These two news items demonstrate the same fundamental fact: Meritocracy Isn’t a Real Thing

. . . so let us meditate upon that, and then neither kvell about folks’ successes or flagellate them for their failures. The truest statement of the 21st C is this: You didn’t build that. All the greatness, all the folly, all of the sound and fury and mess and wonder, of that is stuff that we all done did together.
How Elementary School Teachers’ Biases Can Discourage Girls From Math and Science – The New York Times

Beginning in 2002, the researchers studied three groups of Israeli students from sixth grade through the end of high school. The students were given two exams, one graded by outsiders who did not know their identities and another by teachers who knew their names.
In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and that this had long-term effects on students’ attitudes toward the subjects.
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Although the study took place in Israel, Mr. Lavy said that similar research had been conducted in several European countries and that he expected the results were applicable in the United States. The researchers also found that discouragement from teachers in math or science wound up lowering students’ confidence in other subjects at school, showing again the potential importance of nods of encouragement.

Yi-Fen Chou is Michael Derrick Hudson: The Best American Poetry from 2015 published a writer in yellowface.

Congratulations to Yi-Fen Chou, whose poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was selected for inclusion in the Best American Poetry anthology for 2015. BAP, launched in 1988 by the writer and professor David Lehman, is co-edited every year by a visiting literary starlord. This year, that starlord was the great Sherman Alexie…
There’s just one problem: Yi-Fen Chou’s real name isn’t Yi-Fen Chou. It’s Michael Derrick Hudson. Hudson, who works for the Genealogy Center at the Allen County Public Library in Indiana (and from whom we might expect a fuller understanding of the difference between Anglo-European and Chinese lineage), explained his nom de plume in a contributor’s note:

After a poem of mine has been rejected a multitude of times under my real name, I put Yi-Fen’s name on it and send it out again. As a strategy for ‘placing’ poems this has been quite successful for me. The poem in question … was rejected under my real name forty (40) times before I sent it out as Yi-Fen Chou (I keep detailed submission records). As Yi-Fen the poem was rejected nine (9) times before Prairie Schooner took it. If indeed this is one of the best American poems of 2015, it took quite a bit of effort to get it into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.

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(Sherman Alexie has published a blog post explaining his decision not to pull Hudson’s poem. It is passionate and charming and asserts that dumping “The Bees” would “cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP.” To me this doesn’t quite follow. I’ve reached out to Alexie and to David Lehman for further comment, as well as to Hudson, and will update this post if I hear back.)
On the other hand, has Hudson’s immoral gambit exposed a flaw in the literary ecosystem? Why should a poem be rejected under one name and accepted under another?