Today's links (11-8-12): Ole Miss is not post-racial, David Brooks is still David Brooks, and education is a tough racket

1. Today's best repudiation of facile post-racialism: Ole Miss students protesting Obama's victory - by doing what at least some people found worrisome enough to refer to as a riot (n.b.: it takes a lot to get journalists to say that white people are rioting), an activity that  apparently featured the shouting of racial epithets. Let's hear it for the land of cotton - good times there are indeed not forgotten.
2. Today's best nod to a more subtle approach to race: a nice Seattle Times article on Jack Turner's fine book, Awakening To Race.
3. Today's glimmer of hope that David Brooks isn't who we thought he was, until you remember that he is:......This column on the Grant Study, a 70-year longitudinal study of what another writer on the subject calls "physical and mental well-being." The study yields some nice thoughts - human capacities needn't become fixed in adulthood, as the study's participants showed the capacity for mental and emotional growth well into their dotage; nurture and nature intermingle in shaping our prospects and paths; the complexities of each individual life outrun our ability to capture that life in our stereotypes and theories; and so on. Here's what Brooks learns from it: "Body type was useless as a predictor of how the men would fare in life. So was birth order or political affiliation. Even social class had a limited effect. But having a warm childhood was powerful." Mmmm, a warm childhood trumps all. This is where we have to remember what Mr. Brooks is (a cartoon version of Edmund Burke, but with a weakness for evolutionary psychology). If social class has a limited effect on our prospects - FYI, the study followed a bunch of Harvard students, an all-male bunch, over its multiple decades of scrutiny, but this is apparently immaterial - then that clears the way for the thoughts that will surely animate a forthcoming Brooks column: poverty and the third-worlding of the US (massive wealth inequalities, drawing ever-closer to the vision of a world of growing favelas on one hand and privately provisioned and protected wealthy compounds on the other) have nothing to do with our social ills. And: if we can't theorize successfully about human life, then social reformers ought to give up on trying to make people's lives better with their systems and programs. For these and other reasons, we should get the government out of the social amelioration business. Therefore, American-style quasi-principled conservatism. Sorry if I'm being cynical about Brooks at his warm-and-fuzziest. It's just that I've been hurt before. (Like when he wrote basically the same piece 3 years ago.)
4. Another installment in the Feminist Wire's important series on the health of black woman academics, this one about the microagressions that black women face not at historically white colleges and universities, but at black schools. If this seems counterintuitive, you've never spent any time at a black school. (HBCUs and other MSIs have many virtues and I'm glad to have gone to one. But still.) 
5. Brilliant piece by Arthur Camins in the WaPo calling for a reset to the Obama-Duncan(-Gates-etc) education policy. Camins covers no new ground here, but knits the familiar moves together in maybe the best short argument I've ever seen. The key: the piece orbits around the metaphor of the Vietnam War - a huge policy debacle in which "an intellectual shroud clouded the ability of policy makers to see the evidence in front of them." He goes on:

Vietnam War-era policy makers understood North Vietnam as a tile in a row of falling dominoes that would lead to the worldwide communist domination. While it was readily apparent that their assumptions about the motivations of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were entirely mistaken, Johnson and his advisers could not recognize or admit that they were wrong. Nor could they summon the courage to change course. Such is the distorting power of unexamined ideology. I think many of the powerful supporters of market–driven education reforms are caught in the fog of their self-made education war....