Part 4—Where only elite children count: It would be a better world if young people—young people at Yale, let's say—were never viewed or assessed on the basis of their "race."
(Note: The concept that people have a "race," and that their race defines their identity, is a destructive idea which comes to us live and direct from The World the Slaveholders Made.)
It would be a better world if young people were never assessed in such ways. It would also be a better world if young people didn't even think they were being so viewed and assessed, sometimes in situations where their judgment may be imperfect.
It would be a better world if young people—even young people at Yale!—weren't confronted with such situations. On the other hand, it would also be a better world if the students of the state of Connecticut didn't produce academic data like these:
Average scores, 2017 NaepBy a standard, very rough rule of thumb, the average white student in the Nutmeg State was 3.7 years ahead of the average black student in Grade 8 math. It would be a better world if the many black kids in the state of Connecticut weren't asked to deal with the consequences of that kind of achievement gap.
Connecticut, Grade 8 math
White kids: 295.01
Black kids: 257.73
Hispanic kids: 263.00
Asian-American kids: 311.18
That said, the kid who gets looked at sideways at Yale is elite. On that basis, that person is worthwhile in the mind of our high liberal class.
The young person who's struggling in the Bridgeport schools comes from a much lower class. All in all, those Bridgeport kids can go drown in the Sound as far as our high liberal news orgs are concerned. The microaggressions of Yale are a serious deal to our liberal elite. The macro-burdens of Bridgeport are essentially never discussed.
It has now been more than two years since the New York Times, as part of a bungled news report, presented the voluminous, gruesome data from a nationwide study by Professor Reardon and two associates.
The data are there for all to assess. The data have been there for more than two years, but our big corporate stars just don't care.
Rachel and Lawrence and Chris and the gang would drown in the Long Island Sound themselves before they'd stoop to discussing such a topic—though they might be more likely to end it all in the ocean surf found in the Hamptons.
Just south of Bridgeport, we find Fairfield, the city's wealthy next-door neighbor. Using Readon's data, we explored the gaps between the students of these two school systems in yesterday's award-wining report.
That said, while New Haven is known as The Elm City, Fairfield is gateway to the Gold Coast. Meandering through the county toward New York City, the traveler hits such school systems as these (Professor Reardon's data):
Where the average student stoodGranted, those are some of the wealthiest communities in the nation. That said, kids from those communities will sometimes head off to spend their college years at Harvard or even at Yale.
Grades 3-8, reading and math
Westport: 2.6 years above grade level
Ridgefield: 2.6 years above grade level
New Canaan: 2.7 years above grade level
Darien: 2.6 years above grade level
Black kids, Bridgeport: 1.9 years below grade level
Bridgeport's kids will rarely have to worry about something like that. According to Reardon's data, the average black student in Bridgeport was 4.5 years behind the average student in those communities, presumably at or near the start of sixth grade!
We liberals! We care a great deal, as we basically should, about microaggressions at Yale. But what would it take to make us consider the average black kids across the whole state of Connecticut?
They're much more numerous than Yale students, and they face a much tougher road through life. What keeps us from briefly considering their plight as we rage, rage against the torments faced by the students of Yale?
We'd planned to discuss the ultimate dream—the kind of "desegregation" which might result if the Bridgeport schools and the schools of next-door neighbor Fairfield just up and decided to merge.
We liberals love to dream such dreams. They make us feel like good, moral people—and they throw the little girl who will start first grade in Bridgeport this fall deeper off into the Sound.
We'd planned to discuss that impossible dream, but let's leave that for another day. Before moving on to Atlanta, "the Yale of The South," let's finish our ruminations about gaps and man [sic] at Yale:
In an ideal world, young people at Yale would never be assessed on the basis of their "race." Also in an ideal world, they might occasionally care a bit more about the young people of Bridgeport.
In an ideal world, our multimillionaire corporate cable stars would stop selling The Chase long enough to talk about the gaps which exist all over the state of Connecticut.
Granted, they'd have no idea what to say, so long has it been since they've considered such problems. And, of course, they'll never do that because their owners know something about us:
We liberals! We weep for the poor elite children of Yale. As for the low-income kids of New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport and Stamford, we quit on those kids a long time ago.
We're rarely asked to consider their plight. Lawrence and Rachel, and their handlers, know that we don't really care!
Tomorrow: Lemon and Clark
"In an ideal world, our multimillionaire corporate cable stars would stop selling The Chase long enough to talk about the gaps which exist all over the state of Connecticut."
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, they could report that we don't live in an ideal world.
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"(Note: The concept that people have a "race," and that their race defines their identity, is a destructive idea which comes to us live and direct from The World the Slaveholders Made.)"
ReplyDeleteAlthough the concept of race was certainly used to justify slavery in the 1600-1800s, it wasn't invented for that purpose. The concept of race comes after slavery, not before it. People of the same "race" enslaved each other and slavery has existed as long as there have been people. Those conquered in battle or stolen from other groups were routinely enslaved. Adjacent peoples in Biblical times were enslaved and the Bible contains instructions about how to treat slaves. The Irish enslaved the British and vice versa. Indian trives enslaved each other. So slavery does not depend on race.
