Nobody seems to know how big of a boost blacks got from racial preferences because social scientists were averse to studying the sheer scale of affirmative action preferences over the 56 years.
Exactly, I was in the same situation. And then criticised for finding those who actually qualified. The job needed to get down, and sadly some people don't really care.
I don't blame IQ or crime for black people losing their set-asides etc but I do blame (and pity) them for having the worst class of political leaders this side of the Palestinians. Since the end of the Civil Rights era, their supposed leaders have been con artists like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters and the BLM phonies, all of whom equated "black liberation" with them getting large checks in exchange for pledging eternal loyalty to the DNC and whatever its needs were in the moment.
AA was supposed to be for ADOS only—not for rich West Indians like the Gays Claudine and Roxane and not for nonbinary Berbers or Guetamalan orphans or Filipino cripples and certainly not for white women and gay men.
The moment some enterprising HR zealot wanted to expand AA to other "minoritized communities" black people should have hit the streets as if a white cop had just smoked an aspiring rapper. They fucked up their own reparations industry.
I still don't understand how programs designed for one worthy group of Americans metastasized to become a DEI Industrial Complex designed to heal the wounds of everyone except straight white men. I guess Eric Hoffer said it best: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
I understand where you are coming from in the first paragraph but it’s been my experience that blacks are hugely tolerant of dysfunction, corruption, and getting over so long as it’s one of their own and it doesn’t really matter if almost none of it benefits them directly. If it makes white people mad, even better.
To Steve’s larger point, most people are completely unaware of how much government and nonprofit employment props up the black middle class and even with this subsidy/artificial goosing of black share of GDP, they are still dead last on a per capita basis and real terms when it comes to economic impact.
A permanent rollback of DEI would be a seismic cultural event because a reduction in black economic importance and presence in the professional workforce means less political influence. Although bad for blacks it would be great for the country as a whole, as contorting our economy, culture and politics around a hugely unproductive minority has been a multi generational disaster.
> most people are completely unaware of how much government and nonprofit employment props up the black middle class and even with this subsidy/artificial goosing of black share of GDP
As a general rule public employment is welfare for black women under the cloak of respectability
“but it’s been my experience that blacks are hugely tolerant of dysfunction, corruption, and getting over . . . “
Well said. The black community is highly tolerant of violent crime and pretty much anathema to law and order, which is a pretty toxic mix. Which totally explains the realities of Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc.
As to your other points, federal government employment hugely props up the black middle class, especially in the metro Washington DC area. So many blacks with cushy GS-13 through 15 positions, which are not insignificant (roughly $120,000 - $170,000 per year). With these positions being cut, then yes we will see a massive shift in the black community. Hopefully, crime will not spike sharply.
Great points , but their leadership’s handlers certainly hated straight White males who created the prosperity that underwrote the entire society and provided ample foreign aid to their very own ethno- state in the Mideast … one that has unmasked itself and may struggle to reach four generations or 2028. Expanding the definition of marginalized helped to marginalize the hated straight White make family man or potential family man
I was surprised when I heard Maxine Waters arguing that we should put illegal aliens in public housing which implies that fewer black Americans would get it.
I investigated and found that under her watch, her community was destroyed going from 90% black to around 20%.
No Grand Kleagle in the Klan ever had that level of success!
It’s 2025. No group of Americans should be getting a thumb on the scale any more. I don’t think anything has had a more corrosive effect on civic engagement than the fact that people are treated differently according to some characteristic and the ensuing dishonesty that we are supposed to swallow.
These handouts for back people are toxic, they just mean that black people don’t have to meet the same standards others do. So they don’t. Bad results all round.
Thomas Sowell frequently makes the point that black Americans were better off before the civil rights movements of the 1960's. Pre-Civil Rights black people had more two-parent families, higher employment rates, etc. If you hold people to high standards then they will meet them.
This is the danger of 90+% support to only one party for 50+ years. Republicans didn't treat them well after 1876, either. Will many of them stoop to take the jobs the Dear Deported left behind?
I assumed Trump ending DEI would just affect hiring, but it appears some employers culled existing employees, perhaps to clean up their racial balance sheet for future lawsuits. Or they saw a federal okay to remove deadwood with less risk of lawsuits or bad publicity.
Your implication that removing the thumb will show how hard it was pressing will not be accepted by them.
