Murray's Statistics Say One Thing, My Teaching Experience Says Something Else
I was approaching home. The car radio
was tuned to WBGO, a jazz station out of Newark, NJ. Ella Fitzgerald was
singing "These Foolish Things." I parked the car. The keys remained
in the ignition. I can hear Fitzgerald any time I want on my CDs, but it had been
one of those days that abrade the soul. Though I was eager to enter my
apartment and put the day's struggles behind me, I sat in the parked car and
listened till the end of the song. I felt as if I had never heard Fitzgerald,
or anyone else, sing before. I noted her awesome mastery of the form. Sinatra
said that Fitzgerald "is the only performer with whom I’ve ever worked
who made me nervous … she is the greatest popular singer in the world, barring
none." Yes, Fitzgerald commanded every syllable of the lyric, every beat
of the music, with the expertise of a surgeon handling a scalpel. At the same
time, though, that she was epitomizing flawless technical execution, she was,
with all-enveloping human warmth, tenderly caressing an absent lover. She was laying
bare her heart, beating, wet, and raw. "These Foolish Things" is not
at all a sad song, and it was not because of any sadness that tears welled up
in my eyes. At the end of a long day, Ella Fitzgerald, who passed away in 1996,
gave me beauty.
Listen to Ella Fitzgerald sing here. Next, listen to WAP. Compare the
WAP lyrics to the lyrics of "These Foolish Things."
Though separated by only 63 years, the two performances could not be more
different. Both Ella Fitzgerald and Megan Thee Stallion are African American
women, and they both represent the most popular art forms of their eras. Other
than that, they have absolutely nothing significant in common.
There is no such thing as an essential
black identity, any more than there is such at thing as an essential white or
Asian or other identity. What there is, is universal human nature, expressing
itself through diverse human cultures. In 1957, American song lyrics expressed
style, sophistication, and elegance. In 2020, a black woman boasts that she
produces large amounts of vaginal lubrication. An Ella Fitzgerald singing today
would receive scant attention. A Megan Thee Stallion would have been sidelined
in 1957.
Charles Murray has come out with a new
book, Facing
Reality: Two Truths about Race in America. In this book, Murray
asks Americans to confront two controversial realities. African Americans, as a
group, score at the bottom of academic achievement tests. This is known as the
"achievement
gap." Asians, as a group, score at the top, whites second, Hispanics
third. Murray acknowledges that any given black person could be much smarter
than any given white person, and any given Asian person could be much less
intelligent than either. He's talking about average scores. Murray associates
African Americans' lower IQ scores with two other phenomena: lower academic
performance and lower career performance. Taxpayer-funded programs like
"No Child Left Behind" have not succeeded, Murray says, and he
implies that IQ is to blame. He also says that corporations like Exxon will
never meet stated goals to place black people in top positions because there
are not enough qualified black candidates for those positions.
African Americans, as a group, also
commit more violent crime than members of other groups; therefore, we must
acknowledge, Murray says, that police will behave differently in a black
neighborhood. Murray cites extensive statistics to support his assertions.
Murray says that he published a book emphasizing these two difficult facts in
response to phenomena like Black Lives Matter, the 1619 Project, and Critical
Race Theory. He says that any approach that blames all of America's problems on
white supremacy is doomed to fail, and may well destroy the country without
producing any worthy replacement.
In recent interviews with Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes, Murray
has been asked if he believes that African Americans are genetically inferior.
Murray points out that extensive and costly attempts to close the achievement
gap, attempts that have been taking place for decades, have not yet done so. In
other words, he expresses pessimism that remediation will ever elevate African
American scores. He says that for the purposes of his book, it doesn't
really matter why African Americans, as a group, score at the bottom of these
tests, rather, we must simply accept that these low scores are a fact, a fact
that no amount of burning and looting by BLM supporters, or self-flagellation
by white liberals, or purity purges suddenly discovering racism in Dr Seuss books
and statues of abolitionist heroes, will ever change. If there aren't enough black
astrophysicists or black tech entrepreneurs, it's not because of white
supremacy, and no new riot or government intervention will ever produce more
black astrophysicists or entrepreneurs. Whatever Murray personally concludes on
the questions of black genetic inferiority, one thing is certain. Others will
cite Murray's work as supporting, with statistics, claims of black genetic inferiority.