Ideas about race emerged from Darwin's ideas about natural selection and species, applied to humans. Race is part of early science, before people fully understood genetics and were based on incomplete information. Race was misapplied to justify mistreatment of people, just as other ideas have been similarly used. But race wasn't invented to justify slavery. It was used to explain the inferiority of slaves and immigrants and women and a variety of people, for a variety of reasons.
Somerby would know this if he had taken history classes instead of philosophy. Or if he read anything beyond pseudo-physics and Chozick's biography. History of science would be a good place to start.
The physical observations upon which primitive ideas about race are based are identified as a human universal by anthropologists. All cultures, including those isolated from Western ideas and those where people have dark skin, show a preference for lighter skin and assign higher status to those with lighter skin. Theories propose health reasons for these universal, seemingly innate preferences. African societies entirely isolated from contact with white-skinned people, have such preferences. Associating light skin with other favorable qualities is part of what social psychologists call the halo effect. This doesn't have to be based on skin color, as shown by the tendency to assign to men more favorable qualities than women. But these other cultures didn't call this preference "race." And this has nothing to do with slavery.
W.E.B. DuBois wrote about this modern idea that race was invented to justify slavery and people were strongly influenced by his rants about how our very language assigns terms like white to good things and black to bad. Sorry, but linguistic marking wasn't invented to justify slavery either.
So it's Bob Somerby, you say, who hasn't taken enough history classes?
DeleteLINK
[QUOTE]
Southern Paternalism
The World the Slaveholders Made Two Essays in Interpretation.
by Eugene D. Genovese.
Pantheon Books. 274 pp. $5.95.
Like Eugene Genovese’s previous studies of the ante-bellum South, the two essays which comprise this book attempt to examine slave societies through the prism of social class rather than by focusing primarily, as most previous scholars have done, on patterns of race relations. Thus, in the first of the two essays, Genovese views the different New World slaveholding societies as a series of colonial cultures which he tries to locate “within the process of worldwide capitalist development itself.”
To achieve this “world perspective,” he constructs a skillfully-triangulated comparative analysis: of the social and economic patterns among European powers involved in New World slavery; of the distinctive forms that slavery assumed in French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and English colonies; and of the social and economic tensions which eventually divided the emerging slave societies from their mother countries.
The result is a sophisticated triumph of comparative historical analysis, although one that often jettisons the Marxist framework which Genovese professes to be both using and revising.
What emerges from Genovese’s analysis is a complex spectrum of slave societies, ranging from some that were thoroughly “capitalist” in orientation to more paternalistic ones like the American South, which Genovese views as the leading modern “counterrevolutionary” slaveholding culture.
Genovese’s Southern slaveholders are rarely singleminded agrarian capitalists, ruthlessly engaged in frank pursuit of the plantation dollar. Rather, he finds the slaveholders evolving during the ante-bellum period into a decidedly anti-capitalist, class-conscious elite with a paternalistic life style. (Genovese prefers the term “seigneurial” to the designation “feudal” employed by certain of his critics.)
Within this emerging “seigneurial” culture, he argues, the defense of slavery as a “positive” good—a defense undertaken by Southern intellectuals beginning in the 1830’s—represented not “mere apologetics or rationalization . . . [but] the formulation of a world view that authentically reflected the position, aspirations, and ethos of the slaveholders as a class.”
...Most pro-slavery theorists of the times, Genovese acknowledges, avoided a total assault on the basic democratic, individualistic, and entrepreneurial foundations of American society. They chose to defend bondage as one positive good, proper for the South, rather than as the positive good, proper for the entire nation. This was not true of George Fitzhugh—the subject of the second of the two essays making up this book—whose unrestrained jeremiads against market capitalism, free society, and the “wage slavery” of Northern labor made him somewhat suspect even among fellow slaveholders....
The World the Slaveholders Made carries Genovese’s argument for Southern paternalism—an argument first spelled out in The Political Economy of Slavery—to its own “logical outcome” in George Fitzhugh’s writings.
In the process, the author polishes his basic conception of American slavery into an even more systematic, if not more persuasive, treatment than can be found in his earlier work. The present book really breaks new ground, however, in its comparative analysis of New World slave systems; its first essay, a superb piece of scholarship, provides the structure for a major reassessment of the Western Hemisphere’s slaveholding classes....
[END QUOTE]
"Also in an ideal world, they might occasionally care a bit more about the young people of Bridgeport."
ReplyDeleteWhat is Somerby's evidence that young people at Yale don't care about the young people of Bridgeport?
My experience of college students is that they not only care about social problems but are actively involved in trying to help. I see the social clubs on campus doing volunteer activities in the community, helping a variety of people ranging from tutoring in public schools to helping seniors, staffing free clinics, building homes for the homeless, and otherwise participating in a variety of worthwhile activities to improve conditions for others. It is part of the idealism of youth and is broadly encouraged by all universities to help students incorporate such concerns into their identities as they prepare themselves for adult life.
On what basis can Somerby claim that those at Yale are less caring than college students on any other campus, who are markedly more caring than their non-college counterparts and than adults in general?