The copesplanation will be that freed from the mild constraint they had resented for fifty years, the white beasts overcorrected, exacted revenge, elevated their pettiness to obscene levels and took the opportunity to hire their talentless white friends.
The only thing is, there's enough anons who whine enough to be Black Women, even though they swear they're White Males. So your interactions might not improve that much.
One of the biggest political stories of the last few months should have been how Dems split almost exactly 50-50 in their support of the resolution condemning political violence in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder, with the split almost entirely along racial lines
White people are really good with rules. The more complicated the better. Change the rules? All the better. So no surprise that first, second and third wave feminists crowded toward the trough...or sprinted. My family, for instance, noticed and acted on opportunities that emerged during covid. We always want a deal, a bargain or an edge. It's not exactly in the DNA, but it might as well have been. The black talented tenth did pretty well. Good for them. This is America, after all.
Why is American health care economics (funding edging toward 20% of GDP) dominated by cost shifting in all its malignant forms? Cost shifting is ubiquitous. Old fashion fraud cant survive routine audits. Just sayin. The idea that black culture will thrive in America is laughable. Yes...I have bad thoughts.
Note that the article implies that many black people consider government an "entry level job", the same way a white kid might view McDonald's. As in, if you apply, it's impossible to NOT get the job.
The DEI wealth- and status-transfer mega-mechanism. It’s sort of puzzling. That it was so successfully forced on White America so long, I mean.
Can you imagine the White men of 150, years ago 100 years ago, or even 75 years ago believing it possible? If a man from the 1870s or 1890s or 1920s were teleported to the early-21st century, saw the system, and returned to his time telling the tale of a system of vast anti-White laws and rules and norms called DEI, his fellows back in his own time wouldn’t have believed him and assuming he was lying or delusional. “It’s impossible. Don’t be a conspiracy theorist or fantasist.”
Honestly though, what else can you do with black people? It's not like they're going to invent high technology or whatever. But you're stuck with them. If you're a wealthy country, it seems reasonable to use some of your surplus wealth to give black people stipends. It gives them a chance to live like regular guys. Which is good for them - black people are just people, after all, and they want to have happy lives just like everyone else. And it's good for the rest of us, who then are a bit safer from crime and disorder. If you think of DEI as second-order crime prevention then it might make more sense. If I have a tiger in my house then I'm going to want to keep him fed.
"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak, to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong." -- Christopher Caldwell, 2009
> If you think of DEI as second-order crime prevention then it might make more sense
From a pragmatic standpoint you are absolutely correct, but for the autists on this substack it violates a fundamental sense of fairness. Ultimately we brought their ancestors here against their will and now those descendants are American citizens by birth so we can't ship them to Liberia against their will...
"We" did no such thing. So yes it strikes people as manifestly unfair that people who never owned slaves should have to make transfer payments to people who were never enslaved and who hold one of the most valuable assets on the planet, citizenship in a majority white country. If they really ornament that stupid and psychopathic, then no amount of transfer payments will help. You always get more about your subsidize.
Culture is the feedback loop for genetics. We can harness that.
People who let tigers in their houses deserve what they get.
And to whose surplus wealth are you referring? The government doesn’t generate any wealth. They take it from people like me or borrow it from the Chinese. A country as deeply in debt as ours and as addicted to deficit spending can’t be said to have any surplus wealth.
Some thoughts on DEI (broadly defined) and what it was/is:
In effect, DEI has been a sur-tax on Whites. The real goals were to keep social peace by bribing and coopting enough talented Blacks to keep things tolerable placid. And eventually for (stronger and stronger) ideological reasons, which developed in the mid-late 20th century.
Another way to think of DEI and the entire race dynamic in the US is what Paul Craig Roberts said: DEI, and many aspects of law in the post-Civil Rights era, quickly evolved part of a set of neo-feudal system, with the privileged class being Blacks, and actually all Nonwhites over Whites. White Heterosexual Christian-origin Males the most disprivileged group (‘the unprotected class,” as that one guy titled his book). in genera
A whole lot of Whites born in the third and fourth quarters of the 20th century grew up believing in (i.e., were socialized into belief in) Black Moral Superiority Doctrine. “Sure, Blacks get racial privileges. But people born tall also get ‘privileges’ in playing basketball. Why complain about something natural?”