One can see that in some Amazon reviews of Murray's book.
Charles Murray, love him or hate him, is
an intellectual giant. Even the Southern
Poverty Law Center, who hates him, describes him as "one of the most
influential social scientists in America." Murray is the W.H. Brady
Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He holds a BA from Harvard, an MS
and a PhD from MIT, and he's published bestselling books. One would have to be
an intellectual giant of comparable skills and stature to tackle Charles
Murray.
I am not an intellectual giant. I'm
sure, though, that many a reader has had something like this experience. People
cite an expert to "prove" something true. This "truth" has
been reached by the best available research. In the marrow of your bones, you
know that that "truth" is false.
Assertions that members of ethnic group
X are genetically less intelligent aren't just about black people. They are about
me. I'm Polish-American, that is, a "Dumb Polak." Stupidity is
associated with Polish identity. Polak jokes had their heyday in the 1970s, but
they live on in the lives of Polish people. In 2021, some Poles were trying to
have a responsible conversation about the Holocaust and World War II. David
Cole, a journalist, pelted them with dumb
Polak jokes.
I am dyslexic and I suffer from ADHD. Even
in kindergarten I realized that others could see and understand things that I
could not, and this maddened me. Dyslexia is independent of IQ. There were
things I could see and understand that powerful people around me could not. I
wanted so badly to penetrate the barrier separating my understanding from
theirs. I wanted to share knowledge, mine with theirs, theirs with mine, so no
one had to feel cognitively poor or left out. Teachers and guidance counselors
did not mentor me to achieve my dreams. I was written of as a
"retard," a bad kid, white trash, who wasn't supposed to amount to
anything. Given that I often wrote backwards, I was told I might be possessed
by Satan. This was said seriously. In high school I was placed in a class with
students who couldn't read or write. They were mostly juvenile delinquents. One
pushed a knife in my back and I had to fight to avoid injury. I worked as a
cleaning woman, a nurse's aide, a landscaper, a waitress.
I craved to contribute to intellectual
life. To me teaching means passing on the Promethean torch. I got an MA from UC
Berkeley, and a PhD from Indiana University, two highly ranked grad schools.
"He who has a why to live can bear almost any how," said Viktor
Frankl, paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche. I wanted to educate others better
than I had been educated. That was my "why." My "how" is
the ritual I go through to read and write. I have to be alone. I have to be
wearing headphones. I listen to repetitive sounds, like a CD of a train or
ocean waves. I consume caffeine in the form of dark chocolate or diet cola. I
read very slowly, for only one hour at a time. Any longer and the shame,
sadness, and frustration at my own handicaps become too great. I do something
physical like lifting weights, and then I return to reading or writing. None of
my teachers would have ever predicted that I would get a PhD and become a
published writer. I did.
Those who believe in black people's
intellectual genetic inferiority will insist that no amount of remediation will
close the achievement gap. They're wrong. Culture, not genes, is behind the
achievement gap. As culture changes, the gap will change. "The culture
argument is just a cop-out," some readers will insist. "The culture
argument just makes excuses for black people's failure to measure up." To
those readers, I want to mention four men I've known. As you read about them,
please ask yourself how you would have fared had you lived their lives.
"Jay" grew up in a cold-water
flat in Newark, NJ. His only playground was a rocky expanse empty of any
feature except broken glass. His grandfather was lynched. His father, traumatized
by a life of incarceration, prejudice, and deadly violence, was an alcoholic. His
mother, citing poverty, rarely ate, and rarely fed her kids. In spite of all
this, Jay's natural intelligence gained him attention. He was granted a
scholarship to an Ivy League institution where he studied biochemistry. Jay earned
his degree, but traveling between the world he grew up in and the elite world
of scholarship that his IQ should have offered him a free pass into was too
jarring of a trip. He died as he was born, in poverty. I was part of the
clean-up crew going through his things. I found stacks of papers on scientific
matters, jotted notes that never left Jay's squalid quarters. We wept bitter
tears. "He could have done so much." Jay was never able to escape the
straitjacket of the ethnicity and the social class he was born into. There was
no one on the Ivy League campus he entered forty-five years ago to reach out to
him, to weave him into the fabric, to tell him that people like him, with his
background, were welcome. Murray corelates high IQ with success and high
income. In Jay's case clashing cultures, not IQ, was the barrier to a fulfilled
American Dream.
