Racism? It's Not How Good; It's Skin Color

Why bother increasing efforts to educate the lazy and the dumb. Let's focus on the smart kids who work so we don't have to keep importing doctors, engineers, etc. from other countries.

 

Nope. The facts of this matter do verify, since the 50's, that the Black citizenry is only allowed to progress when the Fed GOVT intervenes to smacketh down any state's or county's or municipal's or tribal's culture, of educational racism.

Stop posting with your, emotions, then join me to post only with the facts.

 

Because "laziness" and "dumbness" are not, or are not entirely, inherent characteristics, but are attitudes which the surrounding social environment can encourage, or discourage. And we can do something about the social environment.

Go to Guatemala, travel through the countryside. Observe the people living in their little huts, raising corn -- intellectually inert. And yet .. these are the descendants of the Maya, who had a positional-expontential numbering system, a calendar, a written language ... At one time, two or three thousand years ago, they lived in an environment which encouraged intellectual achievement. Now they don't.

We cannot turn South Chicago into Tel Aviv, in terms of the social environment. But we can take the minority of mothers there who want their children to escape this terrible place, and help them do so. It's in everyone's interest that we do.

But you're right about the necessity to also focus on the smart kids, and to try to increase the proportion who become engineers and scientists and mathematicians, and decrease the proportion who use their intelligence to become lawyers and bankers and politicians -- as well as improving the quality of the education our future engineers etc receive. We need a network of schools scattered around the country, with provision for boarding for kids who live too far to commute to them, for very bright kids. Taught by well-paid PhDs or the equivalent. Bright kids can start learning calculus in the 8th grade, and should. (Sort of like Bronx High School of Science in New York, now being attacked by New York's leftist mayor, or the specialist science school in Novisibirsk.)

It's a separate problem, though. The bright kids from middle-class homes will do fine whatever we do. We just need to push more of them into 'doing fine' in ways that drag the rest of us forward -- finding the cure for cancer, or a cheap way to protect ourselves from an EMP attack, instead of managing a leveraged buyout or winning damages from one corporation to give to another. (Not that we don't need lawyers and bankers and fund managers -- but let the IQ 125's do that, while our IQ 150s figure out how to design vacuum trains and do genetic engineering and make fusion power work.)

 

You know, actually, you might agree that a real noodlehead will say I'm pretending about anything. If they did the fair thing, first, by checking out the many many times I disparage racism no matter if it's the Dems' anti-darkskin Movement or the GOP's legion of White Supremacist cops and business owners.

Yes sir. I am an American, first, whereas you are a Dem Citizen first or a GOP Citizen first.

And yes please also consider, your story about your liberal friends in Seattle, reeks the stench of a peculiar institution you likely live within;

-Why did you not list the Race of your liberal friends? So to give yourself a loophole, later? When someone intellectually challenged the harlequinade you posted here?
-Why not define what you meant within "accepted by Blacks...as Black" ?? ... there are many, many dimensions to a statement that generalized.
-If your Liberal friends are in fact, Caucasoids, then it stands to reason that just like all other families on Earth...the children will act like the parents! Eureka!! Yes, in this case since the parents are who the kid sees each day around the house exemplifying Caucasoid behavior and mannerisms; Acting White.
-Thereby if, I repeat, if the Blacks kids began to attack her for "acting White" then it is because that is exactly what she had started doing. Within adapting to the new Caucsoid household she lived in. But hey, you clearly do not think that clearly into real life events and going-ons.
-Millions of brilliant intelligent darkskin Black ghetto student ((who White racists disparage since the early-70's)) benefitted from Affirmative Action, in education, and continued to act Black and never act White. They alone, invalidate your entire premise here as well as Judith Rich Harris' study.

 

Black darkskin Africans disprove your theorem here, and still very rarely get accepted for their intellectual brilliance which hath weathered centuries of Racism's hurricanes to silence it.

 

I think the relevant observation here, for African-Americans, is, "With a friend like this, who needs enemies?"

The race problem is not the biggest problem the US faces -- that's avoiding war with China -- but it's in or close to Number Two. And so long as the debate is around whose 'fault' it is, we get nowhere.

I hope the serious and sane people who may be reading this thread will look at some of the links I put up in previous posts.