The thumb won't be removed because it can't be as blacks as a group will not be able to compete and the result will appear to be unrepresentative. There is something called intelligence and IQ is not a bad way of measuring it. Most every task requires a certain level of intelligence to complete and greater intelligence would seem to benefit the completing of any task. Emil Kirkegaard produced a great little tool to measure tail effects (https://emilkirkegaard.dk/understanding_statistics/?app=tail_effects). Check it out-for any given population(s) and any given IQ threshold you can derive the expected make up of a chosen group, whether it be police, firemen, lawyers, doctors etc. Even for a job that would require only a mean IQ of 100, you would only expect 4/100 or 1 in 25 to be black and most of us don't expect 1 out of every 2 people we see to be able to pilot heavy jets or perform neurosurgery, do we? The nonsense we see on Netflix and the BBC is completely erroneous and in no way reflects even our "heavily thumbed" reality, but a meritocratic/objective reality would go against the beliefs of so many. For example, up until 1950 only about 5% of Americans had a degree and lets say, just for arguments sake, that this correlated 1:1 with IQ, then only 1 out of every 100 degree holders would be black. Quite the conundrum for US policy makers but apparently it has been going so well that the rest of the Anglosphere and western Europe thought they could similarly reap the benefits of importing a mass underclass through wishful thinking, propaganda and DIE.
Have a play with the graph-it's brutal. Even using thresholds such as 85IQ, without preferences being applied the outcomes are stark and one can see why they might cause anguish
> Quite the conundrum for US policy makers but apparently it has been going so well that the rest of the Anglosphere and western Europe thought they could similarly reap the benefits of importing a mass underclass through wishful thinking, propaganda and DIE
We are paying the price for the antebellum era, but Europe doesn't have that same baggage vis-a-vis Africans. Why they chose to double down is a mystery with Germany being the biggest offender because they are feeling guilty about the unpleasantness from 80+ years ago. Of course, one has nothing to do with the other but Merkel didn't want to risk making a boner in front of her friends
I don't remember if I posted this here or to someone else on twitter, but this is a story where for once the evergreen NYT sub-headline of "Women, minorities hit hardest" is actually true!
I certainly am not going to complain about culling HR. Frankly, I think that the representation of HR in Dilbert is overly magnamious. And I am certainly tired of the inadequate education justification. School is there not to educate students but to provide students the opportunity to learn. The responsibility for learning is on the student, the responsibility of the school is to provide something approaching an appropriate environment. I went to Paul Junior High School in NW DC in the mid 1960's - and the general atmosphere was not learning friendly - and it was the fault of the 'students', not the teachers or the school administration, who did what they could.
I am most familiar with Physics and Engineering material (afterall, it is my background, as I am or was Ph.D. level in several of the subfields). The texts are roughly standardized. At worst, you can sit down with them and read them - and then do the problem sets. Do lots of problems. Look up what you got wrong when you got them wrong. And keep at it - for years. Frankly, until you get to the active research areas, you learn by doing the problem sets - in undergraduate and the first year or two of graduate school) - not by good teaching. As a general rule the teaching is not good - your professors are researchers, not teachers. Typically, it is only in 2d year graduate coursework that professors start to pay much attention to you - because they start selecting the most promising students to work under them as graduate student research assistants / research slaves.
Do not blame incompetence on inadequate education. You must always learn on the job. If you can't, you are the problem.
I worked for some time as an operating system kernel programmer programming in C. My total college programming coursework was an introduction to programming in Fortran and an introduction to assembly programing - on a Univac 1108. I taught myself classical computer science and programming in C enough to work as a kernel programmer before going into security architecture work.
The ability to submit to drill seems orthogonal to intelligence. A friend of mine is a very friendly black guy who wants to study math. He studies Math Academy for a couple of hours a day, doing targeted problem sets. He moves slowly, achieving in 2 hours what might take someone else 20 minutes. But he's diligent and has a positive attitude, so I'm sure he'll go far. If not to advanced math then at least to sufficient math for an interesting job that he enjoys.
How significant was the unofficial affirmative action I.e. not mandated by Federal government before 1969?
In worked for a state agency in my first managerial role. Our minority goal was 10%. If I couldn't meet the goal I couldn't hire anyone.
Exactly, I was in the same situation. And then criticised for finding those who actually qualified. The job needed to get down, and sadly some people don't really care.
