Please Stop Helping Us_How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed
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Indeed, Ogbu found that it wasn’t just the black kids who were academically disengaged. Few black parents were members of the PTO. Participation in early-elementary-school programs designed primarily for black children was spurned by black families. And white parents tended to have higher academic expectations for their kids. “From school personnel reports of school authorities, interviews with students, discussions with parents themselves, and our observations, we can confidently conclude that Black parents in Shaker Heights did not participate actively in school organizations and in school events and programs designed to enhance their children’s academic engagement and achievement,” he wrote.8
But in at least one important respect, Ogbu faulted the school system itself for the achievement gap. It turned out that teachers were passing students who did not perform at grade level. The practice was widespread, particularly in kindergarten through eighth grade, and well known among students. And the teachers who were setting lower standards for black kids had “good intentions,” he reported. But it had the effect of leading some black kids to believe that they were doing better in school than they really were. Other kids simply didn’t try as hard as they would have otherwise. When Ogbu asked students why their grades were poor, “they would say that they did not take their schoolwork seriously because they knew they were going to be passed into the ninth grade anyway.” Ogbu’s team of researchers also noted that in classes where most of the kids were black, teachers expected less of the students in terms of homework, even going so far as to de-emphasize its importance. Obviously, school officials aren’t responsible for the poor attitudes and lack of effort among black kids, but ignoring or indulging this isn’t going to help close the learning gap.
Today’s civil rights leaders encourage blacks to see themselves as victims. The overriding message from the NAACP, the National Urban League, and most black politicians is that white racism explains black pathology. Ogbu’s research shows that this message is not lost on black youth. “Black students chose well-educated and successful professional Blacks in Shaker Heights and elsewhere in the nation as role models,” he noted. “However, the role models were admired because of their leadership in the ‘collective struggle’ against White oppression or in the civil rights movement rather than because of their academic and professional success or other attributes that made them successful in the corporate economy or wider societal institutions.”9
There was a time when black leaders understood the primacy of black self-development. They fought hard for equal opportunity, but knew that blacks have to be culturally prepared to take advantage of those opportunities when they arrive. “We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too,” Martin Luther King Jr. once told a congregation. “We can’t keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves.” Today we have people trying to help blacks by making excuses for them. Thus, the achievement gap is not the product of a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors conducive to academic success; rather, it results from “racist” standardized tests or “Eurocentric” teaching styles. Multiculturalists like Geneva Gay, a professor of education at the University of Washington–Seattle, tell us that black kids are underperforming in public schools because of how they’re being taught.
“Standards of ‘goodness’ in teaching and learning are culturally determined and are not the same for all ethnic groups,” she wrote.
The structures, assumptions, substance, and operations of conventional educational enterprises are European American cultural icons. A case in point is the protocols of attentiveness and the emphasis placed on them in classrooms. Students are expected to pay close attention to teachers for a prolonged, largely uninterrupted length of time. Specific signs and signals have evolved that are associated with appropriate attentive behaviors. These include nonverbal communicative cues, such as gaze, eye contact, and body posture. When they are not exhibited . . . students are [unfairly] judged to be uninvolved, distracted, having short attention spans, and/or engaged in off-task behaviors.
Gay said that if the U.S. school system would do a better job of accommodating the “cultural orientations, values and performance styles of ethnically different students” instead of “imposing cultural hegemony,” then black kids would “feel less compelled to sabotage or camouflage their academic achievement to avoid compromising their cultural and ethnic integrity.”10 In other words, black kids are being asked to sit still in class, pay attention, follow rules, and complete homework assignments—all of which is a huge imposition on them, if not a racist expectation.
One major problem with this theory is that it can’t explain the performance of other nonwhite students, including black immigrants, who readily adjust to the pedagogic methods of U.S. schools and go on to outperform black Americans. Even black immigrants for whom English is a second language have managed to excel in U.S. schools. When public-school officials in Seattle (which is home to a significant number of African foreign nationals) broke down test scores by specific home language, they found that “African-American students whose primary language is English perform significantly worse in math and reading than black students who speak another language at home—typically immigrants or refugees.” Just 36 percent of black students who speak English at home passed their grade’s math exam, compared to 47 percent of Somali-speaking students. In reading, 56 percent of black students who speak English passed, while 67 percent of Somali-speaking students passed. And kids from Ethiopia and Eritrea scored even higher than the Somali students.11 A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Education found that although immigrants were just 13 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for more than a quarter of the black students at the nation’s twenty-eight most selective colleges and universities. If “Eurocentric” teaching methods, rather than cultural values, explain poor academic outcomes among black natives, how to explain the relative success of black immigrants from backgrounds much more foreign than those of their U.S. counterparts?