 

What sort of social engineering do you envision to help caring mothers "escape" or change the social environment in any way. We have been hearing this stuff since the LBT Great Society days and 22 Trillion dollars and close to a hundred programs later what has changed? How much more money do you expect from the taxpayer and what will be the return on investment?

 

Well, keep repeating that. Maybe that will become true when you repeated it enough times.

 

We got our return on investment by, cheating, for 400 yrs and counting. Now it's time to ante-up.

This is not about an investment, it is about a colossal debt we owe.

 

You don't like to tell the truth. Therefore, you are the worst type of friend that a human can ever have.

 

The American taxpayer, like the taxpayers of other civilized countries, bears a heavy burden.

We have sent billions and billions of dollars to Israel, for example. Over a hundred billion dollars since WWII, and we still send several billion dollars a year to that country.

We have sent billions of dollars to Pakistan, a lot of it to its military, who of course have stolen a lot and no doubt spent some aiding their friends in Afghanistan -- the very people who are killing our soldiers there. (Is there anyone here who believes the Pakistani military did NOT know that Osama bin Laden was living in their country?)

Hundreds of millions go to India. Some of this is, supposedly, for 'education'. Anyone who knows anything about how government money us used in countries like Pakistan or India won't be surprised to find that these hundreds of millions have not had much discernable impact in those countries. Maybe the people holding 'Death to America' signs at demonstrations have learned to spell those words courtesy of our money, though, so it has done a bit of good, I guess.

We spend several hundred million a year on our military's 'Africa Command' -- tasked with bringing 'peace and prosperity' to Africa. Well, in this age of automation and unemployment, I guess it's good that there are some jobs where you're guaranteed employment for life.

So what about this: let the Israelis, a nuclear power, deal with their own security. They're perfectly capable, and more than willing, to vaporize anyone who threatens them. They've decided that it would be wise to incorporate several million people who hate them unto death into their nation's boundaries -- why make aliens have to cross over your boundaries, when you can save them the trouble by sending your boundaries over them? -- and this will no doubt give rise to the need for lots of lethal ordinance in the future -- but why should the American taxpayer foot the bill?

Let the Indians and Pakistanis steal from their own long-suffering taxpayers.

Bring the brave warriors of Africa Command back to Africa-in-America. Plenty of action for them in the South Side of Chicago, Watts, Compton .... and they don't have to travel across the ocean to get there.

You rightly ask about 'return on investment' ... where's the return on our investment of a trillion of dollars trying to bring LGBTx rights and the other splendid blessings of American culture to the people of Iraq?

And yes, you're right. A huge chunk of 'War on Poverty' money was money down the drain. But ... there was one sensible thing that happened then: someone in the government, probably suffering from some form of brain disease, actually had an astonishing idea: why not actually TEST various approaches to education, to see which, if any, actually improved children's educational achievements? There were a dozen different schemes back in those days, most of them 'progressive' listen-to-the-children, learn-by-discovery, etc etc. But a couple were more traditional. This program took pairs of educational districts, matched for demographics, and tested outcomes. It was called "Operation Follow-Through". More about it here.

It turns out that there are indeed significant differences in educational outcomes, depending on the approach, and this is especially true for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, who need to learn the basic skills. The educational establishment hated it, of course. But people who think every child should learn to read, write and add up ought to look at it. Go onto YouTube and look for "Siegfried Engelmann" and see what he could do -- his approach was one that "Operation Follow Through" found actually worked. Look up "Marva Collins" while you're at it.

So we CAN spend the money wisely. Find that minority of ghetto mothers who want to escape the depraved culture which surrounds them. Start schools which are actually devoted to learning, and to teaching character.

Children who grow up in depraved environments will become depraved themselves.
"That girls were raped,
that two boys knife a third,
were axioms to him,
who'd never heard
of any world where promises were kept,
or one might weep, because another wept."

It's in our interests to do this.

 

No. Academically selective schools are entry via exam only. That way they're 100% fair. No racism, no preference for the rich, no 'bribery and corruption', etc.

 

Not where I live. Here, it's middle class white Progressives who do that. POC often just quietly dislike whitey, as per usual. And NOT because they think whites are racist (they know whites are the least racist on earth), but because they regard them as inferior. Lazy, dumb, and a little like badly trained pets who can't stop mounting everything in sight and pooping where they eat.