"We liberals! We weep for the poor elite children of Yale. As for the low-income kids of New Haven, Hartford, Bridgeport and Stamford, we quit on those kids a long time ago."
ReplyDeleteI think Somerby's guilty conscience is showing here. I didn't quit on those kids -- he did. I am still working with kids in public schools. He isn't.
What would our world look like if everyone supposedly did care about the gaps? Would low-performing kids be taken out of their homes and assigned to upper middle class families for enrichment? Would they be asked to attend school twice as long every day in order to do the work to catch up? Is there a magic pill we could give them to make up for those lost early years as disadvantaged toddlers without preschool?
Somerby thinks we all give lip service to kids but do nothing. What should we do? I think an excellent start would be to fully support public schools by equipping them with resources and paying teachers well, and restoring the librarians and counselors and nurses whose jobs were cut, not to mention the art and music teachers. But would that do anything to change the gaps? Presumably these things affect all students, not just those in the lowest percentiles. What else? More special ed and remedial teachers? That means supporting the colleges and universities that train teachers too. WAIT -- that means supporting Yale, because Yale surely trains teachers and does education about how to address gaps in learning. That's what the field of education does, among other worthy goals. Maybe it means caring about the college students at Yale because they will become tomorrow's teachers. Maybe it means caring when black Yale students encounter race-related difficulties, because if they don't make it through and become good teachers, how will those gaps ever be fixed? Maybe Somerby will go back to teaching, so he doesn't have to keep writing offensive posts that chastise those who are already doing more than he does to address the needs of black children everywhere.
Maybe it means caring when black Yale students encounter race-related difficulties, because if they don't make it through and become good teachers, how will those gaps ever be fixed?
DeleteTroll much?
"I think an excellent start would be to fully support public schools by equipping them with resources and paying teachers well, and restoring the librarians and counselors and nurses whose jobs were cut, not to mention the art and music teachers. But would that do anything to change the gaps? Presumably these things affect all students, not just those in the lowest percentiles. What else? More special ed and remedial teachers? That means supporting the colleges and universities that train teachers too."
DeleteThis!
The threads at the Daily Howler, home of the highest sockpuppet participation rate on the web.
DeleteIt may be time for the analysts to intervene, because Bob seems to be suffering some kind of seizure, as he keeps writing the same post over and over and over again.
ReplyDelete" we quit on those kids a long time ago. "
ReplyDeleteYes you did, Bob. Yes you did.
Digby sez:
ReplyDelete"The president surrounds himself with criminals." MSNBC's Chris Hayes told his "All In" audience last night that is what Democrats should say every time they are in front of a camera. There have been to date 17 indictments and 5 guilty pleas, three from Trump associates. Over 100 charges. "The campaign of the president of the United States, including some of its most senior members," Hayes states bluntly, "was staffed with criminals."
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ReplyDeleteLawrence and Rachel don't mention achievement gaps. Ergo, liberals don't care about achievement gaps. Logic! Or more properly, Boblogic!
ReplyDeleteHere's how Somerby shows he "cares:" sits in Starbucks every day, re-issuing yesterday's Boblogic post about schools, which isn't really about schools at all, but about liberals.
Suggestion, Bob: take the money you fork over to Starbucks everyday for your overpriced lattes and use it to purchase supplies for needy schools. And not the schools in Connecticut. Try somewhere closer to home, say, Baltimore.
The subversion of our government by a foreign power is a more serious problem than racial gaps in educational achievement, which have always existed. Our cable hosts have the right priorities, not Bob.
DeleteUrging us to pay more attention to black kids and less attention to The Chase, aids Trump and his henchmen. Our country is in crisis -- we must address that now.
Josh Marshall sez:
ReplyDelete"The President is trying to obstruct and stymie and hamstring a lawful investigation into his own crimes and those of his associates: by repeatedly lying, firing and threatening to fire people, intervening in law enforcement decisions in his own interest, fabricating fake stories to impede the investigation. The list goes on and on and even those who know better are becoming inured to it. The President is in the midst of a massive, more or less public and months-long effort to cover up his own crimes and the crimes of his associates. That’s really clear-cut. It’s obvious to anyone why that’s not okay. So we need to state that clearly so everyone will know what is at stake. Otherwise, everything becomes a blur. We lose the thread, the significance. We should stop talking around the issue and say this as clearly as we can because our future depends on it."
Somerby's nitpicking is helping the President conceal his crimes, not contributing to the kind of clarity needed to save our country from these criminals.
This isn't about gaps, but Ali Velshi (MSNBC) correctly cites test scores. He also talks to someone knowledgeable about Detroit schools. She discusses the growth of charter schools in Detroit and the consequent dilution of the dollars per student per school. The number of school districts went from around 200 to around 500, with no real increase in overall school funding.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.msnbc.com/velshi-ruhle/watch/betsy-devos-education-theory-and-the-power-she-wields-1183669315970
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"We liberals! We weep for the poor elite children of Yale."
ReplyDeleteAs was pretty obvious a few days ago, no one wept for those Yale grad students. Most people thought they were both idiots.
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