Another nonwhite group that has thrived academically despite supposedly biased teaching methods is Asians. More than half of the 14,400 students enrolled in New York City’s eight specialized high schools in 2012 were Asian, even though Asians make up just 14 percent of the city’s public-school students. To appreciate their dominance, consider the racial makeup of the city’s three most selective public schools—Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School—all of which require an admissions test. In 2013 Stuyvesant, which is 70 percent Asian, offered admission to 9 black students, 177 white students, and 620 students who identified as Asian. The breakdown at Bronx Science was 25 blacks, 239 whites, and 489 Asians. At Brooklyn Tech, the numbers were 110, 451, and 960, respectively.12
What’s remarkable about the racial differences is that while most of the black and white kids at these schools come from middle-class and affluent families, many of the Asians are immigrants, or the children of immigrants from low-income households where English isn’t the first language spoken or in some cases isn’t even spoken at all. When WNYC, the local NPR affiliate in New York, looked at 2012 admissions data for these selective schools, it found that a disproportionate number of the students lived in an Asian immigrant community in Brooklyn. “An analysis by WNYC found more than 300 students from three zip codes in the vicinity got into the city’s specialized high schools last year,” the radio station reported.
Those three zip codes include parts of Sunset Park, Borough Park and Dyker Heights. They were among the 20 zip codes with the most acceptances to the elite high schools. Yet, the average incomes in those three zip codes are low enough for a family of four to qualify for free lunch (they range from about $35,000-$40,000 a year). That’s striking because most of the other admissions to the elite schools came from middle to upper class neighborhoods.
The report went on to explain how diligently the families prepare
for these admissions tests. It turns out that the most popular weekend activity for middle-school students is test preparation. While the parents work six or seven days a week in menial, labor-intensive jobs, the children, beginning in sixth grade or earlier, are preparing for high-school entrance exams. “Even the lowest paid immigrants scrape up enough money for tutoring because those high schools are seen as the ticket to a better life.”13 The parents push the children to do well academically, and the students in turn encourage one another. The culture places a high value on education, and the results speak for themselves. So while multiculturalists are busy complaining about teaching methods and civil rights leaders are busy complaining about standardized tests, the Asian kids are busy studying.
Education is not the only area where an oppositional black mindset has been detrimental to social and economic progress. Black cultural attitudes toward work, authority, dress, sex, and violence have also proven counterproductive, inhibiting the development of the kind of human capital that has lead to socioeconomic advancement for other groups. But it’s hard to see how blacks will improve their lot without changing their attitudes toward school. A culture that takes pride in ignorance and mocks learnedness has a dim future. And those who attempt to make excuses for black social pathology rather than condemning these behaviors in no uncertain terms are part of the problem. “The middle-class values by which we [middle-class blacks] were raised—the work ethic, the importance of education, the value of property ownership, of respectability, of ‘getting ahead,’ of stable family life, of initiative, of self-reliance, et cetera—are, in themselves, raceless and even assimilationist,” wrote race scholar Shelby Steele. “But the particular pattern of racial identification that emerged in the sixties and that still prevails today urges middle-class blacks (and all blacks) in the opposite direction. This pattern asks us to see ourselves as an embattled minority.”14
Black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it to the point where black youths have adopted jail fashion in the form of baggy, low-slung pants and oversize T-shirts. Hip-hop music immortalizes drug dealers and murderers. On a 2013 album Jay-Z, one of the country’s richest and most popular rappers, referenced one Wayne Perry in a song. Perry was a hit man in the 1980s for one of Washington, D.C.’s most notorious drug lords. He pleaded guilty in 1994 to five murders, and received five consecutive life sentences. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, President Barack Obama expressed his affinity for rappers like Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, whose lyrics often elevate misogyny, drug dealing, and gun violence. At the time of the president’s interview, Lil Wayne was imprisoned on gun and drug charges.
