Posted on 01/15/2004 7:51:04 AM PST by xsysmgr
In the current issue of the left-leaning The American Prospect, Lisbeth B. Schorr has an article entitled "The O'Connor Project." The title alludes to Justice Sandra O'Connor's opinion last summer upholding the use of racial preferences in university admissions, which she concluded by saying that she hoped the academic performance of young African Americans would improve enough so that, in 25 years, this kind of discrimination would no longer be called for. And so, asks Schorr — director of the Project on Effective Interventions at Harvard University — what is to be done in order to make O'Connor's hope come true?
Schorr's answer is to spend "somewhere between $110 billion and $125 billion a year" on social programs that would end racial disparities in the following critical areas: (1) "birth outcomes" (i.e., "teen births" and prenatal care); (2) school readiness; (3) opportunities in K-12 education; (4) "opportunities for adolescents to make a healthy transition into young adulthood" (i.e., not become criminals); and (5) "opportunities that families have to provide their children a good start in life." This list — or, more precisely, Schorr's discussion of it — demonstrates very well the unwillingness of the Left to speak candidly and reason honestly on this issue.
Items 1, 2, and 4 are all in large part clumsy attempts to avoid saying what has been obvious for a long time: The major problem facing African Americans as a demographic group today is the fact that seven out of ten of black children are born out of wedlock. Just about any social pathology you can name, especially for boys, correlates with growing up in a home where there is no father. (See my earlier column on NRO.) You can avoid the i-word (for illegitimacy) and write — as Schorr does — about "teen births," and "the necessity of nurturing, supportive adults," and "matching at-risk young people with adult mentors." But it boils down to this: So long as the African-American illegitimacy rate is more than triple that of whites, you are going to have a serious "underrepresentation" of academically well-prepared blacks when it comes time to think about college.
I'm skeptical about how effectively this problem can be addressed by anything done in the classroom, but it is certainly true, as Schorr acknowledges in item 3, that a disproportionate number of African-American children go to lousy public schools. But Schorr can't bring herself to come right out and acknowledge as well that these schools are themselves, by and large, a product of the liberal establishment — and that the principal obstacle to their reform is that establishment and, in particular, the teachers' unions. The only way to improve the educational opportunities now available to children assigned to failing public schools is to force the schools to compete and to give these children the opportunity (through vouchers or other choice programs) to go elsewhere. And guess which side of the political spectrum favors that, and which one opposes it?
Schorr's final item nicely complements the item that obviously ought to be on her list but isn't. Number 5 is essentially a complaint that we don't all have the same amount of wealth and income in the United States (unsurprisingly, Schorr proposes that the cost of her O'Connor Project be met by "rescinding the portion of the 2001 tax cut allocated the wealthiest 5 percent of U.S. families...together with a modest increase in the gas tax or a 25 percent cut in 'corporate welfare'"). The real problem, however, is a culture gap, not a money gap.
As Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom demonstrate brilliantly with an array of empirical data in their new book No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning — and as John McWhorter confirms through his own experiences as student and teacher in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America — it is an unfortunate but widespread phenomenon that too many African-American kids see excelling in academics as "acting white," and too many African-American parents fail to disabuse them of this notion. Schorr knows that a culture gap exists here and in other key respects, but she won't use the c-word any more than she will use the i-word.
Note that, while there is no doubt that illegitimacy, failing public education, and poverty are serious social problems, it is a mistake to view them as essentially racial in nature, because many whites (and Asians) face them, too, and many blacks (and Latinos) do not. For those who support racial preferences, the deep-down justification for them remains a sense that they are needed to "make up" for past discrimination against certain groups. But this justification won't wash, as the days of Jim Crow recede further into the past, and as it becomes obvious that the remaining social problems — whomever they afflict — have little, and less and less, to do with discrimination.
Incidentally, will the use of racial preferences blessed by Justice O'Connor make it easier or harder to close the academic gap she identifies? It is ironic but likely that preferences are themselves a critical element in keeping the gap wide. They enable politicians to sweep the real problems under the rug by, to mix a metaphor, using preferences to paper over them; and preferences also remove the incentive for academic excellence at the same time that they stigmatize and encourage a defeatist and victim mentality among their supposed beneficiaries.
— Roger Clegg is general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity in Sterling, Virginia.
Use the b-word instead. The elimination of the stigma of bastardy is a major factor in the cultural breakdown occuring today.
No, it's not the only way.
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