I don't blame IQ or crime for black people losing their set-asides etc but I do blame (and pity) them for having the worst class of political leaders this side of the Palestinians. Since the end of the Civil Rights era, their supposed leaders have been con artists like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters and the BLM phonies, all of whom equated "black liberation" with them getting large checks in exchange for pledging eternal loyalty to the DNC and whatever its needs were in the moment.
AA was supposed to be for ADOS only—not for rich West Indians like the Gays Claudine and Roxane and not for nonbinary Berbers or Guetamalan orphans or Filipino cripples and certainly not for white women and gay men.
The moment some enterprising HR zealot wanted to expand AA to other "minoritized communities" black people should have hit the streets as if a white cop had just smoked an aspiring rapper. They fucked up their own reparations industry.
I still don't understand how programs designed for one worthy group of Americans metastasized to become a DEI Industrial Complex designed to heal the wounds of everyone except straight white men. I guess Eric Hoffer said it best: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
I understand where you are coming from in the first paragraph but it’s been my experience that blacks are hugely tolerant of dysfunction, corruption, and getting over so long as it’s one of their own and it doesn’t really matter if almost none of it benefits them directly. If it makes white people mad, even better.
To Steve’s larger point, most people are completely unaware of how much government and nonprofit employment props up the black middle class and even with this subsidy/artificial goosing of black share of GDP, they are still dead last on a per capita basis and real terms when it comes to economic impact.
A permanent rollback of DEI would be a seismic cultural event because a reduction in black economic importance and presence in the professional workforce means less political influence. Although bad for blacks it would be great for the country as a whole, as contorting our economy, culture and politics around a hugely unproductive minority has been a multi generational disaster.
That first paragraph is also how white democrats think of Trump supporters.
> most people are completely unaware of how much government and nonprofit employment props up the black middle class and even with this subsidy/artificial goosing of black share of GDP
As a general rule public employment is welfare for black women under the cloak of respectability
“but it’s been my experience that blacks are hugely tolerant of dysfunction, corruption, and getting over . . . “
Well said. The black community is highly tolerant of violent crime and pretty much anathema to law and order, which is a pretty toxic mix. Which totally explains the realities of Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc.
As to your other points, federal government employment hugely props up the black middle class, especially in the metro Washington DC area. So many blacks with cushy GS-13 through 15 positions, which are not insignificant (roughly $120,000 - $170,000 per year). With these positions being cut, then yes we will see a massive shift in the black community. Hopefully, crime will not spike sharply.
Great points , but their leadership’s handlers certainly hated straight White males who created the prosperity that underwrote the entire society and provided ample foreign aid to their very own ethno- state in the Mideast … one that has unmasked itself and may struggle to reach four generations or 2028. Expanding the definition of marginalized helped to marginalize the hated straight White make family man or potential family man
I was surprised when I heard Maxine Waters arguing that we should put illegal aliens in public housing which implies that fewer black Americans would get it.
I investigated and found that under her watch, her community was destroyed going from 90% black to around 20%.
No Grand Kleagle in the Klan ever had that level of success!
Amen!
It’s 2025. No group of Americans should be getting a thumb on the scale any more. I don’t think anything has had a more corrosive effect on civic engagement than the fact that people are treated differently according to some characteristic and the ensuing dishonesty that we are supposed to swallow.
These handouts for back people are toxic, they just mean that black people don’t have to meet the same standards others do. So they don’t. Bad results all round.
Thomas Sowell frequently makes the point that black Americans were better off before the civil rights movements of the 1960's. Pre-Civil Rights black people had more two-parent families, higher employment rates, etc. If you hold people to high standards then they will meet them.
This is the danger of 90+% support to only one party for 50+ years. Republicans didn't treat them well after 1876, either. Will many of them stoop to take the jobs the Dear Deported left behind?
I assumed Trump ending DEI would just affect hiring, but it appears some employers culled existing employees, perhaps to clean up their racial balance sheet for future lawsuits. Or they saw a federal okay to remove deadwood with less risk of lawsuits or bad publicity.
Or perhaps they were over represented in the federal government?
“Dear deported” is great. I’ll be stealing that.
Your implication that removing the thumb will show how hard it was pressing will not be accepted by them.
The copesplanation will be that freed from the mild constraint they had resented for fifty years, the white beasts overcorrected, exacted revenge, elevated their pettiness to obscene levels and took the opportunity to hire their talentless white friends.
