From: hengist
Should anyone in authority say
anything sensible about racial policy, an event unlikely to occur before
the next Ice Age, he would have to say that when it is not merely futile
it often injures the people it is supposed to help; that it succeeds in
antagonizing whites without benefiting blacks; that it has become more
of an ideological battleground than a practical program; and, finally,
that it is a fraud, serving principally to benefit groups that grow fat
from racial programs. He might be tempted to add that civilized man has
never seen such a monumental stream of unembarrassed twaddle.
An obvious observation,
which hardly anyone seems to make, is that blacks suffer less from
racism than from poor education. Harvard does not reject black
applicants because it dislikes blacks but because they are badly
prepared. Blacks do not fail the federal entrance examination because it
is rigged to exclude them but because they don't know the answers.
Equality of opportunity without equality of education is a cruel joke:
giving an illiterate the right to apply to Yale isn't giving him
much.
The intelligent policy is to
educate black children, something that the public schools of Washington
manage, at great expense, not to do. In fact the prevailing (if
unspoken) view seems to be that black children cannot be educated, an
idea whose only defect is that it is wrong: the Catholic schools of
Washington have been educating black children for years. The Catholic
system has 12,170 students in the District, of whom 7,884, or 65
percent, are black.
On the Science Research
Associates (SRA) exam, a standardized test of academic achievement, the
average reading ability of eighth graders in Washington's Catholic
schools in 1979-80 was at the 52nd percentile, compared to the national
norm, and at the 72nd percentile, compared to big-city norms-that is,
above average. In arithmetic, the percentiles were 60 and 75-above
average. In science, they were 53 and 66 -- again, above average. In
none of the subjects tested, which included composition, "language
arts," and social studies, were scores as low as the 50th
percentile.
Most people argue,
incorrectly, that the overall scores are being pulled up by the scores
of white students; it is remarkable how few people will accept that
black children make good grades because they are bright and well taught.
But it happens that Mackin Catholic High School, on California Street,
N.W., is 94 percent black, and students there average at grade level or
higher when tested in reading; they score similarly in other subjects.
Our Lady of Perpetual Help Elementary School, in Anacostia, one of the
poorest neighborhoods in the city, has only two white students. The
students in the seventh grade read at the 40th percentile, or, to put it
another way, rank 10 percent below the national norm. Ninth grade
students in the public schools in Anacostia rank 26 percent below. St.
Anthony's, in northeast Washington, near Catholic University, is about
90 percent black. On a composite SRA score, its eighth graders rank at
the 67th percentile against the national norm, and at the 76th
percentile against big-city norms. When there are virtually no whites at
a school, whites cannot be responsible for the scores.
Skeptics suspect that
Catholic schools get good scores by accepting only promising students.
There is a little truth in this, but not much. Catholic schools in
Washington do not accept hopelessly bad students or students who have
other problems, such as serious police records, which would cripple them
academically or cause them to disrupt classes. Some schools are more
lenient than others about admissions standards, but most accept students
who score below average. They do not gather up the geniuses and neglect
the rest.
Why do the Catholics get
better results? One reason is that the students have parents who care
enough to put them in superior schools. Another reason is that Catholic
schools have superior staffs, with teachers generally required to have
at least a B.A. in their subjects. Also involved are academic
rigor-students are often assigned two-and-a-half hours of homework --
and discipline. One disruptive student can reduce a class to chaos.
Catholic schools, not being subject to educational bureaucracies and
political pressures, can prevent disruption, resorting, if need be, to
expulsion.
In my estimation, the
Catholic schools also profit by their respect for the students -- a
belief in their potential, accompanied by a recognition that they are,
after all, children. At St. Anthony's I talked to the eighth-grade
English teacher, Lorraine Ferris. Ferris seems to be half scholar and
half drill instructor, about right for junior high, and strikes me as
being about as good as teachers get. She knows English from the gerunds
up, which puts her ahead of most college English departments. "The
important thing," she says, "is to make children believe in themselves,
but you can't do it by coddling them. I won't accept a 95 from a student
who should make a 98. It's important to them to see that they can
compete. And the idea that black children can't do the work is baloney.
I see red every time I hear it."
If black children can be
educated, the question arises: Why aren't they? The usual answer is that
racism and conservatism are responsible, and much ink is spilled in
exorcising these evils. But racists and conservatives have almost
nothing to do with educational policy in Washington. Until recently,
we've had a Democratic president and Congress; we have a liberal
National Education Association, a black city government, a black school
board, a black electorate. They, not conservatives or racists, bear
responsibility for conditions in the schools.
