"Trying to Beat the Odds Is What You Do When You’ve Relinquished All Hope of Turning Them in Your Favor"

"But this is the kind of treacly liberalism best reserved for movies about dedicated white teachers who inspire their angry inner-city students—and it was precisely the myth that I meant to reject on the day of my graduation. A team on the receiving end of biased officiating loses more often, period. And, at some point, it quite reasonably begins to lose faith in the entire enterprise. To believe that my family history represents anything more than the confluence of hard work and an even greater degree of good luck would be to concede that a third-grade Jim Crow education represents a reasonable starting point from which to produce high-achieving children. And to do that would be to lend support, however unintentionally, to the belief that the implications of racism have been overstated."


Jelani Cobb at The New Yorker responds to the debate between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait over poverty and race.