Rappers have long expressed pride in spreading degeneracy among black youths. “You walk into a fourth or fifth grade black school today,” Chuck D of Public Enemy told the Village Voice in 1991, “I’m telling you, you’re finding chaos right now, ’cause rappers came in the game and threw that confusing element in it, and kids is like, Yo, fuck this.”15 Meanwhile, liberal sages are preoccupied with “contextualizing” this cultural rot. Cornel West describes rap as “primarily the musical expression of the paradoxical cry of desperation and celebration of the black underclass and poor working class, a cry that openly acknowledges and confronts the wave of personal coldheartedness, criminal cruelty and existential hopelessness in the black ghettos.”16 Michael Eric Dyson, the sociologist and television commentator who credits rappers with “refining the art of oral communication,” says that “before we discard the genre, we should understand that gangsta rap often reaches higher than its ugliest, lowest common denominator. Misogyny, violence, materialism, and sexual transgression are not its exclusive domain. At its best, this music draws attention to complex dimensions of ghetto life ignored by many Americans.”17 Psychiatrists James Comer and Alvin Poussaint tell parents that the nonstop profanity used by black kids today is nothing to get worked up over. “Profanity is profanity, period, and not part of the black language style. On the other hand, you should not let words like fuck, shit, ass, and motherfucker cause you to have seizures, see red, or run for the Bible,” the authors explain. “Today the use of ‘motherfucker’ has so changed that some young blacks use it as a term of endearment and respect. The terms ‘shit,’ ‘bitch,’ and ‘nigger’ also serve as both epithets and expressions of endearment within sections of the black community.”18
Black intellectuals, it seems, are much more interested in attacking those who are critical of these black cultural expressions. When black officials in Louisiana and Georgia moved to pass indecency laws aimed at the proliferation of youths who refused to cover their backsides in public, Dyson criticized not the kids or the culture but the proposals, telling the New York Times that proponents had “bought the myth that sagging pants represents an offensive lifestyle which leads to destructive behavior.” And Benjamin Chavis, the former head of the NAACP, vowed to challenge the ordinances in court. “I think to criminalize how a person wears their clothing is more offensive than what the remedy is trying to do,” said Chavis.19
In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby was the featured speaker at an NAACP awards ceremony commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision. Cosby used the occasion to offer a stinging critique of contemporary black culture. He said that blacks today are squandering the gains of the civil rights movement, and white racism is not to blame. “We, as black folks, have to do a better job,” he stated. “We have to start holding each other to a higher standard.” Today in our cities, he said,
we have 50 percent [school] dropout [rates] in our neighborhoods. We have . . . men in prison. No longer is a person embarrassed because [she is] pregnant without a husband. No longer is a boy considered an embarrassment if he tries to run away from being the father.
Here are some other excerpts from Cosby’s address:
People putting their clothes on backwards—isn’t that a sign of something going on wrong? Aren’t you paying attention? People with their hats on backwards, pants down around the crack . . .
Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t land a plane with “Why you ain’t . . . ” You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that kind of language. Where did these people get the idea that they’re moving ahead on this . . . these people are fighting hard to be ignorant.
Five or six different children—same woman, eight, ten different husbands or whatever. Pretty soon you’re going to have to have DNA cards so you can tell who you’re making love to . . .
What the hell good is Brown v. Board of Education if nobody wants it?20
Cosby received a standing ovation from the audience that evening, but the black intelligentsia wasn’t so kind. Dyson took him to task for “elitist viewpoints” that overemphasized personal responsibility and “reinforce[d] suspicions about black humanity.”21 The playwright August Wilson said he was “a billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect?” Theodore Shaw, then head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the speech was a “harsh attack on poor black people” that ignored “systemic” racism. Commentator Ta-Nehisi Coates agreed, noting that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow—that is, the actions of whites—was primarily responsible for black behavior today, and that “Cosby’s argument—that much of what haunts young black men originates in post-segregation black culture—doesn’t square with history.”22
Actually, it does. In Philadelphia circa 1880, 75 percent of black families and 73 percent of white families were comprised of two parents and children. In Philadelphia circa 2007, “married-couple families account for only 34 percent of African American family households, while white married-couple families account for 68 percent of white family households,” according to the Urban League of Philadelphia. Was there less racism in America, structural or otherwise, fifteen years after the end of the Civil War than there
was a year before Barack Obama was elected president? In 1847 Philadelphia—that is, prior to the end of slavery—historians report, two-parent families were more common among ex-slaves than freeborn blacks. And Philadelphia was no outlier. Nationwide, data from every census taken between 1890 and 1940 show the black marriage rate exceeding the white rate. Liberals want to blame the “legacy” of slavery and racism for the breakdown of the black family and subsequent social pathologies. But the empirical data support Bill Cosby.
There is a much stronger case to be made that efforts to help blacks have had more pernicious and lasting effects on black attitudes and habits than either slavery or segregation. Social welfare programs that were initiated or greatly expanded during the 1960s resulted in the government effectively displacing black fathers as breadwinners, and made work less attractive. Even before Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty began in earnest, New York and other states had already been expanding their social welfare programs. And despite the best intentions, the results were not encouraging.
“The number of abandoned families had grown enormously in the 1960s,” explained Harvard social scientist Nathan Glazer.
More liberal welfare eligibility and benefits were one factor that had encouraged this increase. More generally, the constraints that traditionally kept families together had weakened. In some groups they may not have been strong to begin with. Our efforts to soften the harsh consequences of family breakup spoke well of our compassion and concern, but these efforts also made it easier for fathers to abandon their families or mothers to disengage from their husbands.23