The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Let’s Play, ‘Find the Hidden Racism’!

Posted on | October 1, 2023 | 1 Comment

Appalling is a word we don’t use often enough, but it’s perhaps the best word for what is going on in America’s public schools in the name of “social justice.” You may not be able to read the text in that screen-cap, but apparently academics have invented a term, “evaded racism.” Here’s a brief summary from a journal article:

Evaded Racism
Prominent race scholar, Richard Valencia (2012) argues that while in the past intellectual inferiority and cultural deprivation were prominent theories used to uphold racial inequity in schooling, today, individualized analysis of underachievement are tools that maintain the status quo. K. D. Brown & Brown (2012) contend that dominant rhetoric blames students of Color and their families for a lack of academic success, promoting a shift in their behavior as the solution (e.g., reminding parents to read more to their children; advocating for a growth mind-set), rather than suggesting shifts to structures or policies that systematically fail students of Color (e.g., limited resources, racial profiling; Malagon & Alvarez, 2010). Blaming communities of Color for educational inequality at the individual level invisiblizes institutional responsibility, thus providing a rationale to study race yet evade concrete analyses of racism (Bonilla Silva, 2006).

Got it? Now watch this short video clip:

This person — and anyone who thinks like her — should never be allowed anywhere near a classroom. But that’s obvious enough. What perhaps requires more explanation is why liberals think this way. Once again, I must recommend Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy as the single best description of the psychology of modern liberalism, which I think is highly relevant to this kind of “woke” nonsense that’s infesting American education.

Liberals are unwitting guilty, as I recently remarked, of being “childishly simple-minded . . . Whatever they like is good, and whatever they dislike is evil.” Although they consider themselves sophisticated and intellectually superior to others, liberals exhibit a tendency to think in a sort of Manichean dualism, where every controversy is seen as a struggle between the forces of good (i.e., themselves) and the forces of darkness (i.e., anyone who disagrees with them). Often, as a practical matter, it is impossible to distinguish between the liberal’s professed ideals — in this case, “equity” in education — and the narrow political interests of the Democratic Party. In this specific example, why are liberals so obsessed with the belief that “structures or policies” in public schools “systematically fail students of Color”? (Resist the temptation to ask why the authors felt the need to capitalize “Color.” Time is too precious.)

The reason why liberals are obsessed with racial “equity” in public schools is because the Democratic Party relies on votes from black and Hispanic people to win elections, period. Viewing these groups as their natural constituents, whose interests the Democratic Party exists to serve, liberals therefore must believe that (a) black and Hispanic people are extraordinarily virtuous, and therefore (b) anything bad that happens to black and Hispanic people is not their fault. So if it is demonstrably true that black and Hispanic students are, on average, lagging behind white and Asian students — the data on this point is abundant — the liberal must find some way to blame this problem on racism.

Let me tell you something about “equity” in education as the father of six children: No two children are identical, not even twins. Our children, two of whom are twin boys, have had quite varied education outcomes. Our oldest daughter got her university degree summa cum laude, a feat that none of her brothers have matched. The baby sister (now studying abroad for her junior year in university) also aspires to be summa cum laude, but we’ll have to wait and see for that. My point is that, if we cannot produce educational “equity” even among siblings who share the same genetic background and grew up in the same home, what are the chances of achieving “equity” in inner city Baltimore or Philadelphia?

“Equity” is a fool’s errand, a snipe hunt, and once you acknowledge the impossibility of such a goal, only politics can explain why anyone would waste time in pursuit of this ridiculous will-o’-the-wisp.

Something else: You can’t make chicken salad from chicken manure.

By the time children show up for their first day of school, at age 4 or 5, their basic educational aptitude is already pretty much established, and whatever the budget, policy or personnel of the school, educators do not possess a magic formula that can turn a stupid or lazy child into a future summa cum laude graduate. You don’t need any fancy theory or academic jargon to understand this basic truth. The need for theory and jargon arises from a desire to obscure the truth.

Actually, liberals turn the facts upside down, preferring to live in a weird inverted universe that is diametrically opposed to reality: The student didn’t fail school — the school failed the student! This pretzel-logic is required, as I say, by the political interests of the Democratic Party. Because the schools where “students of Color” are experiencing a “lack of academic success” are generally in deep-blue districts (Biden got 87% of the vote in Baltimore, 81% of the vote in Philadelphia, etc.), and the parents of these students are Democratic voters, the common-sense explanation of the problem is politically taboo. No one in an urban school system is going to tell the parents of their students: “Hey, you dumbass Biden voters, your kids have inherited your stupidity.”

The stupid apple seldom falls far from the stupid tree.

The need to avoid this obvious truth, you see, explains why liberals have put on their Magic X-Ray Spex, which enable them to see the invisible ultra-racism hidden in the “structural inequality” of education.

By the way — and it shouldn’t be necessary to point this out, but I will — is it not a fact that the vast majority of public school employees are Democrats? Isn’t it also a fact that most professors of education in our universities are loyal Democratic voters? And what about school boards in cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore? Aren’t these people all Democrats? So if there is “racial inequity in schooling,” whose fault is that? How could anyone blame Republicans for this?

It’s kind of like Jussie Smollett, claiming he got attacked by two racist homophobic Trump supporters in downtown Chicago at 2 a.m.

The story that liberals are telling about what’s wrong with our education system simply doesn’t add up. It’s not an explanation, it’s an excuse.



 

Category: Education, Racism

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One Response to “Let’s Play, ‘Find the Hidden Racism’!”

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