One may argue that in general
the chief hindrances to progress for poor blacks are misguided racial
policies and the attitudes of those who make them. It is important to
realize that things were different twenty years ago. In the Fifties and
Sixties the civil rights movement was producing results-dismantling the
prevailing apartheid, for example. Unfortunately the movement somehow
became bureaucratized, then became self-serving, and finally became the
problem. Today the obstacle to racial progress is not Bill Buckley; it
is Ted Kennedy. It isn't the KKK; it is the NEA.
Race has become an industry.
CETA, EEOC, OMBE, and other forbidding acronyms with huge payrolls exist
by presiding over the status quo. Various freelance acronyms, such as
NAACP, SCLC, ACLU, and PUSH, derive their importance from appearing to
galvanize the governmental acronyms. Politicians and influential
subcommittees thrive by conspicuously giving their attention to racial
matters. The Democratic party retains blacks as a largely docile voting
bloc by maintaining the flow of money for racial programs. Billions of
dollars, countless jobs, and the political balance ride on keeping
things as they are.
The underlying difficulty is
that when enough people are employed to solve a problem, means become
ends. It becomes more important to continue solving the problem, which
provides jobs, than to have solved the problem, which would result in
dismissals.
Not all racial functionaries
cynically exploit racial division, but many do. People are remarkably
adept at aligning their principles with their pocketbooks. Racial
bureaucrats will always manage to persuade themselves that their
particular programs are of paramount importance in the struggle against
oppression. Further, their principal interest being their own interest,
they will oppose the elimination of unsuccessful programs to prevent the
discovery that nothing very bad would happen if they were abolished.
They have all but silenced
opposition with their insistence that He who is against me is against
blacks. This argument, repeated often enough, results in something close
to censorship, so that it is currently almost impossible to discuss
racial programs on their merits-i.e., on whether they work. Whether, for
example, the welfare system needs revision isn't considered.
The national media and the
major dailies do their best to enforce the ban on open discussion. They
simply won't publish serious criticism. Relative freedom from criticism
encourages a preference for moralism in place of practicality. The
tendency is to see racial questions as a conflict between abstract Good
and abstract Evil, in which the most important thing is to display
admirable intentions, usually to the exclusion of doing anything
useful.
There is a further tendency
among racial functionaries to do penance for sins they haven't
committed, such as tolerating slavery. Penance is fun, but marvelously
useless.
When people are more
concerned with seeming good than with doing good, symbols become
irresistible. Racial policy abounds in symbols that express concern,
cost a lot, and miss the point. There is, for example, the Martin Luther
King Memorial Library-oversized, under-used, short on books, with a
grandiose lobby that has enough wasted space for several simultaneous
games of basketball. The District, however, doesn't suffer from a
shortage of books but from a shortage of people who can read them.
The University of the
District of Columbia, actually a school for remedial reading, is
similarly a symbol. Ninety percent of its freshmen read below the
ninth-grade level. Although a new university in the District is not
necessarily a bad idea, a fraudulent university whose students are
hardly beyond the level of junior high school is unquestionably a bad
idea. The sensible policy would be to improve the schools so that the
city's children would be qualified to attend a university, and then to
build a university or, for that matter, several universities. But
establishing a bogus university is quick and easy; teaching a city to
read is slow and difficult, and produces votes a decade later.
It is fascinating that the
racial establishment systematically blocks the adoption of the
educational policies that would most benefit black children. For
example, when Vincent Reed, superintendent of schools in the District,
urged the wholly admirable idea of a special school for children with
the intelligence and energy to do advanced work, the proposal was
defeated.
Such schools exist in cities
across the country and have worked well. Readers unfamiliar with the
workings of the socially concerned mind may not immediately see why
bright children should not be educated to their own level. The reason,
said those who defeated the idea, is that it would be elitist. Elitism
is regarded as a dreadful thing by the wealthier members of the racial
establishment, who send their children to Harvard to avoid it.
Preventing elitism by
rendering children illiterate is a dubious favor to them and to the
nation. The social effect, of course, is to delay the emergence of black
leaders and therefore to retard the progress of the race. South Africa
achieves the same result by the same denial of education but is morally
superior in making fewer pretenses about its intentions.
The racial establishment also
discourages the imposition of discipline in the schools, without which
teaching is impossible. The problem is horrendous in some of
Washington's schools. The students need protection against marauders
from outside, and the staff need protection against physical assault by
students. Teachers tell of being attacked by students with knives, of
being afraid to go to certain parts of the school. Vincent Reed recently
voiced his concern over security. "When I have kids being shot in
schools by outside intruders and teachers being mauled by outside
intruders-last year we had a young girl ten years old taken out of the
building and raped-I don't have time for rhetoric."
