Not Particularly Impressed with Tuskegee Airmen Propaganda.

"The Enlightenment" wrote in message
...
The Squadron was particularly effective at a time when being judged by
merit
was apparently not common and for this its men deserve great honor.

Not quite. You seem not to understand that in the US at the time, it was
customary (and in some states legal) to simply altogether exclude certain
entire groups of persons from the application of the rights, privileges and
immunities of citizenship, including voting rights and service in the armed
forces. In the USAAC, for example, a potential pilot-trainee could at one
time be excluded from participation on the grounds...that he was a
Negro...and no other rationale was considered necessary for that situation
to obtain. The same obtained when it came to admission to the US service
academies. That policy did change, however. Similarly, non-whites were
excluded from the US Navy's officer ranks for most of the war. Hence the TA
might not have been judged on their merits, but discriminated against
despite their merits.


However the reason the Trugegee Airmen worked, indeed the reason
integration
has not degraded the effectiveness of the US military is this: Selection
on the basis of merit and IQ tests.

IQ tests have been under fire as a legitimate tool of selection for many
years. An IQ test is all but irrelevant in determining which persons will
have the hand-eye-leg coordination necessary for competent fighter pilotage,
or for determining which persons will demonstrate the skills requisite to
managing a transport or a bomber a/c. Any human-resources person in the
civilian sector can probably tell you, (if so inclined) how easy it is to
"get around" even stringent selection rules. In other words, neither native
intelligence (IQ?) nor acquired skills (merit) necessarily determined how
society or a military organization treated you.

You seem to fail to recognize that officially-sanctioned racism was more or
less the norm in the US of those days. The TA experiment succeeded only
because the necessary impetus was available to force it through against
several levels and forms of opposition: F Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt.
Otherwise, the TA probably would have been excluded.

It was not a question of whether the TA were "qualified"; instead it was a
question of whether they should be included or could be excluded. To ensure
exclusion, certain roadblocks were placed in their way. That was the
reality, virtually all across the board.

They were an elite.

That seems to have been true, to the extent that the "typical" TA had
completed college or a substantial proportion thereof, whereas the black
population taken as a whole had not had such an education. By contrast (and
no aspersion is intended) Chuck Yeager, by all accounts an excellent pilot,
did not attend college. Recall also that Bob Johnson of P-47 fame,
matriculated at a junior college before entering the USAAC. In neither case
did their education or membership in an "elite" make any real difference to
their opportunity to become pilots or to their performances. It was
unnecessary for either Yeager or Johnson to have been part of an "elite" in
order to become a part of the air corps, but I'm glad both of them were
available and that the USAAF sent them where they could do some good work.

Methods both made
illegal under affirmative action in the civilian world in a Landmark case
involving the Duke Power Company who wanted to eliminate the possibility
of
racial discrimination by using written tests and IQ tests devoid of bias
as
much as possible.

I may be a bit parochial, but I don't believe I've ever encountered a test
which can be termed "devoid of bias", probably because no one who composes
tests based principally on IQ is without biases (I admit to reaching this
conclusion only after discussions with psychology majors while in college).
A built-in bias of any such test is that it assumes that the testees have
had solid educations, and rewards those who have.


That's the sub text of what I think when I here someone lauding the
Tusgegee
Airmen. They are lauding and proving the effectveness of IQ and 100%
merit
based tests.

Not really. You don't seem to understand that there were societal and
(within the USAAF) systemic biases at work against the TA even coming into
existence. A phrase I used to hear quite often (but less so nowadays) was
that "A Negro (that wasn't what was actually uttered) can't become a (fill
in the blank), they're not smart enough". After completing training, the TA
were subjected to a long waiting period before they were grudgingly sent
overseas. The TA achieved against tough odds. This was the result of the TA
men belonging to an "underclass" of US society.

I guess you are lucky if you are judged on merit.

Agreed. Who you know and what group you are classified into are factors
which often have had more to say about one's access to opportunities than
so-called "merit".