Therefore, it is obviously necessary to put DEI back in order to prevent systemic racism, again. Can hear it now.
The only thing is, there's enough anons who whine enough to be Black Women, even though they swear they're White Males. So your interactions might not improve that much.
"Generous public subsidies" is a very Timesian way of explaining that new Hellcat.
One of the biggest political stories of the last few months should have been how Dems split almost exactly 50-50 in their support of the resolution condemning political violence in the wake of the Charlie Kirk murder, with the split almost entirely along racial lines
White people are really good with rules. The more complicated the better. Change the rules? All the better. So no surprise that first, second and third wave feminists crowded toward the trough...or sprinted. My family, for instance, noticed and acted on opportunities that emerged during covid. We always want a deal, a bargain or an edge. It's not exactly in the DNA, but it might as well have been. The black talented tenth did pretty well. Good for them. This is America, after all.
Why is American health care economics (funding edging toward 20% of GDP) dominated by cost shifting in all its malignant forms? Cost shifting is ubiquitous. Old fashion fraud cant survive routine audits. Just sayin. The idea that black culture will thrive in America is laughable. Yes...I have bad thoughts.
Note that the article implies that many black people consider government an "entry level job", the same way a white kid might view McDonald's. As in, if you apply, it's impossible to NOT get the job.
The DEI wealth- and status-transfer mega-mechanism. It’s sort of puzzling. That it was so successfully forced on White America so long, I mean.
Can you imagine the White men of 150, years ago 100 years ago, or even 75 years ago believing it possible? If a man from the 1870s or 1890s or 1920s were teleported to the early-21st century, saw the system, and returned to his time telling the tale of a system of vast anti-White laws and rules and norms called DEI, his fellows back in his own time wouldn’t have believed him and assuming he was lying or delusional. “It’s impossible. Don’t be a conspiracy theorist or fantasist.”
Honestly though, what else can you do with black people? It's not like they're going to invent high technology or whatever. But you're stuck with them. If you're a wealthy country, it seems reasonable to use some of your surplus wealth to give black people stipends. It gives them a chance to live like regular guys. Which is good for them - black people are just people, after all, and they want to have happy lives just like everyone else. And it's good for the rest of us, who then are a bit safer from crime and disorder. If you think of DEI as second-order crime prevention then it might make more sense. If I have a tiger in my house then I'm going to want to keep him fed.
"One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak, to a world in which it can't be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong." -- Christopher Caldwell, 2009
> If you think of DEI as second-order crime prevention then it might make more sense
From a pragmatic standpoint you are absolutely correct, but for the autists on this substack it violates a fundamental sense of fairness. Ultimately we brought their ancestors here against their will and now those descendants are American citizens by birth so we can't ship them to Liberia against their will...
"We" did no such thing. So yes it strikes people as manifestly unfair that people who never owned slaves should have to make transfer payments to people who were never enslaved and who hold one of the most valuable assets on the planet, citizenship in a majority white country. If they really ornament that stupid and psychopathic, then no amount of transfer payments will help. You always get more about your subsidize.
Culture is the feedback loop for genetics. We can harness that.
If you're a white American citizen, then your ancestors chose to come to a country where Africans were brought against their will
And?
And you're a dipshit, apparently
I agree with your comments in great part, but would think it's not the full story (a lot of water has flowed under the bridge since that kind of purist view would be more complete); see: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/dei-cuts-causing-black-unemployment/comment/165776250
People who let tigers in their houses deserve what they get.
And to whose surplus wealth are you referring? The government doesn’t generate any wealth. They take it from people like me or borrow it from the Chinese. A country as deeply in debt as ours and as addicted to deficit spending can’t be said to have any surplus wealth.
Some thoughts on DEI (broadly defined) and what it was/is:
In effect, DEI has been a sur-tax on Whites. The real goals were to keep social peace by bribing and coopting enough talented Blacks to keep things tolerable placid. And eventually for (stronger and stronger) ideological reasons, which developed in the mid-late 20th century.
Another way to think of DEI and the entire race dynamic in the US is what Paul Craig Roberts said: DEI, and many aspects of law in the post-Civil Rights era, quickly evolved part of a set of neo-feudal system, with the privileged class being Blacks, and actually all Nonwhites over Whites. White Heterosexual Christian-origin Males the most disprivileged group (‘the unprotected class,” as that one guy titled his book). in genera
A whole lot of Whites born in the third and fourth quarters of the 20th century grew up believing in (i.e., were socialized into belief in) Black Moral Superiority Doctrine. “Sure, Blacks get racial privileges. But people born tall also get ‘privileges’ in playing basketball. Why complain about something natural?”