 

Excelling at school does not require two parents, or educated parents, or professional parents. ALL it takes is at least one who is prepared to sit down with their kid/s every day for at least a couple of hours, to ensure they're focused on work. Even a sole parent working two or three jobs can sacrifice a bit of sleep to do this, if sufficiently motivated.

No outside agency can make that happen. It MUST come from the parent.

 

No we can't. No amount of money, better schools, 'programs', or largess of any kind will make a jot of difference. The ONLY thing that will make a difference is black parents changing their attitude to education. When the parents' attitude is right, any school will do. If 50% of the parents at a given school have the right attitude, the school becomes a winner. Etc etc.

As any teacher working in an academically selective public school will tell you .. the (high) quality of the school is a result of the high quality of its students - it's not a product of the school itself.

 

That almost sounds racist ,Crank.

 

Take it up with your brown friends

 

It came from you, not them.

 

I hope you realize that this is nothing but White Asians who already enjoy preferential treatment, for being White and sort of European-looking, are now trying to maximize their White Privilege with this whiny little discrimination claim they make here.

 

Thanks for the intelligent response. I am in agreement with you on a lot of what you say. Although your statements are perhaps too idealistic IMHO, as a taxpayer I would rather see money spent in America (even if wasted) than spent on the absurd foreign policy adventures that seem to obsess our leaders.

 

Everything (almost) that you say is true. It's just not the whole truth. Fire your child with ambition, read to them, tell them they must do well in school -- but then send them to a school where they are surrounded by people who think that doing well is contemptible ... and will take a character of iron to resist this. A few people have it, most don't.

Like breeds like. If you are surrounded by intelligent, polite, aspirational students -- who compete with each other not to see who can get away with saying the nastiest thing to the teacher, but to see who can solve that hard maths question, or who knows the answer to why the Roman Republic fell -- then you will tend to become like that too.

You say that parents create character. Please read Judith Rich Harris, and you'll see that it's peers who create character. A good parent will try to get their child among the right sort of peers. Our job is to make this possible, through decent schools with high standards of behavior.

Example: I once taught, part-time, for one horrible year, in a local state school (in the UK). It was an all-boys school, in a 'deprived' area. I later found out that the locals called it "the Borstal" ('borstal' being a British word for a boys prison). The class I taught for one hour three times a week were all right -- it was the equivalent of an AP class in Computer Science. But the school! During the break, the teachers went to 'the common room' for tea -- being there it was like being with soldiers sprawling in trenches after the first day on the Somme. As you walked down the corridors, you would pass classrooms where the kids were all yelling. (The progressive disease has gripped the British educational establishment as well as the American, and one of the malign results, in addition to draining education of real content, has been a great relaxation of expectations for standards of behavior. Half of newly-qualified teachers here quit after a few years, in large part because of the abuse they get from students.)

One of Britain's best schools is an elite private school, called 'Eton'. I think at one point most of the members of the British cabinet, and a large proportion of the members of the Labour Party leadership, and of the National Committee of the British Communist Party, were all Old Etonians (as young men who have been through Eton are called). It occurred to me that if you swapped student bodies -- not facilities (Eton has wonderful facilities, my terrible school not), not staff (Eton has highly-qualified staff, my school not) -- just swapped the students ... and then asked an aspiring parent, would you now like your child to go to Eton? -- of course they would say No. They would rather have opted, I am sure, that their son go to my crappy school, with no sports facilities and average teachers, but a stellar student body.

So yes, if a parent is indifferent to education, there is not much we can do. What we can do is to make it possible for those parents who do care about education, to send their children to decent schools. I've given some examples of decent non-white schools. If their students had been sent to the chaotic, mediocre state schools, they would have been surrounded with peers who would have pulled them down. They would have been in an educational crab-pot. Children lucky enough to attend decent schools are in an environment which encourages achievement, which reinforces what decent parents tell their children.

We need to create such schools everywhere we can.

 

That isn't actually true. I know some years ago research showed that the No one thing which made the biggest difference in how well a child did in school was the academic achievement of the parent. Given that those with high academic achievement tend to be from richer families, that also is a plus for those more rich.

 

The solution is simple, doable, and the only moral thing to do: A separation between the state and education. But, it will require a more enlightened culture than one that worships innocence crucified, and which reads horoscopes for pleasure.

 

Indeed! So what did I say which was racist? The bit about middle class white Progressives?