Brave educator does a 180

In the midst of a staggering mess of an article consisting of 2,000 words, vast amounts of overheated rhetoric, and 94 hyperlinks (that’s almost one hyperlink per every 20 words of text), Steve Sailer writing at Vdare provides us with one new fact and makes one useful argument, both of which he could have done in an article one quarter the length.

The new fact: Jack O’Connell, the California Superintendent of Public Instruction who at the recent “Achievement Gap Summit” appeared to be saying—according to my best attempt to understand his somewhat ambiguous statement—that an anti-intellectual black and Hispanic culture shared by all blacks and Hispanics was the source of low black and Hispanic achievement, apparently did not mean that at all, or, if he did mean it, he was so freaked out by the attacks he received from minority educators for saying it that he immediately did a complete reversal. Now, according to the November 18 Los Angeles Times, far from attributing black and Hispanic low performance to a black and Hispanic culture, O’Connell is

talking of “a cultural bias that impedes instruction. Well-meaning, well-educated people can unintentionally be part of perpetuating institutional racism.” The nation’s schooling system, he said, “developed to educate white children and remains most advantageous to white children.”

How about that? We’re back at institutional racism and a “culturally white” educational system that can’t teach blacks and Hispanics. This—from the guy who five days ago was self-importantly announcing that he had a new explanation for poor black and Hispanic performance, an explanation that no one had ever heard of before!

In fact, your trusty guide to Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society predicted a reversal very like this. In my previous article on Jack O’Connell, posted on November 13, I wrote:

Second, let’s say that all educators accepted O’Connell’s putatively daring notion that it is a cultural attitude shared by all blacks and Hispanics, namely a view of themselves as non-intellectual, that causes their low intellectual achievement. Won’t the belief that negative cultural attitudes are the cause of low achievement lead automatically, as it has done repeatedly in the past, to the conclusion that it is America’s culturally dominant white majority which, consciously or unconsciously, is imposing those negative cultural attitudes on minorities, which in turn means that society in order to raise black and Hispanic achievement must eliminate the racial stereotypes which make all blacks and Hispanics believe that they are not intellectual? In reality, of course, all the attitudinal engineering in the world will not raise black and Hispanic intelligence.

So there it is, and such is American liberalism. O’Connell, a clever guy who yearned to escape, even if just a little, the stifling constraints of educational PC, thought he would sneak in a hint of an ambiguous argument that the low performance of blacks and Hispanics had something to do with blacks and Hispanics themselves. But this suggestion was so scandalous to the educational establishment that he immediately reverted to the hoariest cliches in the lexicon of American education: institutional racism and a dominant white culture that excludes, and is insensitive to the special needs of, blacks and Hispanics.

As though the California educational system had not spent the last 20 years noisily dumping Eurocentrism and re-designing its curriculum to adjust to the special needs of blacks and Hispanics.

* * *

The useful idea suggested by Sailer is that California schools should hire tough-guy alpha males to handle school discipline.

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James N. writes:

“It’s absolutely true that the educational system, at least the white one, was developed to educate white children. There was also a moderately successful educational system which was developed to educate black children. ”

Moving a large childhood and adolescent population of people with a mean IQ of 85 into a system designed for people with an IQ of 100 has ruined education for both groups. The significant results are masses of angry and frustrated people in Group A, who are in a race they can’t win, and people in Group B who are determined to make Group B children stupid so it won’t seem so unequal.

It’s not working.

Robert R. writes:

I’ve long found the VDARE site and Steve’s old personal site to be very annoying with all the links and just the general disorderliness of the sites. I actually wrote him about this and recommended your site (and Jim Kalb’s) as examples of what a good blog looks like—and he pointed me at his new site.

Take a look at it, it’s much better.

LA replies:

But that’s been his permanent archive site all along, right? He just gave up isteve.com because of tech difficulties while continuing to use isteve.blogspot.com. Furthermore, even though his O’Connell article starts at i.steve.blogspot, to read the complete article you still have to go to Vdare.

Larry G. writes:

The effects of white racism actually increase with distance from the source, unlike any other known natural phenomena. While African-Americans exposed to white, institutional racism only have their IQs depressed by about 15 points, on the other side of the planet in Africa, Africans in schools designed by Africans, run by Africans and taught by Africans have their IQs depressed by a minimum of 30 points! It’s amazing, I tell ya.

Mark A. writes:

“The nation’s schooling system, he said, “developed to educate white children and remains most advantageous to white children.””

That’s odd. The last time I checked Asian students in California outperformed White students in almost every subject.

LA replies:

Those pesky Asians, the liberals must keep ignoring their existence.

Mark A. replies:

Asians accomplish this coming to a culture that is completely exotic to them. Hispanics grow up speaking a European language with Latin roots. African-Americans grow up speaking English (or at least try) and generally they know no other language. Asians come from an exotic culture whose language hasn’t even developed to the point of having letters represent sounds. Yet Asians are able to outperform whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans. In almost every subject. Including English.

Dimitri K. writes:

Speaking about institutional racism—of course, there is institutional racism. The FACT that all institutions of our society were created by whites IS institutional racism. And the only way to abolish this racism is to eliminate the dominant white culture that created our society’s institutions and so ruin the society completely.

LA replies:

As I wrote in my first article in National Review in 1989:

Since “European American” culture is by definition exclusive and oppressive, it obviously cannot coexist with the oppressed cultures that seek equality with it until it has been stripped of its hypocritical pretensions to universality and legitimacy—i.e., until, as a national culture, it has ceased to exist.

Tim W. writes:

If whites are to blame for poor black & Hispanic school performance, why are liberals so obsessed with integration? If whites are responsible, then minorities should be trying to keep as far away from us as possible.

LA replies:

Not a contradiction. It fits the basic liberal paradigm. Whites are both Santa Claus AND the devil. They are Santa Claus because they are the source of all goods. They are the devil because they perversely withhold these goods from nonwhites.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 19, 2007 01:54 AM | Send