The thumb won't be removed because it can't be as blacks as a group will not be able to compete and the result will appear to be unrepresentative. There is something called intelligence and IQ is not a bad way of measuring it. Most every task requires a certain level of intelligence to complete and greater intelligence would seem to benefit the completing of any task. Emil Kirkegaard produced a great little tool to measure tail effects (https://emilkirkegaard.dk/understanding_statistics/?app=tail_effects). Check it out-for any given population(s) and any given IQ threshold you can derive the expected make up of a chosen group, whether it be police, firemen, lawyers, doctors etc. Even for a job that would require only a mean IQ of 100, you would only expect 4/100 or 1 in 25 to be black and most of us don't expect 1 out of every 2 people we see to be able to pilot heavy jets or perform neurosurgery, do we? The nonsense we see on Netflix and the BBC is completely erroneous and in no way reflects even our "heavily thumbed" reality, but a meritocratic/objective reality would go against the beliefs of so many. For example, up until 1950 only about 5% of Americans had a degree and lets say, just for arguments sake, that this correlated 1:1 with IQ, then only 1 out of every 100 degree holders would be black. Quite the conundrum for US policy makers but apparently it has been going so well that the rest of the Anglosphere and western Europe thought they could similarly reap the benefits of importing a mass underclass through wishful thinking, propaganda and DIE.
Have a play with the graph-it's brutal. Even using thresholds such as 85IQ, without preferences being applied the outcomes are stark and one can see why they might cause anguish
Agree. The show will continue as is, since a discussion of any of your points won’t be tolerated well at all.
> Quite the conundrum for US policy makers but apparently it has been going so well that the rest of the Anglosphere and western Europe thought they could similarly reap the benefits of importing a mass underclass through wishful thinking, propaganda and DIE
We are paying the price for the antebellum era, but Europe doesn't have that same baggage vis-a-vis Africans. Why they chose to double down is a mystery with Germany being the biggest offender because they are feeling guilty about the unpleasantness from 80+ years ago. Of course, one has nothing to do with the other but Merkel didn't want to risk making a boner in front of her friends
I don't remember if I posted this here or to someone else on twitter, but this is a story where for once the evergreen NYT sub-headline of "Women, minorities hit hardest" is actually true!
I certainly am not going to complain about culling HR. Frankly, I think that the representation of HR in Dilbert is overly magnamious. And I am certainly tired of the inadequate education justification. School is there not to educate students but to provide students the opportunity to learn. The responsibility for learning is on the student, the responsibility of the school is to provide something approaching an appropriate environment. I went to Paul Junior High School in NW DC in the mid 1960's - and the general atmosphere was not learning friendly - and it was the fault of the 'students', not the teachers or the school administration, who did what they could.
I am most familiar with Physics and Engineering material (afterall, it is my background, as I am or was Ph.D. level in several of the subfields). The texts are roughly standardized. At worst, you can sit down with them and read them - and then do the problem sets. Do lots of problems. Look up what you got wrong when you got them wrong. And keep at it - for years. Frankly, until you get to the active research areas, you learn by doing the problem sets - in undergraduate and the first year or two of graduate school) - not by good teaching. As a general rule the teaching is not good - your professors are researchers, not teachers. Typically, it is only in 2d year graduate coursework that professors start to pay much attention to you - because they start selecting the most promising students to work under them as graduate student research assistants / research slaves.
Do not blame incompetence on inadequate education. You must always learn on the job. If you can't, you are the problem.
I worked for some time as an operating system kernel programmer programming in C. My total college programming coursework was an introduction to programming in Fortran and an introduction to assembly programing - on a Univac 1108. I taught myself classical computer science and programming in C enough to work as a kernel programmer before going into security architecture work.
The ability to submit to drill seems orthogonal to intelligence. A friend of mine is a very friendly black guy who wants to study math. He studies Math Academy for a couple of hours a day, doing targeted problem sets. He moves slowly, achieving in 2 hours what might take someone else 20 minutes. But he's diligent and has a positive attitude, so I'm sure he'll go far. If not to advanced math then at least to sufficient math for an interesting job that he enjoys.