America: We’re ignorant, we’re uninformed… and we feel great about it! Sounds pretty southern to me.
But wait—fair is fair. When you spend $400 billion a year on schools, teachers, administrators, condoms, Mary Kate and Ashley videos, etc., you’re going to get something for all that money. I don’t want to give the impression that our public schools don’t transmit anything to our children other than self-esteem. America’s public schools do an extremely effective job of inculcating some basic principles into our children.
Like racism. Since Slobodan Milosovic went out of business, no institution has done a better job of promoting racial division and ethnic conflict than the American public school system. For example, if you haven’t been to a government-run school lately, you probably didn’t know there was such a thing as Chinese math. No, really! Remember “Balancing my checkbook is as hard as Chinese math”?
Well, it really exists and is taught at American public schools, along with Mexican math, African math, Italian math, and Polish math, the latter consisting entirely of word problems ending with the phrase “to change a light-bulb?”
This educational approach is called ethnomathematics, which is part of the incredibly confusing new-new math movement (a.k.a. “whole math”) that public schools have adopted just to make sure no children accidentally learn something by glancing casually through their own textbooks. According to essayist John Leo, ethnomathematics teaches that “Western math… isn’t universal but an expression of white male culture imposed on nonwhites.” One essay by an ethnomathematician written for public school teachers refers to the “so-called Pythagorean Theorem,” as though the relationship between angles on a right triangle changes with the ethnicity of the observer.
According to teacher’s guides made available with ethnomathematic texts, math class should accomplish goals like “prejudice reduction; equitable pedagogy; and ensuring cultural equality and empowerment for students.” No mention of actually doing math, but who’s got time when you’re studying how aboriginal tribesmen measure the floors of their grass huts?
Ethnomathematics is on an embarrassing par with “Ebonics,” except that Ebonics is a punch line and ethnomath is public school policy. And doesn’t anybody care that black test scores on the SAT are lower for math than they are for language? Black activists have long claimed that the SATs are culturally biased. Thoughtful Americans have replied, “Maybe the verbal part, but how the heck can a binomial equation be racially insensitive?”
Well, now we know…
It turns out there is a national movement of ethnomodified education for our public school kids. Science, social studies, foreign languages—all are learned differently by students based on their skin color. Some black activists are urging public school systems to open black-only academies so that black children can be taught to multiply and divide from a black perspective. In Oklahoma City, the Millwood public school system goes so far as to teach its children a Black Pledge of Allegiance:
We pledge allegiance of the red, black and green
Our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle,
And to the land we must obtain.
One nation of Black people,
With one God for us all,
Totally united in the struggle for Black Love,
Black Freedom, and Black determination.
So let’s see if I’ve got this straight: We run a public school system where the districts are drawn based on race. We use education theory based on the idea that black and white children are inherently different and cannot be taught the same way. Black children need to be taught in separate (but equal?) schools from white children where they can learn the principles of racial loyalty. And all this is happening in public schools outside the South?
Somebody owes Governor Wallace an apology.
These obvious, indisputable criticisms of the current education system are dismissed as propaganda by opponents of what is commonly called “school choice,” but is more accurately titled “a free-market school system.” I am a tireless and unashamed advocate of such a system, due in part to the suffering I endured at the hands of the public schools.
I went to a school that, by any measure, was terrible. Too small for a football team, a choir, an orchestra, or even a school newspaper, Pelion High School (which was also Pelion Middle and Pelion Elementary) offered the bare minimum of classes one could take and still get a diploma from the academic acme that is the South Carolina Department of Education. We had but one high school science teacher, who had to switch physics with chemistry every other year to accommodate graduation requirements. Fortunately she was utterly incompetent in both, so nobody’s education suffered unfairly. Our one foreign language offering was French, though the language skills of many of my classmates suggested that English might be considered an alternative.
Our French teacher was an earnest young woman who was very sincere about la langue française, but, “C’est dommage!”, she also had to teach social studies and junior high biology. As a result, my entire French vocabulary consists of adolescent entendres revolving around the phrase “J’ai un grand stylo.”
When I went to college, I majored in music, played in the college jazz band, and sang in the opera program. But as a public school student, I played in a band so small that my trombone and I were often half of the entire low brass section, teamed up with a trumpet player pressed into service on a baritone.
It was a public school so bad that teachers and administrators openly acknowledged its badness. How could you deny it when fewer than 10 percent of graduates were going to college and only half of your eighth graders were going on to graduate? There were no advanced placement courses, no college-level credit courses, and the only targeted education courses of any kind involved lathes and teachers with missing fingers.
The year I was graduated from Pelion High, our school had one of the lowest average SAT scores in the state of South Carolina, which, in turn, had the very lowest SAT scores in the nation. It could be rationally argued, therefore, that I went to perhaps the worst public school in America. And I went there for only one reason. Because I had to.
