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Here's how it works. First, you take a single, isolated incident, and pounce on it. Then, you give it all kinds of Meaning, which it doesn't really have. This isn't just an example of a young girl giving a single dumb answer. This is a symbol for everything that's allegedly wrong with our educational system, our culture, everything. Because there's no actual factual evidence involved, these ridiculous claims are impossible to refute.
Even better is the fact that the victim of these attacks is someone who can't speak in her own defense. She's only 21, she has no platform to speak from, and given that she's a pageant contestant, she's effectively gagged. That makes her a perfect target.
Finally, Traister takes something that everyone already knows (beauty queens don't tend to be Nobel laureates) and trots out the exact same tired arguments. There's absolutely nothing new here, but all the female readers of Salon get to shake their collective heads, again, the how beastly our culture is, and for one brief shining moment, get to feel a little superior to blonde beauty queens from the South. As someone else has already pointed out, if the person who gave this inarticulate answer was, say, black and poor, nobody at Salon would say a word. But a gorgeous blonde? Let's go get her!
Of course, as it always does, reality reasserts itself. In the real world, being blonde and gorgeous is a big advantage. For whatever reason, this fact seems to just bug the shit out of Traister, who is, if you Google her and find an image of her, a reasonably pretty, black-haired young woman. What's more interesting than the story, frankly, is that this fact about human nature drives Traister up the wall. It's not news. It's not even interesting. But it definitely hits some kind of emotional nerve.
Also, speaking of ignorant, I think that if the adjective "blonde" is applied to a female, there's supposed to be an "e" on the end of it.
