and maintain standards. You don’t admit everyone, and then when an incompetent person gets someone killed, decide to start culling the herd.
But now the script is completely flipped. We’re deliberately hiring morons in every conceivable profession. This is a terrible idea regardless of the profession, of course, but in the field of social work, it’s particularly ironic. The Left is lowering the bar for social workers after they spent the last few years insisting that social workers should replace law enforcement in a wide array of situations. So they are trying to expand the power and scope of social work while at the same time lowering the standards.
The only good news here, if you can call it that, is that for the most part, social workers are functionally useless anyway. Therefore, it’s not clear what the practical implications of lowering the bar will be, given how low it is already. But as a symbol for a much larger problem — for the regression we’re seeing in virtually every major industry — what’s happening in the field of social work is actually notable. What they’re doing makes it very clear that they’re trying to remake all of society, from the most important and demanding professions, to the jobs that are neither important nor demanding. Yesterday it was the police, today it’s social workers, tomorrow it will be dog walkers. They will not stop until they have eliminated the legitimacy of every conceivable job in this country.
Well, maybe that’s not true. The Left won’t implement any kind of “diversity initiative” for the NBA or the NFL or any other major sports league, because their preferred demographics are already dominant there. But in every other field, this is what they’re planning. This is an effort to reduce standards across the board, to the point that they’re nonexistent. If even social workers don’t have to endure the indignity of taking a simple, straightforward test, then that proves they truly can eliminate the standards for everything else. We can either have a functioning society, or we can allow them to succeed.