The government of the state of South Carolina—like the governments of Cleveland, Newark, and virtually every public school system today—forces children to go to the local school to which they are assigned. And here’s the exquisitely stupid part, the part that convinced me that the public school system is essentially a southern institution: Just a few miles away from my house, in the opposite direction of Pelion, was Lexington High School. It was a big, new public school with a football team and a real track team and an orchestra and several choirs and literature teachers who didn’t need emergency electrolysis. It was everything my high school was not.
We Pelion students heard rumors about kids taking classes at Lexington that gave them partial credit at the University of South Carolina. We saw news stories about plays being performed there, even musicals with musicians from the South Carolina Philharmonic coming out as ringers. Some people even said the cafeteria had a menu—you could actually choose what you had for lunch!
It was almost too much to be believed.
Here I was, trapped at Gomer & Goober High, but my family was paying the same taxes to the same school district with this far superior school. If I could get my dad to drive me over every day, why couldn’t I go there? It seemed a reasonable proposition.
That’s when I learned what the American public school system was all about. My mother and I went to see my principal, an inept, elderly woman named Mrs. Nichols. A part-time librarian with little experience, Mrs. Nichols earned the principal’s position by demonstrating the unique management quality of being married to our former principal Mr. Nichols.
Mrs. Nichols insisted that it would be a bad thing for one of the few kids with test scores at or above the state average to leave this fine institution of learning. She was not willing to sign the paperwork for me to leave, and the only other person who could authorize suc
h a move was the superintendent of the district. She mentioned that she might have his phone number handy, being that they were relatives.
When pressed as to why I would be forbidden from attending a school that was clearly in my best interest, Mrs. Nichols (unintentionally) articulated the fundamental structure upholding our public school system. She told me—and I am paraphrasing here—that if everyone who wanted out of this second-rate educational hellhole were allowed to escape, the school’s average daily attendance could drop so low that the school might be forced to close. And did I think that there was some other school where Mrs. Nichols’s unique qualification would make her the principal? And where would the underperforming teachers at Pelion High find gainful employment?
Or, as she put it far more succinctly, “Michael, if I let you leave, what about everyone else?”
Yes, what about “everyone else”? Everyone else gets screwed. Everyone else gets an education that would embarrass the average student in Singapore or Sweden. Everyone else gets to become part of the collapsing test scores and widening knowledge gap that are American youth culture.
But the teachers, incompetent and otherwise, remain gainfully employed. Their average salaries are on the rise, faster than inflation. Meanwhile, class sizes continue to shrink. More money for more teachers to teach fewer children, but test scores remain flat.
And, chances are, the children being miseducated by this system are more segregated by race and ethnicity than at any time since 1970. They are being sorted by skin color, taught by skin color, tested by skin color, and if some education intellectuals have their way, will be indoctrinated by skin color. All right here in America the Beautiful.
So tell me again how the North won the war? We must have missed that part in my high school history class.
It was taught, of course, by my basketball coach.
7
B.J.U.S.A.
The trouble down [South], at the bottom, is very simple. That section of the American people which has the most difficult and vexatious of all problems on its hands, and not only on its hands but directly under its nose, is precisely the section the least accustomed to clear thought, and hence least capable of it.
—H. L. Mencken on the South and race relations
If Michael Jackson went to Bob Jones, whom would he be allowed to date?”
This was my question for Jonathan Pait, an able and affable gentleman who at the time had one of the worst jobs in America: P.R. flak for Bob Jones University. I was interviewing him about BJU’s ban on interracial dating, and I asked him this question to embarrass him. To his credit, it did.
I also asked it to show how foolish the race obsession at BJU became when scrutinized. Banning dating based on skin color was such a ludicrous campus policy I couldn’t imagine how one went about defending it.
So I was taken aback when the articulate Mr. Pait began offering arguments for the defense that sounded eerily familiar. In fact, they sounded like they’d been ripped from the editorial pages of the New York Times and the web pages of the NAACP. The more he spoke, the more it became clear that, far from being out of the mainstream of American thought on the issue of race, the quirky backwater campus of BJU was at the forefront.
In fact, everything America believes about race it learned from Bob Jones.
Not that the theoretical mating status of Michael Jackson isn’t a difficult question for the folks at BJU. First, there was the ban on interracial dating. Then there was the public confusion over Jackson’s sexuality in general. So, even after the administration decided whether or not Michael Jackson is technically represented by the NAACP, they would still have to divine whether Holy Scripture allows God-fearing women to date Diana Ross.
When you’re in the talk radio biz as I am, having a local institution like Bob Jones is manna from heaven. Their fourth-rate, irrational theology is a font of embarrassing press coverage. Every few weeks some former student would profess an unnatural lust for his fellow man and show up at a BJU Bible study under the threat of arrest, or some negligent theology student would inadvertently set one of his snakes loose on the general campus population, etc., etc.