Others have time for
rhetoric. Ron Dellums, a black representative from California, asked at
a Congressional hearing whether the presence of policemen in the schools
would inhibit discussion of ideas. (Maybe. So, presumably, do knives,
guns, drugs, and rapes.) It is a commonplace argument among
educationists that discipline is regimentation and a means of racial
repression. Illiteracy is a far better means of repression, and disorder
is a sure road to illiteracy.
The racial establishment also
ensures that black students have poor teachers. One might expect racial
politicians to insist on providing the best obtainable teachers for
black children who, being behind, desperately need them. It would not be
an unreasonable demand. Given the rate of white-collar unemployment,
highly educated teachers can be gotten by whistling.
Unfortunately the racial
establishment, never particularly energized about the quest for academic
quality, is especially unenthusiastic about finding good teachers. There
are several reasons, one being that many in the race business belong to
the various species of pseudointellectual riffraff that multiplied
during the Sixties-psychologists, sociologists, educationists,
feminists, the whole touchy-feely smorgasbord of group-gropers,
anxiety-studiers, and fruit-juice drinkers who believe that the purpose
of education is emotional adjustment. They seem not to have reflected
that an excellent source of maladjustment is to be an unemployed
semiliterate without the foggiest understanding of the surrounding
world.
Educationists, who have a
well-developed sense of self-preservation, understandably do not favor
higher standards for teachers. Hiring good teachers means firing bad
ones. Any serious attempt to get rid of deadwood means bucking the
powerful teachers' unions, which, as a variety of tests have shown,
would be gutted by any insistence on competence. Moreover, dismissal of
incompetent teachers would mean a heavily disproportionate dismissal of
black teachers. The bald, statistically verifiable truth is that the
teachers' colleges, probably on ideological grounds, have produced an
incredible proportion of incompetent black teachers. Evidence of this
appears periodically, as, for example, in the results of a competency
test given to applicants for teaching positions in Pinellas County,
Florida (which includes St. Petersburg and Clearwater), cited in
Time, June 16, 1980. To pass this grueling examination, an
applicant had to be able to read at the tenth-grade level and do
arithmetic at the eighth-grade level. Though they all held B.A.'s, 25
percent of the whites and 79 percent of the blacks failed. Similar
statistics exist for other places.
Another major reason for the
slow progress of blacks is a prejudice, palpable in racial policy though
unprovable, that blacks are incapable of competing with whites. Racial
functionaries will deny this with fervor; yet if they believed blacks
could compete, they would advocate preparing them for competition.
Instead the emphasis is on protecting them from it. The usual attitude
toward blacks resembles the patronizing affection of missionary for a
colony of bushmen: these benighted people are worthy in the eyes of God
but obviously can't take care of themselves, so we will do it. Whenever
blacks fail to meet a standard the response is to lower the standard,
abolish it, or blur it-not to educate blacks to meet the standard. The
apotheosis of this sort of thinking was the lunatic notion that black
children should be taught in the gibberish of the streets because it,
"communicates," the implication being that English was too difficult for
them. Nobody thought English too difficult for the Vietnamese.
Paternalism has practical
consequences. The unrelenting condescension supports blacks' view of
themselves as worthless. (If anyone doubts that poor blacks do indeed
regard themselves as worthless, I suggest he spend some time with them.)
People who think they cannot succeed do not try.
Finally, the absolute
unwillingness of the racial industry to police itself-to make sure that
money accomplishes the intended results-has made racial programs a
synonym for corruption, waste, mismanagement, nepotism, and undeserved
preference. It is hard to find a racial program that is not grotesquely
abused. The District's annual effort to provide summer jobs is typical.
The jobs don't exist, nobody tells the youths where the jobs are thought
to be, no work is done if the jobs are discovered, and the youths don't
get paychecks even if they happen to do the work. Last year the same
thing happened, and next year, one wearily expects, it will happen
again. The pattern repeats everywhere. CETA, for example, might better
be called the Comprehensive Graft and Scandal Act. Some programs lapse
into frank absurdity. Under "affirmative action," group after group
musters the clout to get on the deprived-species list until, on a quick
calculation, 65 percent of the population qualify as mistreated
minorities.
Corruption and mismanagement
inevitably lead to resentment among whites whose money is being wasted.
This resentment is currently called "white backlash," which has a
comfortingly vicious sound and implies that it is someone else's fault.
(In the race business, everything is someone else's fault.) Antagonizing
half the country by shoddy performance is abysmally stupid politics,
especially given that the nation would probably have few objections to
sensible programs that worked. I find it hard to believe that many
people would object to giving a black child a good education at a
reasonable price.