These students are not "unqualified" to be in college but are too often mismatched with the particular colleges they are in. They may be struggling to stay afloat academically in the Ivy League, when they would meet the normal admissions standards in a good state university and do fine. Because of the pervasive use of double standards based on race, all up and down the academic pecking order, black students are often struggling not only in the Ivy League and at flagship state universities, but also at less prestigious and less demanding institutions.
In the absence of these double standards, black students would be distributed very differently among academic institutions -- and succeeding far more often. In the situation as it actually exists, these students are in a painful predicament, whose real source of pain cannot be openly acknowledged by either themselves or by their white classmates, and least of all by their professors or academic administrators.
What does this have to do with black students weeping during a protest against David Horowitz's views on reparations for slavery?
The impossible situation in which black students have been placed by well-meaning double standards has led to a whole protective make-believe surrounding them, much like the huge plastic bubbles used to surround children born with wholly inadequate immune systems, who must be protected from the slightest risk of infection.
Within their protective bubble, black students are insulated from any criticism of their performances, behavior, or ideas. Draconian speech codes and automatic accusations of "racism" protect them from anyone who says anything to oppose what they say, do, or demand.
What David Horowitz has done is puncture that protective bubble. He has treated black students the way he would treat anyone else. But the facts and logic that he would use in debating anyone else are shocking things to those who have not been used to having to confront them, and are therefore unequipped to cope with them. Their options are to deny or be devastated. Tears and rage are about the only responses available.
Horowitz is not merely threatening their position on a particular issue, but their whole protected world inside the bubble. No wonder they wept. We should all weep that such a world of make-believe was ever created in the first place.