#BIFF AND CHIPPER TV#

It's the same kind of question Maher's comedy team came up with - find something white people are more likely to know than black people - but the Real Time writers just pilled it on over-and-over. If you don't live by a body of water and/or don't have much experience with rowing, you're probably going to fail this question. The answer is C, and it relies on a test taker's knowing the meaning of regatta - something more likely to have come up in the daily lives of affluent white students than in the lives of less affluent minority students.

It's a real SAT question famously discussed in the infamous 1994 book, The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray - a book that tried to use discrepancies in test scores to prove white people are smarter than black people. Not the comedy staff's fake SAT question but Maher's assurance that 'The SAT doesn't have questions like that.' But of course the SAT doesn't have questions like that so it becomes a kind of ludicrous exaggeration that makes lovers of common sense roll their eyes - and then vote for Trump.' Now if we find the SAT test is slanted in such a way as to stack the deck in favor of Caucasians, if there are questions like Biff and Chip are sailing a yacht traveling at 12 knots to an Ed Sheeran concert on Catalina - if Catalina is 12 miles away, how many White Claws should they bring? Yes, then maybe. But it shouldn't apply to something like - as more than a few have suggested - getting rid of the SAT test. Now some of that to be sure is because Trump came along and emboldened the faction of this country that is truly white supremacist. 'In 2010 the New York Times used the term 'White Supremacist' on 75 occasions. Here's the relevant bit of his monologue: They saw it as an opportunity to make a joke and whiffed at it pretty terribly. In fact, that's probably why he (and his staff) picked my piece in the first place. He was content to speak in a smarmy tone and make a pretty lame joke about what a racially biased test question might look like. Never mind the arguments I made in favor of my point, the sources I cited, the examples of actual bias or the documented history of standardized testing as a creation of the eugenicist movement. Maher never actually examined my claim or what I wrote backing it up. The crucial bit was how triggered Bill was by my assertion.īy connecting such allegedly alien concepts as standardized testing and racism, Maher thinks I devalued the meaning of 'white supremacy.' I am the author, after all, but I guess that's not important. On his show, 'Real Time with Bill Maher' this week, he posted the title of the article and the graphic that appeared with it when it was republished on. In fact, that was the title of the article, which seems to be about as far as Bill read because he ignored any arguments, facts or historical citations in the piece. Only that standardized testing is a tool of white supremacy. In fact, the very idea annoyed him as a prime example of namby-pamby liberals taking their agenda too far. It got popular and was republished throughout the Internet.

#BIFF AND CHIPPER TV#

What could I possibly do to provoke the ire of this man so much so that he took aim at me on his HBO TV show?Īs near as I can tell, it started when I wrote a blog. I guess you could say we're from different worlds.

Biff and chipper