Mike was a brilliant writer and stand up
comedian. Steve was a musician and the best natural poet I've ever met. Don was
one of my students, a very gifted young man. The world will never know any of
their talents. Mike became a homeless alcoholic and died in obscurity. Steve
never published a single one of his poems before his relatively early death of
a treatable illness that shouldn't have taken his life – he didn't have health
insurance. Don was hit with two blows, one emotional and one physical, in the
1990s. Both Don's doctors and his friends helped relieve his pain, with the
then-popular opioids, legal and illegal. Don died of an overdose at age 24.
All four of these men were all white. Two
of them were sons of Polish immigrants. Two were Irish Americans. They were
every bit as gifted, in their own fortes, as anyone worthy of coverage on the
front page of the New York Times. What prevented them from achieving the
kind of success that Murray reads as proof and byproduct of superior genes?
Culture doomed them. What culture? The culture in admissions offices that
result in disproportionately low numbers of poor white applicants even being
allowed on campus, as shown in the research of Thomas
Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. If a poor white student does beat the
odds and manages to gain admission to an elite college campus, he will
encounter a culture that lets him know in myriad ways that he is not wanted,
and that he must change who he is in order to fit in and succeed. If he does
change, he will merely be a counterfeit, and he will be ostracized for inauthenticity.
Damned if he does; damned if he doesn't.
Vicki Madden, an author who made the leap
from being a poor white kid to earning a prestigious degree, wrote in a
2014 New York Times op-ed how elite culture communicates to poor
kids that they don't belong. "Once those from lower socioeconomic
backgrounds arrive on campus, it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of
who they are and where they come from, that cause the most trouble, challenging
their very identity, comfort and right to be on that campus. The more elite the
school, the wider that gap … my own experiences were not only undervalued but
often mocked, used to indicate when someone was stupid or low-class: No one at
Barnard ate Velveeta or had ever butchered a deer." The hundreds of reader
comments accompanying Madden's op-ed offer one anecdote after another of poor
students, but bright students, both white and black, who missed their chance,
or who grabbed the brass ring and lived with nagging alienation from their
roots.
Achievement, including the academic and
career achievement that some read as the inevitable byproduct of superior
genes, is in fact just as much a byproduct of mutable culture as of immutable
IQ. Achievement is the end result of an assembly line, in which each added
part, added by yet another set of hands in a long row of sets of hands,
exponentially enhances the ongoing project. I saw this when I worked as
departmental secretary for Indiana University, Bloomington's, chemistry
department. Each professor was, of course, brilliant. They had to be. What
differentiated these academic stars from a failure like Jay is not genes or
race. Each professor was held up by hundreds of hands. Colleagues, secretaries,
societies, deans, social directors, receptionists, award ceremonies,
recognitions, reminders, editors, research assistants, offered daily, hourly,
encouragements, invitations, nudged and prodded and molded each professor into
being the productive success the university that invested in that professor wanted
that professor to be. I used to joke that one professor I worked with could not
enter a room without immediately being handed a bouquet of flowers and a magnum
of champagne. He was, in fact, an intellectual mediocrity. He had attempted
suicide and had few friends. He wrote the right book at the right time and he
was enough of a non-entity to allow himself to be molded as the university and
academic trends demanded. He's set for life.
Jay, Mike, Steve and Dan had all made it
past the initial entrance ramp to the assembly line of academic and career achievement,
and each made one false move that knocked them right off. Maybe they mentioned
eating Velveeta or butchering a deer. That was enough to signal: this person
does not belong here. The trap door opens beneath them and they are lost. Whites
tempted to invest in ideas of white intellectual superiority must look around
and realize – they, no less than black people, know gifted people who never
realized their gifts because their surrounding culture did not support those
gifts. Culture, not genes, explains many failures among both whites and blacks
alike.
Yes, but, someone might argue. That
culture in the chemistry department was invented by white people, not black
people. Doesn't that invention of a culture that facilitates academic
achievement prove white intellectual superiority? No. Humans have lived in Northern
Europe for tens of thousands of years. For most of those millennia they were
hunter gatherers, living lives comparable to North American Indians or
Australian Aborigines. They practiced human sacrifice and lived to be thirty or
forty years old. If Northern Europeans were endowed with genetically superior
genes, Northern Europe would not have experienced cultural stasis for so long.