On this particular day, the ban on interracial dating was the topic du jour. I wasn’t particularly interested in the theology, something to do with the Tower of Babel or the Mark of Cain or the Nut of Job, I forget. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, one of them ignored God’s immutable commandments regarding sunscreen or some such and received the dark-skinned mark of Satan, or something to that effect.
What I was interested in was the mechanics of the race-based dating policy. Sure, making a rule that white girls and black guys can’t go to the multiplex together is dumb in principle. But try imagining how truly unpleasant it must be for a civilized human being to put it into practice.
First, the university needs some formal, institutionalized method to determine the race of each Bob Jones student. As the Michael Jackson example shows, you can’t always tell a person’s ethnicity (or gender, for that matter) from a mere casual glance. So somewhere on staff, Bob Jones has to employ ethno-stenographers, carefully tracking the race and ethnicity via some Bible-based formula determining official blackness and whiteness and Hispanicness, etc., along with some method of tracking who was who. Or what. Or whatever. Frankly, just thinking about it gives me a headache.
Then the folks from BJU have to commit themselves to the idea that a student’s ethnicity mattered, that two of God’s creatures—one black, one white—identical in every way save skin color, should be treated differently and be taught to treat each other differently as well. This requires true, heartfelt commitment from the Jonesians: It’s easy enough to engage in such sloppy thinking in conversation, but to behave in such an embarrassingly indefensible way in public takes raw courage. Or stupidity. Among fundamentalists, the two are often indistinguishable.
And finally Bob Jones and Co. must craft an explanation as to how these irrational policies are in line with the dictates of Holy Writ and also in the best interest of all concerned. Setting aside the bumpkin Bible beating, BJU’s defense was one of public service: The customers are always right and mostly white.
They argued that the ban on interracial dating was in place at the request of parents who sent their children to the bosom of Bob Jones to suckle on the sweet milk of segregation. Bob Jones’s policies were well known; indeed they were trumpeted across the land. If Mom and Dad believed race was all-important, if they had (just for the sake of argument, mind you) an inappropriate concern with ethnicity and tribal purity, well, was it BJU’s duty to change their minds?
All of which resulted in this: As a matter of policy, an accredited American university had to pay faculty and staff to break dates between teenagers because they were the wrong color. It’s humiliating. It’s disgraceful.
Oh, and by the way: It’s the official racial policy of the United States of America.
Everything America believes about race, dear Yankee, can be found in the practices and policies of Bob Jones and the old, segregated South. Only now, those same policies and values are woven through the politics and principles of the two major political parties, our federal, state, and local governments, our private businesses, our colleges and universities, thousands of race-based clubs and organizations, and even TV game shows. In fact, one of the few places you will no longer find this overt racial obsession is at BJU.
After the media scorching it endured in the 2000 presidential primary, Bob Jones University unceremoniously dumped its interracial dating ban like a fat prom date. They claimed that the public pressure had nothing to do with it. Then again, they also claim that their frequent references to the Roman Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon are meant in a nice way.
Don’t be misled into thinking this is a defense of Bob Jones. If anyone is defending the BJU ethos, it’s probably you. You, Kweisi Mfume, Hillary Rodham, Al Gore—the vast majority of my fellow Americans are allied with Bob Jones on behalf of a worldview I totally and ut
terly reject—namely, the idea that race is determinant. That race matters. That when you know my skin color or national origin, you know something significant about me. It is the one redneck notion that has truly taken hold of the American psyche.
As long as the typical American, North and South, buys into this idea, we’re all on the Bob Jones team, sorting the black marbles from the white ones. The only difference between you and the devoted followers of Herr Jones is the color of the marbles you pick first.
Have you already forgotten your census form, your U.S. government census form? The one that dedicated three entire pages to questions about your racial and ethnic identity? If any document devised by man could solve Bob Jones’s Mating Mystery of the Multihued Michael Jackson, this was the officially sanctioned government document to do it. Start with the six—count ’em, six—categories for race: White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Some Other Race. Then you were given eighteen more “response categories” like Japanese, Samoan, Asian Indian, and Guamanian or Chamoro. Had enough? Ah, but there’s more. Your U.S. government then asked if you are “Hispanic or Latino” or not—God forbid we overlook the White/Hispanic/Guamanian, how would we live with ourselves?
When all the possible categories and subcategories were analyzed, we Americans divided ourselves and each other into 126 separate ethnic or racial clans. In short, it was the kind of government document that only the Confederacy could love, sent to you by your friendly federal government.
How can any honest citizen deny that the race-conscious ideology of the South has become our national policy? When a society begins sorting the Chamoros from the Samoans, you’ve gone beyond casual interest. You’re like the southern sheriff from Act I of Show Boat coming aboard to look for quadroons and octoroons.
Redneck Nation Page 7
