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JEFF JACOBY

How do you spell m-o-t-i-v-a-t-i-o-n?

Cochampions (left-to-right): Abhijay Kodali (407) of Flower Mound, Texas, Sohum Sukhatankar (354) of Dallas, Texas, Rishik Gandhasri (5) of San Jose, California, Shruthika Padhy (307) of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and Rohan Raja (462) of Irving, Texas, held up the trophy for photographers. Alex Wong/Getty Images/Getty Images

This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee was epic: For the first time ever, it ended with not one spelling champion or even two cochampions, but with eight winners. Winnowed down from 562 starting contestants, the final eight proved unconquerable through 20 rounds. “We’re throwing the dictionary at you,” said Jacques Bailly, the Spelling Bee’s official pronouncer, “and so far, you are showing this dictionary who is boss.”

That was after the 17th round. Three rounds later, all eight contestants were still in the running — and the judges had run out of challenging words. Whereupon they ruled that each member of what Bailly called “the most phenomenal assemblage of super-spellers” in the Bee’s history would take home a first prize trophy and an accompanying $50,000 check.

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These were the winners, and the final word each spelled correctly:

Rishik Gandhasri: auslaut.

Erin Howard: erysipelas.

Saketh Sundar: bougainvillea.

Shruthika Padhy: aiguillette.

Sohum Sukhatankar: pendeloque.

Abhijay Kodali: palama.

Christopher Serrao: cernuous.

Rohan Raja: odylic.

As the kids’ names suggest, all but one is of Indian descent. Since 2008, the children of immigrants from South Asia have crushed the world’s most prestigious spelling bee. Is that a problem? Should we be lamenting the lack of diversity in the top ranks of competitive student spellers? Ought Scripps manipulate the rules — the way Harvard has manipulated its admissions standards — to ensure that more non-Asians make it to the final rounds?

Certainly not.

Indian-American kids haven’t become the royalty of competitive spelling because their race or color gives them an advantage. There is no “Asian privilege” that explains the failure of white, black, or Latino kids to capture the trophy. Awesome spelling skills aren’t coded in DNA from the Indian subcontinent. High-level spelling competition is a meritocracy; the only way to win is by spelling the most words correctly. And the only way to get that good at spelling rare and difficult words is to work at it — hard.

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Many Indian-American children devote extraordinary time and effort to training for spelling bees: They memorize word lists, study etymology, familiarize themselves with prefixes and roots, take guidance from coaches, and compete in regional contests.

Such rigor, diligence, and patience has nothing to do with genetics or superficial “diversity.” It has everything to do with motivation. And what fuels that motivation is a combination of culture, social expectations, family encouragement, and ethnic solidarity. “Spelling bees have become a vital part of the Indian-American experience,” anthropologist Shalini Shankar has written. “There is community prestige in placing competitively in spelling bees and great familial pride for having participated in something so challenging at a young age.” Nor does it hurt that many of “these young word nerds,” as Shankar calls them, have a “vast social network of friends who also love spelling.”

The disproportionate success of Indians in world-class competitive spelling ought to elicit only admiration. But there’s no denying that it flies in the face of America’s vast diversity-industrial complex, which endlessly reinforces and endorses a great fallacy: that statistical disparities between racial and ethnic groups are proof of invidious discrimination.

Bigotry and injustice are real, of course, but they have no more to do with the dominance of Indians in spelling competitions than with the dominance of Kenyans in distance running, or of Russians in chess, or of African-Americans in the NBA. Or, for that matter, of men in commercial fishing or women in veterinary medicine, or of any of a thousand-and-one other examples of extreme statistical disparities among categories of people.

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“Human beings are not random events,” the renowned scholar Thomas Sowell observes. “Individuals and groups have different histories, cultures, skills, and attitudes.”

What is true of high-stress spelling bees is true of workplaces and investments and college applications and entertainment: People do not randomly sort themselves out by color, background, and sex. Group disparities are not, as a rule, evil. They are normal, the result of a myriad of human choices, preferences, interests, and motivations.

The Scripps “octo-champs” are amazing spellers who worked fantastically hard to achieve something wonderful. True, they aren’t a diverse amalgam of races, colors, and ethnicities. Who cares?


Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com. This column is adapted from the current issue of Arguable, his weekly e-mail newsletter. To subscribe to Arguable, click here.