\n<\/p>\n
The governor\u2019s remarks at an Atlanta stop on his book tour have drawn criticism.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m like you; I\u2019m no better than you,\u201d California governor Gavin Newsom told Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens and people in the audience at a recent event on his book tour. \u201cI\u2019m a 960 SAT guy. And, you know, and I\u2019m not trying to offend anyone, trying to act all there if you got 940.\u201d It sounded like many people in the room laughed. Newsom went on to talk about his inability to read a prepared speech.<\/p>\n
Rebukes of his remarks were swift and strong, especially on conservative news channels and social media.<\/p>\n
Tim Scott of South Carolina, our nation\u2019s only Black Republican U.S. senator, wrote on X, \u201cBlack Americans aren\u2019t your low bar. We\u2019ve built empires, created movements, outworked, outhustled and outsmarted people like you. Stop using your mediocre academics as a way to patronize communities. Its [sic<\/em>] ridiculous!\u201d <\/p>\n Rapper Nicki Minaj, like Scott, deemed the comments racially problematic. \u201cHis way of bonding with black ppl is to tell them how stupid he is & that he can\u2019t read,\u201d the 12-time Grammy-nominated artist and recent high-profile MAGA ambassador wrote on social media.<\/p>\n \u201cTake it from someone who was actually in the chair asking the questions: Context matters more than a headline,\u201d Dickens noted in an Instagram post. \u201cThe conversation around his new book included him speaking about his own academic struggles, including not doing well on the SAT. That wasn\u2019t an attack on anyone. It was a moment of vulnerability about his own journey.\u201d <\/p>\n This was not the governor\u2019s first time disclosing these personal details. He has done so in settings comprised predominantly of white attendees, as well as in a March 2025 podcast interview with Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.<\/p>\n Inside Higher Ed<\/em> has not authenticated this five-second clip from the Atlanta book tour event. It shows that the crowd was not entirely or perhaps even overwhelmingly Black. Newsom\u2019s critics likely presumed it was because the event was held in Atlanta, a city that is 46\u00a0percent Black, according to U.S. Census data. Without confirmation of the demographic composition of the audience, conservative talk show host Sean Hannity declared that Newsom \u201cthinks a 960 SAT makes him \u2018like\u2019 Black Americans.\u201d <\/p>\n The governor did not appreciate the Fox News host\u2019s apparent double standard. \u201cYou didn\u2019t give a shit about the President of the United States of America posting an ape video of President Obama or calling African nations shitholes\u2014but you\u2019re going to call me racist for talking about my lifelong struggle with dyslexia,\u201d Newsom posted on X. \u201cSpare me your fake fucking outrage, Sean.\u201d<\/p>\n No one, including white people across political parties, should give anybody a pass for associating Black Americans with low IQs, low SAT scores or any racist claim of intellectual inferiority. Nevertheless, in this situation involving Newsom, there are at least three noteworthy realities. First is that outrage about his comments emerged in the absence of actual data about who was in the audience.<\/p>\n Second, let\u2019s imagine for a moment that the room was indeed predominantly Black: Would their mayor, a Black man, have allowed a white Californian to make such obviously racist remarks without calling him on it or inviting him to clarify what he meant? Dickens\u2019s laugh in response to Newsom\u2019s statements appeared neither awkward nor cringe. While much attention has been devoted to what Scott and Minaj had to say (and, to a lesser extent, a Fox News interview with Corrin Rankin, the California GOP chair, who is Black), there has not been an avalanche of outrage expressed by Black people who were actually at the event. Their voices on this matter most.<\/p>\n A long-standing critique of Democrats pandering to Black people is a third noteworthy dimension of this story. In an April 2016 <\/em>Breakfast Club<\/em> interview, Hillary Clinton was asked what is something that she always carries. \u201cHot sauce,\u201d the then\u2013presidential candidate replied within a split second; she required no time to contemplate this response. Some people interpreted this as a cheap attempt to appeal culturally to Black people. But, as it turns out, sources confirmed that the former secretary of state does, in fact, carry Ninja Squirrel hot sauce in her bag. Because Newsom talks so openly and repeatedly about his disability and relatively low SAT performance across a multitude of audiences, he was not seeking to connect with Black Georgians in particular over their presumably low scores on a standardized test.<\/p>\n The final two points are perhaps most important. According to the College Board, makers of the SAT, the average score is 1050. U.S. Department of Education data shows it is around 908 for Black students who took the test as high school seniors. There are long-standing racial differences in performance on this exam, as well as on the ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, GMAT and other standardized tests. Wealth disparities exacerbate these disparities. <\/p>\n This surely is not something for a governor or anyone else to recklessly leverage in attempts to connect with Black Americans. It is not a badge of honor for most of us, because we know how useless such exams are in measuring our potential, confirming our intelligence or predicting our futures (insists a very smart and extraordinarily successful Black academician\u2014call him a Resident Scholar\u2014whose GRE score never reached 1000 after four attempts).<\/p>\n Finally, it is plausible that Newsom wanted Georgians to understand that a dyslexic person with a 960 SAT score could become governor of our nation\u2019s most populous state and stand a chance of being elected U.S. president in the future. If that was indeed his goal, then Newsom is right about one of higher education\u2019s most powerful gatekeeping tools: The SAT does not determine long-term success.<\/p>\n Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. His most recent book is titled <\/em>Let\u2019s Talk About DEI: Productive Disagreements About America\u2019s Most Polarizing Topics.<\/em><\/p>\n