BLUF: I'm arguing for a completely different attitude towards the racial justice crowd from the standard one where they are granted some amount of moral high ground. That high ground gives their criticisms of us and America weight that it simply doesn't warrant. When you stop seeing them as well-intentioned, it changes all of your interactions with them. In short, if they can't earn your respect by pointing to real-world success, they shouldn't get it.
I've ranted in the past about the appalling test scores in Baltimore, but this one was a real shocker.
BALTIMORE (WBFF) — A Baltimore City teacher came forward with devastating information that showed 77% of students tested at one high school are reading at an elementary school level.
The teacher works at Patterson High School, one of the largest high schools in Baltimore with a 61% graduation rate and a nearly $12 million budget. We agreed not to identify this source who fears retribution for giving Project Baltimore the results of iReady assessments.
In reading, 628 Patterson High School students took the test. Out of those students, 484 of them, or 77%, tested at an elementary school reading level. That includes 71 high school students who were reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first-grade level. Another 45 are reading at a second-grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School, were reading at grade level, which comes out to just 1.9%.
Emphasis mine. Baltimore is run, top to bottom, by the racial justice crowd. Just what future do those illiterate kids have? Are they going to get into STEM, perhaps?
Meanwhile, recently in Science magazine, we have this.
As science struggles to correct systemic racism in the laboratory and throughout academia in the United States, external forces press on, making it even more difficult to achieve equity on all fronts—including among scientists. The latest example is the decision by the US Supreme Court to hear cases brought against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill challenging their right to use race as a factor in undergraduate admissions. It is sometimes easy for scientists to let colleagues in other disciplines engage in a debate like this, but the dismantling of race-conscious admissions would deal another blow to equity in science.
Scientific American isn't any better. It's all political action and race relations with no acknowledgment of what the data clearly shows - family structure is the dominant factor.
Academic institutions and scientific organizations must confront race relations while navigating the difficulties of a pandemic and economic strife. They should also aknowledge (sic) their role in perpetuating systems of racial oppression. It should not have taken this long for them to realize that something had to be said, and it should not take long for something to be done.
To the racial justice crowd, particularly in the sciences, I say: I grant you nothing and I mean nothing. I do not accept any claims of good intentions, compassion, concerns for racial justice, devotion to equity or anything else. I grant you nothing. Those kids in Baltimore are not outliers, they're the norm. If you didn't know that, it's because all of your attention has been focused on you. You don't understand, know or care about those kids.
Nominating a black woman to the Supreme Court is all about you. Lobbying for affirmative action in the sciences is all about you. Showing affluent blacks in crazily disproportionate numbers in TV ads is all about you. It's all fantasy.
This is nothing but moral masturbation and a lot of us can see it being done out in the open. It's sick.
" no acknowledgment of what the data clearly shows - family structure is the dominant factor."
ReplyDeleteOK, fine. Family structure is the dominant factor. We've come around to this time after time. So, where does this get us? So these kids are screwed up and uneducated because they come from single-parent families with a parent that either can't or won't look after them properly. What next? What do you propose be done about this?
It seems to me that the fundamental problem is that a lot of people don't want kids, don't like kids, have no aptitude for being parents, can't get along with a spouse in any case, and yet nevertheless find themselves with children. This is a recipe for neglectful/abusive parents who raise screwed-up kids. No amount of trying to talk them into avoiding sex, or getting and staying married in spite of hating each other's guts, is going to fix that. I knew a lot of kids in high school whose parents were married, but clearly despised each other and took out their frustrations on the kids. And those kids were the ones that were failing in school and getting into trouble with the law. They were going to be messed up whether their parents stayed married or not.
The only solution I can see, is to make it as easy as possible for people to avoid having kids if they don't want them. Do you have any better suggestions?
Tim,
ReplyDeleteI won’t argue your points. They stand as obviously true and hard to fix.
But “equity” (which is lefty speak for bald face racism, racism which is red in tooth and claw) is NOT a solution to this or any other problem (with the possible exception of helping certain self-hating individuals feel like they have flagellated themselves In penance). But the cost of “equity” is that it causes our society to fail those who are able to better themselves and society. It is anything but true equity. It is anything but “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
It isn't "people" who "find themselves with children", it is women. And, other than exceeding rare statistical outliers such as rape victims, women do not "find themselves with children" -- they get pregnant because they *choose* to get pregnant. Many women choose to get pregnant for bad reasons, and it shows in the lack of care they afford those children.
ReplyDeleteIt is already "as easy as possible for people to avoid having kids if they don't want them"; it is one of easiest things in the world.