The Mis-education of Afro-Americans, Yesterday

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Paul Kersey leads with this story--Nutshell: Teachers in failing black school districts routinely change kids' test scores to comply with No Child Left Behind, fraud investigation ensues, hands are thrown in the air, shall anyone ever succeed in closing The Gap?


It may surprise us that one hundred years ago, as today, much ink was spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations had passed since Emancipation; what progress had been made on the great project of lifting up this 'race in its childhood'? W.H. Collins, in 1918:

But notwithstanding the fact that the illiteracy of the Negro race had been reduced by 1910 to about thirty-three per cent, there is a widespread feeling of disappointment in Negro education. Not that it has made the Negro more criminal as has sometimes been said, however, this is not yet well determined, but rather that it has failed to make him a greater producer, or to aid him to adjust himself to economic conditions. Instead of firing him with the desire to do more and better work, too often he quits it altogether.   (1)

They [Southern men around 1904]  unite further in the opinion that education such as they [Blacks] receive in the public schools, so far from appearing to uplift them, appears to be without any appreciable beneficial effect upon their morals or their standing as citizens. But more than this; universally, they report a general depravity and retrogression of the Negroes at large in sections in which they are left to themselves, closely resembling a reversion to barbarism.   (2)

Aside from some unqualified successes like the Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes, Afro education had not yet produced the desired results.  Blacks still had higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.


A century on, what has changed?  Much ink is still spilled over the question of educating American Blacks.  Two generations have passed since the end of Segregation, and...

...and Blacks still have higher rates of illegitimacy, criminality, and disease and lower levels of wealth than white Americans.  Now, via standardized testing, we also know that they lag far behind in the classroom.

The Guilty Party

Olave d'Estienne has been kind enough to post this leaflet which lays out the plight of Blacks and Hispanics wronged by the tech industry.

Although they are 12.6% of the population, we are told, Blacks make up only 1% of internet company founders and 1.5% of Silicon Valley employees.   The latter, in addition, are subjected to a humiliating yellow badge-wearing regime which bars them from riding company bicycles.

The leaflet also shares with us the troubling facts that (1) Blacks' higher melanin content makes it harder for face-tracking software to sense them and (2) the disproportionately high crime rates in black ghettos tempt U.S. pedestrians to avoid them, with technology.

Who shall pay for these sins?

The detectives at OnlineITDegree.net claim to have sniffed out the culprit:  Its name is 'tech' and its weapon is 'racism':

Strangers at the Gate

What can destroy a great people?  The student of history knows vast civilizations have crumbled into dust.  He is sure, however, that no such fate could possibly await his own.

Rome, 100 A.D.:

While every land…daily pours
Its starving myriads forth. Hither they come
To batten on the genial soil of Rome,
Minions, then lords of every princely dome,
Grammarian, painter, augur, rhetorician,
Rope-dancer, conjurer, fiddler, and physician.

--Juvenal, Satire III

For 'great peoples destroyed,' few have drawn as much puzzlement as the Romans.  Historian Tenney Frank (1916):

When Tacitus informs us that in Nero’s day [54-68 A.D.] a great many of Rome’s senators and knights were descendants of slaves and the native stock had dwindled to surprisingly small proportions, we are not sure whether we are not to take it as an exaggerated thrust by an indignant Roman of the old stock. (1)

Frank pored through 13,900 sepulchral inscriptions from imperial Rome to try to find an answer.  His research

... has at least convinced me that Juvenal and Tacitus were not exaggerating. It is probable that when these men wrote a very small percentage of the free plebeians on the streets of Rome could prove unmixed Italian descent. By far the larger part—perhaps ninety percent—had Oriental blood in their veins. (1)

 

Mass importation of Eastern slaves coupled with ever more lax manumission (slave-freeing) practices, Frank argued, helped lead Rome to (as Thilo Sarrazin would say) 'abolish itself.'

We know for instance that when Italy had been devastated by Hannibal and a large part of its population put to the sword, immense bodies of slaves were bought up in the East to fill the void; and that during the second century, when the plantation system with its slave service was coming into vogue, the natives were pushed out of the small farms and many disappeared to the provinces of the ever-expanding empire.[...] During the first century B.C., the importation of captives and slaves continued, while the free-born citizens were being wasted in the social, Sullan, and civil wars. (1)

Wealthy women opting out of motherhood? Juvenal again:

But hardly ever does a woman in labour lie in the gilded bed; so potent are the arts, so powerful are the drugs, [of] she who makes them infertile.

Frank concurs:

By combining epigraphical and literary references, a fairly full history of the noble families can be procured, and this reveals a startling inability of such families to perpetuate themselves. We know, for instance, in Caesar’s day of forty-five patricians, only one of whom is represented by posterity when Hadrian came to power. The Aemilii, Fabii, Claudii, Manlii, Valerii, and all the rest, with the exception of the Cornelii, have disappeared. Augustus and Claudius raised twenty-five families to the patriciate, and all but six of them disappear before Nerva’s reign. (1)

Tenney Frank may have been right; he may not have. But in the two thousand years since Rome fell, have we seen proof of his 'replacement-by-race-mixture' theory elsewhere?  Far-fetched, or far-sighted?

The Tsar is Far

No sort of philosophy of history, whether Slavophil or Westerniser, has yet solved the enigma, 

why a most unstatelike people has created such an immense and mighty state, 

why so anarchistic a people is so submissive to bureaucracy, 

why a people free in spirit as it were does not desire a free life?  --Nikolai Berdyaev, 1915

The sky is high; the tsar is far.  --Russian proverb

Another election day on planet Earth, another population refusing to act the way Right-Thinking Westerners believe it should.

Two things have mystified the Francis Fukuyamas of the world about non-Western peoples and their way of 'adopting democracy.'  One is these peoples' annoying propensity to produce rulers who stuff urns, crack heads, and throw opponents in prison.  The other is that even when such peoples do manage to squeeze out a 'fair' election, 50+% of them vote for some brutal lunkhead completely unpalatable to Right-Thinking Westerners:

 A monitoring group set up by protesters in Russia has refused to recognise the results of the presidential election which returned Vladimir Putin to power.

The League of Voters said there had been widespread fraud and the poll was an insult to civic society in Russia.

Mr Putin, it added, won 53%, not 63.6% as reported officially. Such a result would have still brought him victory.

Because everyone knows that Democracy (TM) leads a priori to the kind of leaders Right-Thinking Westerners find palatable.  Why just look at Iran in 1979, Algeria in 1991, Nicaragua, Venezuela, or Palestine in 2006, or Ukraine just last year.

Russians, in any case, have long fascinated Western Europeans.  Who is this people, one once asked, held in semi-slavery by their own ethnic brethren?  Who is this people, one asked later, who has abolished free entreprise as well as religion?  Who is this people, one asks today, who continues to happily elect a man famous for clamping down debate and strangling the free press?

Who indeed?

Impossible to know the soul of another people without living it. Outsiders can only observe, listen, hope to catch a glimmer of what they can never truly grasp.