Doubling down on the impossible

As reported in the UK Telegraph, Adolph Cameron, head of the Jamaican Teachers’ Association, says that black boys from Jamaica think that academic success is non-masculine, even “gay,” and this is why they do so poorly in school. Instead of applying themselves to their studies, they join a culture of “hustling” from an early age. Cameron’s repeated, matter-of-face reference to the predominance of the “hustling” culture among Jamaicans exemplifies how blacks can say true things about blacks that a white would be destroyed for saying.

Cameron does not seem to be proposing any particular measure to fix the black preference for hustling over learning, but to the extent that he is hinting at one, it involves changing Jamaican boys’ attitude to learning, so that they see learning as masculine rather than feminine:

He went on to ask whether the notion of “academic achievement” could coexist with notions about “black masculinity” in contemporary culture.

What Cameron is suggesting seems analogous to what has been going on in the U.S. for decades. Since many American blacks despise academic achievement as “acting white,” educators adopted the idea that the solution was to make blacks believe that academic achievement was a “black” thing. That way they would appreciate learning the way whites do and their academic achievement would climb to white levels. This is the logic that led to Afro-Centric education, Ebonics, and the eternal search for black role models.

So, based on the American example, how will British educrats change education to make it seem more “masculine” in the Jamaican sense? Train teachers to speak Jamaican patois and teach it to their pupils? Portray the great figures of history as black-style hustlers? Rename schools in black neighborhoods the Bob Marley Academy?

Masculine, not feminine

But has black-centric education in the U.S. raised black academic achievement? Not in the slightest. Good luck to British schools in conforming learning to the ethos and culture of Jamaican hustlers and pop singers.

Also, is it really only black boys from Jamaica that are way behind? Are black boys from other black countries in the Caribbean and Africa all performing up to par? The article doesn’t say.

Also, haven’t we been told a thousand times, at least in the U.S., that Jamaicans do not exhibit the academic and behavior deficits of American blacks, a fact which purportedly proves that black deficits are not racial, but cultural? But if Jamaicans, the supposed black crème de la crème, are among the worst achievers and gravitate to a life of hustling, then we’re back with a racial explanation of low black intelligence and aspiration.

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Jerry Z. writes:

Of the head of the Jamaican black teachers group, Adolph Cameron, reported in the UK Telegraph, you paraphrase him saying:

… that black boys from Jamaica think that academic success is non-masculine, even “gay,” and this is why they do so poorly in school.

Whether blacks use these dodges or the more common one in the U.S.—achieving in school is “acting white”—both are no more than psychological evasions of the deeper, unmentionable truth that black boys (and girls) in general simply lack the intellectual pre-requisites to achieve. “Acting white” may just be another expression of the Jamaican “not masculine” or the obvious corollary for the frightened black male—“gay.” And they have much to be frightened of, despite their reported high self-esteem bravado. Given black male conduct everywhere, “masculine” means cruel, cowardly, criminal, irresponsible and social failure. And “gay” conveniently includes everything else that would define success in the Western world. What a clever back door exit.

How could they face such a truth directly when the liberal establishment has repeatedly told them—as you yourself have put it in VFR—they are more than capable, and it is only white racism (or poverty, or lack of good meals, lack of better income, lack of better schools, lack of control of “their” institutions, lack of black teachers as role models, etc.) that prevents success? Perhaps they feel in control (when they’re really not) by inventing an acceptable way to fail.

LA replies:

I don’t want to pick on blacks or put them down. This madness has been largely created by whites, by giving the blacks the unearned sense of entitlement. But now that the falsehood of equal black capability and superior black entitlement is in place, I don’t see any way to undo the falsehood except through the truth, and that is going to upset many people.

Does anyone have a better solution?

In the old USSR, people stopped believing in the system decades before it came to an end, though they kept mouthing the platitudes because that was socially required. Could something similar happen with liberalism? That people stop believing in its lies, until it dies?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 22, 2011 09:28 AM | Send