More From The Bigotry Of Low Expectations Files

Periodically I will see stories like this come across my timeline of some non-White high school graduate that is accepted to a slew of colleges. They are usually on the “local” news but generally are stories from somewhere else in the country.

Channel 13 was one of the stations we got to choose from when I was growing up. In the Toledo market we had 11 (CBS), 13 (NBC) and 24 (ABC) plus channel 30 which was PBS. That was it until we got cable when I was maybe in middle school and that is one reason I read a lot as a kid. Those station affiliations have since changed. WTVG has gone through a ton of ownership changes that I didn’t even know about but is currently owned by “Gray Media” that owns a total of 180 local TV stations in 113 markets across the country.

Anyway, back to our young scholar:

A Chicago-area 18-year-old has a lot to be proud of.

He graduated high school with acceptance letters to dozens of colleges and millions of dollars in scholarships.

It’s a payoff for many years of hard work.

Aaron Williams and his mother, Ericka Smith, have sifted through a stack of college acceptance letters.

The 18-year-old was accepted to 83 colleges and counting…..

…..The Bogan High School graduate is a straight-A student and had a bold proclamation on his first day of class as a freshman.

“Came in to the principal and said I would be the class of 2025 valedictorian, and now it’s safe to say that I have done that,” Williams said.

Williams did become the valedictorian of his class.

Wow, impressive right? Well….

I don’t mean to take anything away from this kid, I am sure he worked hard but are his accomplishments noteworthy enough to warrant being covered in the Toledo local news as he is a kid from Chicago?

According to the story above, he is a graduate of a Chicago area school called Bogan High School. The full name of the school is “William J. Bogan Computer Technical High School” and according to Great Schools it is not a very great school.

The school is located at 3939 West 79th Street in Chicago on the southwest side of Chicongo in the Ashburn neighborhood. I don’t what that really means as I know very little about Chicongo other than I don’t want to go there.

The student body is about what you would expect…

If he were at a school that was 60% White and 10% Asian, want to bet he wouldn’t be the valedictorian?

The Ashburn area is “only” 42% black but this school is 57% black and the principal is one “Alahrie A. Aziz–Sims”.

I scrolled through her LinkedIn profile where she makes this claim “Data Inspired Leader - Expert Insight, Life Changing Results“, and where she boasts impressive credentials such as a Master of Education degree from the prestigious online school “American College of Education”. Like many public school administrators she put in a couple of years in a classroom before becoming an “area literacy coach” for a year and then moving into a role as an assistant principal and finally a principal. In her 20 years in “education” she spent less than 20% of that time in a classroom.

Here is a comment she made on a post a few years ago:

I love the hokey “Y’all” from Maurice Swinney to try to make him sound genuine or whatever, almost as much as I love the “EdD” in his profile name. Wow, a Doctor of Education degree! Very impressive! According to his LinkedIn it only took him 15 years to attain this honor….

Like his buddy Alahrie A. Aziz–Sims, he spent a whopping one year in actual teaching before moving on to roles as assistant principal and principal before deciding even that was too much like teaching and becoming the Chicago Public School’s “Chief Equity Officer”. Sensing a pattern here?

That’s more than enough mockery, back to Aaron Williams. According to the story, he is going to Northern Illinois University located west of Chicago a bit where he plans to pursue electrical engineering, a fine career path and one that is pretty challenging. NIU is an OK school, U.S. News and World ranked them #273 in National Universities out of a total of 436 putting them close to the bottom third although it is tied for 273rd with a whole slew of other schools including my alma mater Bowling Green State University, a school that was close to my family and my wife’s family and had so many fellow graduates from my high school alma mater that I sometimes felt like I never left high school.

So he accepted admission and received a full ride to Northern Illinois University, by any measure an at best mediocre college. That is something of interest to people in Toledo, Ohio? Put it another way:

If this kid, with whatever grades and test scores, was White it must be asked: would he get this many scholarships and acceptances? Would the media have covered the story if he was White or Asian?

Of course not.

If I had bothered to fill out enough college applications, back when you had to fill those apps out with an actual pen on paper, I could have gotten hundreds of acceptance letters. Thanks to my awesome ACT scores I received brochures from a ton of colleges, mostly small liberal arts schools. I wouldn’t have gotten any scholarships of course. I remember sitting down with the financial aid person at my school and when she asked what my parents did for a living and I replied “my dad is a doctor”, she laughed and moved on to the student loan sections because clearly I wasn’t going to get any need-based scholarships.

I have no idea why this kid would apply at so many schools, especially since he ended up accepting an offer to go to a school that is less than 70 miles from his high school. Since there is no mention of a dad in the story I assume he wants to be reasonably close to his mom which is understandable. It seems to be a black thang so you can brag about how many colleges you were accepted to and I suspect that it doesn’t take that much time to copy and paste information into an online application compared to filling them out by paper.

A black kid with good grades and passable test scores is going to get accepted into any mid-range school in America. There are other really good schools in the Chicago area, Northwestern is one of the best schools in America and even closer to home in Evanston, Illinois. The University of Chicago is a Top 20 school by most accounts and is right in Chicongo. The Illinois Institute of Technology is pretty well regarded and has several electrical engineering options. I assume Northern Illinois won because a) it is pretty inexpensive with an annual tuition of around $13,000 compared to Northwestern at $68,000 and b) it doesn’t have very high standards for admission.

In short, Aaron Williams is an above average black kid who graduated valedictorian from a high school that is a disaster. He was accepted at a lot of schools and was offered a lot of money in scholarships because he is black and he chose a fairly local, very inexpensive school where he can go basically for free for four years and get a degree in electrical engineering. I hope he does well, I really do.

On the other hand, I recall back to a post from January of 2020 titled The Dumbing Down Of America where we looked at a variety of topics but one was Ms. Marqell McClendon, like Aaron Williams the valedictorian of her graduating class, in her case at Cody High School in Detroit. When she arrived at Michigan State University (not exactly an academic powerhouse either) after getting, like Aaron Williams, all A’s in high school she immediately began to struggle even in remedial math. Being the smartest black kid in a school full of low IQ blacks doesn’t really measure your likelihood of success in a college setting. On the other hand, according to a LinkedIn profile for a Marqell McClendon who attended Michigan State starting in 2019 which matches the story, she graduated with a degree in communication and went on to grad school at the University of Michigan in the School of Public Health.

Smart move on her behalf to major in communications as an undergrad as that might be one of the easiest degree programs to skate by in and likely involved very little if any math or sciences. There is a reason “Communications” is so often the “degree program” you see many Division 1 athletes enrolled in. Electrical engineering is a whole different beast, your teachers can push you through communications classes but in electrical engineering I would hope any answer is either right or wrong. One of my roommates my first year of college was majoring in electrical engineering and it looked incredibly difficult.

That brings me at long last, and kudos to you for making it this far, to my point. Why would a local news outlet in Toledo, Ohio run a story about a high school graduate from Chicago that is going to attend Northern Illinois University?

Because he is black and not a complete moron, and that is newsworthy.

Also because the media loves to run stories of blacks showing any amount of success and also finding stories of minor malice by Whites toward blacks to try to provide some minor counterweight to the endless stories of black violent crime. Our local media does this all the time, look at this black girl with a lemonade stand in Atlanta! Look at this White guy who shot a black guy in Topeka, Kansas! Boo for the White people, cheer for the black people.

Again, I wish Aaron Williams only the best. A black guy who becomes an electrical engineer is far less likely to end up in jail being paid for by White tax dollars than a high school drop-out black. It just is very interesting that a minor story like this one gets pushed onto people from these giant media conglomerates that pose as “news” organizations.