Sumer, in the Middle East, and Egypt, on the continent of Africa, produced agriculture,
monumental architecture, and writing while the British Isles were still in the
Stone Age.
Europe beyond the Mediterranean didn't
begin its journey to universities, the scientific method, and IQ tests until a
vast culture change, that is the arrival of Christianity, as described by Tom
Holland in is book Dominion, Rodney Stark in The Victory of Reason:
How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, and Scott
Locklin in "No
Catholic Church, No Scientific Method." That university culture isn't
wedded to white people's genes, and can service the intellectual achievement of
those with non-European ancestry, is evidenced by the academic success of
Asians, Nigerians,
and Jews.
Charles Murray and I have one thing in
common. We have both been Peace Corps Volunteers. He served in Thailand during
the Vietnam War and eventually ended up working for the CIA there. I served in
the Central African Republic, one of the poorest and most remote countries on
earth. In the past, CAR was depopulated by the slave trade. French colonizers
practiced a forced labor system, not much different from slavery, right into
the twentieth century. More recently, powerful forces struggle for CAR's raw
materials including gold, diamonds, uranium, and oil.
There were one hundred students in each
of my classes. The floor was dirt and the windows lacked glass or screens. The
country was, and still is, politically unstable. Life expectancy was 49 years.
French tanks patrolled the countryside, and hunger and deadly diseases were
part of everyday life. My African students were among the best I've ever had.
They recognized that school was a precious gift. They were eager, enthusiastic,
active, and quick to learn. And they had nowhere to go with their talents. Their
own government massacred one hundred students before I arrived, that government
was overthrown, and the next government was overthrown shortly thereafter.
Today, forty years later, CAR is still a failed state. Life expectancy is 52
years. If I had the money, I could have taken students from CAR and gotten them
into an Ivy League school. As it is, I have to assume, given the statistics,
the TB, the schistosomiasis, malaria, AIDS, and constant unrest, that many of
them are dead. But the intellectual sharpness and alacrity my African students
showed me under the most demanding conditions make it impossible for me to
believe in black intellectual inferiority.
Murray makes much of supposed Asian
intellectual superiority. I taught in Asia after Africa and I did not encounter
this alleged Asian intellectual superiority. My Asian students were slower than
my African students. Again, I understood this slowness to be an expression of
culture. The Hindu caste system emphasizes a rigid hierarchy and the social
inferior's submission to social superiors. My Asian students shrank from
shining in class. My African students felt no such cultural restraint.
Anyone naïve enough to believe that test
scores prove white or Asian or Jewish intellectual superiority might benefit
from knowing something about the history of IQ tests. As I wrote in my book
"Bieganski,
the Brute Polak Stereotype," "Princeton Psychology Professor and
eugenicist Carl C. Brigham was the inventor of the SAT. Brigham used an early
version to measure the intelligence of millions of World War I U.S. Army recruits.
In a 1923 Atlantic Monthly article, Robert M. Yerkes, professor at both
Yale and Harvard, and founder of the famed Yerkes National Primate Research
Center, reported solemnly: 'Of natives of England serving in the United States
Army only 8.7 percent graded D or lower in intelligence; of natives of Poland,
69.9 percent. In the English group, 19.7 percent graded A or B, and in the
Polish group, one half of one percent.' Accompanying Yerkes' article were three
charts; on all three, Poles scored the lowest of over a dozen ethnic groups."
One can see those charts here.
A century has passed since IQ test
innovators denounced Poles as a lesser race with lesser intellectual capacity
than superior "white" people. Jason C. Booza noted in 2007 that 19.1%
of the Polish population in America has a Bachelor’s Degree as compared to
15.5% of the total population. Poles are more likely to have an advanced
degree. Fewer Polish American families live below the poverty line than the
national average. A hundred years ago, about sixty percent of Poles under
Russian control were illiterate. Today Poland has a 99% literacy rate. If one
believes that contemporary IQ tests prove African American intellectual
inferiority, one must also believe that Polish people were an intellectually
inferior "race" in 1923, and somehow managed to acquire a completely
different set of genes in the past hundred years. Poles didn't acquire new
genes. Culture changed. Test scores and incomes changed with culture.
Similar points can be raised about
alleged IQ superstars, Asians and Jews. The stereotype of Jews as doing well in
the sciences is relatively recent. Centuries ago, when Jews were more likely to
be religiously adherent, Jews were thought of as being wedded to study of the
Talmud to the exclusion of secular knowledge. The Talmud was perceived as a convoluted,
primitive text stuffed with irrational superstitions. The stereotype of Jews
was of a people too rejecting of secular education to excel in science. Lists
of the big names of the scientific revolution include Italians, Dutch, Germans,
Englishmen, Scots, Poles, Czechs, almost all of Christian backgrounds. Many
prominent scientists of previous centuries were devout Christians, including
Copernicus, Mendel, Pascal, Newton, Galileo, Lavoisier, Lemaitre, Descartes.
Jews did not begin appearing on lists of big names in the sciences until after Jews
secularized. Again, it was culture, not genes, that engendered Jewish
intellectual success.
One hundred years ago, when tests were
"proving" that Poles were an intellectually lesser race whose
immigration to America threatened this country, Chinese were written off as so
inferior as not to be allowed into the country at all. The 1924 Quota Act
limited Polish immigration to a trickle. Chinese immigrants were banned
outright in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese people were seen as
servile, primitive, and ineducable. China itself was a backward land that was
manipulated, invaded, and exploited by foreign powers. Like a turtle on its
back, China was incapable of defending itself from horrific abuses, from the
Opium Wars to the Rape of Nanking. This is hardly the profile created by a genetically
superior race.
The "smart Asian" stereotype
is selective. It refers specifically to Asians from China, Japan, Vietnam, and
Korea. The smart Asian stereotype does not refer to Asians from Muslim Malaysia
or Indonesia, the Catholic Philippines, or Buddhist Cambodia. China, Japan,
Vietnam and Korea have been influenced by Confucianism, which emphasizes the
bond between parent and child. That culture, not those genes, has contributed
to East Asians doing well on standardized tests in recent years.
No one would seriously argue that the 19th
century Chinese railroad workers, or Japanese laboring in sugar cane fields or
as household servants, had different genes than Chinese and Japanese students
flourishing today in academic institutions. No one can argue that thirty
percent of Cambodian-Americans
live below the poverty line, versus ten percent of Vietnamese
Americans, or that fewer
Cambodian Americans have an undergrad degree than Vietnamese
Americans because of some genetic difference between them. The
thousand-kilometer border between Vietnam and Cambodia does not prevent genetic
intermixing, but it does separate a largely Buddhist culture from a largely
Confucian one.
I can imagine my leftist friends reading
to this point in this essay and agreeing heartily. "Yes," they'd
insist. "It's culture, not genes, behind African Americans' low test
scores." And that culture, they would go on to say, is white supremacy. My
leftist friends are half right. Every day in this country, black students are
sabotaged by white people and white culture. Leftist white culture hurts black
students. When asked if he thinks that black people are genetically inferior, Charles
Murray refers to the billions of dollars spent over the course of decades to
improve black test scores. In spite of these massive efforts, the achievement
gap persists. Several cultural trends contribute to this gap. Those cultural
trends include white guilt. They also include an "Afrocentric"
education style, and anti-intellectualism among blacks.
Too many American education dollars are
squandered by administrators informed by white guilt. Too many teachers and
administrators are afraid to make the same demands of black students that they
make of white ones. Teachers are pressured to pass underperforming black
students (see, for example, here, here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here
… etc.) On June 28, 2021, according to the Daily
Wire, "Princeton University admitted an incoming class with 68 percent
of students who self-identify as a person 'of color' after nixing its
standardized testing score requirement." Princeton also announced that
undergraduate students of the classics would no longer be required to know
Latin or Greek. The "history of our own department bears witness to the
place of Classics in the long arc of systemic racism," Princeton announced.
A black faculty member added, "the production of whiteness turns on closer
examination to reside in the very marrows of classics."
Black conservative scholar Glenn Loury responded to
these announcements plaintively. If African Americans want to demonstrate their
intellectual achievement, he said, educators do African Americans no favors by
removing the very criteria that prove intellectual achievement. John
McWhorter is another black conservative scholar who rejects Princeton's
lowering of standards in the name of diversity. Lowering standards robs
students of the intellectual "high" students can feel when they accomplish
something. No pain, no gain, McWhorter says, "you often must go through a
phase of drudgery – learning the rules, memorizing vocabulary – before you pass
into a phase of mastery." Why not let black students enjoy that mastery? "The
implicit intention – sparing Black students the effort of learning Latin or
Greek – can be interpreted as racist itself."
Scholar Harold Black grew up
under Jim Crow in the South. On July 5, 2021, he protested "The
Dumbing Down of American Education." "Princeton University’s
announcement … has been seen by some as further evidence of the 'wokeness' of
white liberals intent on denigrating their own culture … My mother who went to
an all-black high school in Macon, Ga during the 1930s had both Latin and Greek
… School systems say these actions are to increase diversity implying that
black and Hispanic kids are too dumb to achieve at a high level. However, many
charter schools demonstrate otherwise … There are well documented methods of
instruction that can dramatically raise reading levels … Such have met
resistance in the public education industrial complex. Instead of adopting
these methods the schools are instead moving to teach to the lowest possible
denominator."
Some insist that blacks are inherently
different from whites and that blacks should not even attempt to succeed at
"white" academics. Jeremiah Wright, Barack
Obama's mentor and friend, gave a speech to
the NAACP in April, 2008. Wright devotes the opening paragraphs of his
speech to a relativist theme, relying on a catchphrase, "different does
not mean deficient." He cites Dr. Janice Hale as teaching him that African
American schoolchildren are like "apples" and white children are like
"rocks." Blacks and whites come from "different worlds;"
blacks are right-brained, people-oriented, "creative and intuitive." Whites
are left-brained, "analytical," and prefer things to people. Black
people and white people clap differently. Wright's approach is the mirror image
of the idea that black students score at the bottom because of genetics. Wright
is not saying that genes make blacks worse; he's saying that genes make blacks
"apples" rather than "rocks."
Back in 2007, a black friend was
struggling through a PhD program. Like so many other PhD candidates, he just
couldn't get the dissertation written. He knew about my cognitive handicaps and
he asked me for advice. How did I do it? I told him about my various
disciplines. He surprised me by becoming angry. "I'm black; you're
white," he said. "I shouldn't have to write a dissertation. I should
be able to get a PhD by" – he struggled for a moment – " by putting
on a drum performance!" I found this comment especially fascinating because
my friend is not a drummer. He doesn't even own any musical instruments. I can
only guess that he had selected drumming based on a rather stereotypical view
of black people as percussionists. He never finished the dissertation and never
got the PhD.
In July, 2020, the Smithsonian
Institution released a graphic insisting that individual responsibility,
objective truth, science, hard work, respect for authority, private property,
planning for the future, delaying gratification, progress, being on time,
intelligence as an attractive quality, the concept of winning a competition,
mastery, action to solve problems, courtesy, and correct grammar are all
aspects of "whiteness."
With such allegedly "Afrocentric" approaches, the achievement gap is
waved away. Achievement is just another expression of racist whiteness.
Jeremiah Wright, the Smithsonian Institution, and others who think that their
dumbed-down approach, focused on "intuition," "clapping," and
drumming is "Afrocentric" need to learn that 29%
of Nigerian Americans have earned an advanced degree, as opposed to 11% of
the nation as a whole. Yes, people with black skin can compete, can read, can
analyze, can be on time, can be polite, can acquire and respect private
property, and can succeed in academia. People with black skin perform these
feats everyday.
To close the achievement gap, blacks
must overcome an aspect of their own culture: anti-intellectualism. It wouldn't
surprise any thinking person that people who have been enslaved, put down, and
excluded, would develop their own value system that is the photographic
negative of the oppressive power group's value system. To distinguish
themselves, and to build in-group solidarity, African Americans developed their
own distinctive speech patterns, music, and fashion. That common human survival
technique gave us spirituals, jazz, and soul food. When a cultural trait
becomes self-destructive, though, it's time to jettison it.
John McWhorter wrote one of the bravest
pieces I have ever read, "Explaining
the Black Education Gap." In that article, and in his subsequent, 2001
book, Losing
the Race, McWhorter details black people punishing each other and
sabotaging themselves for engaging in academics. Shelby Steele has written that
when a black kid can't play basketball, he is not pitied, and no one redefines
sports success to accommodate his failure. Rather, he is told to spend long
hours practicing on the court; he does, and he improves. That insistence on
long hours of practice leading to mastery could and should be applied to
academics. Orlando
Patterson has written that "cool pose culture" encourages black
kids to underperform at school. Both black and white peers reward young blacks
for acting out gangster fantasies.
In their 2004 book, No
Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning,
Abigail
and Stephan Thernstrom responded to Charles
Murray's earlier book, The Bell Curve. They write that Murray's argument
for "a genetic view of IQ" is "unconvincing" and
"uncertain;" study results on the matter "conflict." The
Thernstroms also reject the leftist assertion that the achievement gap is
caused by white supremacy. They compare funding for majority black and white
schools and say that money is not the problem, either, nor is it the race of
the teacher or the class size.
The achievement gap, the Thernstroms
insist, is caused by, and it can be changed by, culture. "Some group
cultures are more academically advantageous than others," they write.
"A wealth of evidence indicates that African-American children – and especially
black boys – are far more likely than others to break school rules, disrupting
their own and their classmates' education." Black children, on average,
grow up with fewer than half the books in the home that white kids have in
their homes. "This parental choice is a good measure of broader
differences related to the world of learning." Black children spend more
time watching TV than other children.
Charter schools, Abigail Thernstrom said
in an interview, freed from teachers' unions, need to teach the cultural skills
that facilitate learning. "Teach [students] how to look at people straight
in the eye when they're talking to them, how to shake hands, how to show
respect for teachers and classmates when they're talking to them, how to talk
quietly in the lunchroom, how to get to school on time, dress for success and
so forth." Leftists denounce any such education as imperialist whiteness.
Thernstrom says, "If you do not learn these soft skills you will not climb
the ladder of economic and social opportunity in America."
Reviewer Kevin
Currie-Knight sums up the main ideas of the Thernstroms' book well. "I
currently work as a special educator in a middle class high school that is 98%
black … many of the statistics and arguments in this book encapsulate well the
things I see every day … according to surveys, black students spend less time
on homework, more time watching television, and experience less parental
accountability than do their white and Asian counterparts … This book confirms
that this experience is not limited to my high school, but is happening on a
national scale … The solution to all of this is to become aware of the 'soft
bigotry of low expectations' … The only way we can close the racial gap is to
set, and keep, standards."
One might think that culture is easier
to change than genes. In the age of CRISPR, that might no longer be
true. Humans cling to cultural forms unless outside forces change them. Egypt
maintained the same style of art for three thousand years. That style was based
on ideas of Egyptian gods and the afterlife. Egypt's conversion to Christianity
rendered that art style obsolete, and it changed.
Poles, too, have a history of
anti-intellectualism. Sociologist Aleksander Hertz wrote that Poles traditionally
regarded intellectuals with "unfriendly treatment, mockery, and
mistrust." How did that change? Through cataclysm. Nazis invaded and
murdered almost all of Poland's Jews, wiping out what had been the country's
mercantile class and much of its white-collar elite. Soviets invaded and
eliminated the aristocracy, redistributed the manorial estates, paved over
farmlands and opened large factories. Nazis and Soviets both mass murdered
educated people. These atrocities created a vacuum. Poles whose parents were
peasants and whose grandparents were serfs filled that vacuum. No such
cataclysmic change is on the horizon for African Americans.
We all know that a child fed a decent
meal will do better at school than a child who has snacked on junk food. We
know that a child who sleeps in a quiet bedroom will do better than a child
who, like the children of my own city of Paterson, must sleep with super-loud
car stereos blaring from sunset to sunrise, with no effective intervention by
city authorities. We know that reading
actually changes the brain for the better, and that internet
addiction changes the brain for the worse. We know that the
human brain does not reach full maturity till the mid-twenties, and
everything that happens from conception to age 25 has a huge impact. We know,
we know, we know.
We must consign to the trash can the
white guilt that encourages us to lower standards for black students. We must
similarly toss the "Afrocentric" "whiteness-studies" identity
politics that says that black people think, and clap, differently than white
people, and that objective truth and the scientific method are somehow
"white." We must listen to and apply the wisdom coming from black
conservatives, who have long been saying everything that needs to be said on
this issue, and we should start applying their wisdom today.
Danusha Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
