What Is Racism?

 

“Racism” can be understood generally as favoring or disfavoring — or expecting less or more — of someone based merely upon the color of his or her skin. 

Other factors, such as real-world crime statistics however, can enter into realistic assessments of one’s situation. 

Consider this statement: “There is nothing more painful to me... than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” 

 

Is the statement racist, or simply realistic?   Does it change your understanding to know that it quotes Jesse Jackson
(Baltimore Sun, Dec. 3, 1993)?

Consider the FBI's report on murders for 2021, below. It's less comprehensive now under Mr. Biden than before, whether under Trump (e.g., FBI’s 2019 Uniform Crime Report) or Obama (e.g., FBI's 2016 Uniform Crime Report)

But taking some time with “Offender Race” data allows a summary of  the following tragic data for murders (homicide).  Where the races are known:  blacks, though only about 13% of U.S. population, commit more than 60% of murders and represent nearly 60% of murder victims.  Violent crimes as a whole show similar disproportions.

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Lunatic D.E.I. Obsession

 

The organized Left's obsession with "diversity, equity, and inclusion" has had and is having real-world consequences outside the insular world of education.  Merit and ability, in even the most critical of institutions and individual professions are being superseded by preferential racial, ethnic, and gender-based selection and even with quotas, despite the principles of equal protection under law. 

Richard Delgado and Elise Stefancic, the authors of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, assert that “For the critical race theorist, objective truth, like merit, does not exist, at least in social science and politics. In these realms, truth is a social construct created to suit the purposes of the dominant group.”  And the Rule of Law, a foundational American principle, is defined as just "Legal formalism, which some theorists believe is necessary for order, stability, and cohesiveness in a society.”

So it's only "some theorists" who believe in the Rule of Law? 

Some of the more prominent critical race theorists in fact do want to do away with the rule of law.  They're the active proponents of, or willing spectators to, what you saw in the absence of Rule of Law during the summer of 2020, in the burning down of businesses and the wave attacks on police.  And in America's big cities, the mayhem continues.

Meanwhile, the fixation on "diversity, equity, and inclusion" ("D.E.I.") instead of demonstrated merit is already affecting such fields as Medicine and Health Care, the Legal profession, airline pilots and attendants, ranging even to the  California State Water Resources Control Board.   

Even when D.E.I. isn't downright dangerous, it's ludicrously absurd. See, for example, the chart on "ASPECTS & ASSUMPTIONS OF WHITE CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES," as published by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2020.  The Museum received immediate condemnation from multiple directions, so took down its chart, and apologized. 

But the "ASSUMPTIONS" about "WHITENESS," treated as negative or counterproductive behaviors (e.g., the notion that "Hard work is the key to success"), are in fact baked in to current D.E.I. training around the country.  The increasingly common result in schools is a system of diminished standards for academic performance (to generate equalized outcomes rather than equal opportunity), with differential behavioral rewards and penalties based on race.

Even proposals in response federal Department of Energy, Office of Science grant solicitations for the most important foundational work in science (think particle physics at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories, for example) is required to include a "Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research" statement ("PIER plan") to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.”

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Even the AP Course on African-American Studies Gets into the CRT Act

See the revealing Wall Street Journal editorial on what the irresponsible College Board tried to slip into its AP course on African-American Studies:  reparations, "Black Lives Matter"(more than others), "Black Queer Studies," "Postracial Racism and Colorblindness" (including "racecraft"), "Intersectionality and Activism."

These particularly centrifugal lessons begin in Unit 4 of the course, at page 21 of 79.  This post may have disappeared by the time you read this, because the College Board has been caught in the act of sordid reverse racism, and has apparently had to back down.

So what’s to be done?  

Instead of counterproductive victimology lessons and incitements, a factual study of American race relations would be beneficial.  It could include the slave-reliant economy of the Democrat Old South, then the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party.  It could continue on with the early 20th Century's still-overt racism and KKK support by Democrats and Democrat leaders such as Woodrow Wilson (who approvingly showed The Birth of a Nation at the White House.)

That could lead to an understanding of the modern welfare state and its multigenerational cycles of cynical paternalism, dependency, family dysfunction, and savage criminality — and its $30 Trillion of “Great Society” / “War on Poverty” spending, which has left poverty rates essentially unchanged.  Poverty has won the "War on Poverty" because the huge sums expended have so been badly targeted.  Figuratively, welfare programs have been a mile wide but an inch deep, designed more to buy votes than to strengthen families (the ultimate, real-world need).

A factual course on race relations would and should incorporate Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s March, 1965 analysis, The Negro Family: the Case for National Action, written for the Johnson administration.  Moynihan’s statistically backed report showed the American black family already in crisis, particularly in its nearly 25% rate then of missing fathers in black family households. The result then was, and still is, “a tangle of pathology.” 

The report’s concluding programmatic recommendation was for Lyndon Johnson and his Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Department to state that “The policy of the United States is to bring the Negro American to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship.  To this end, the programs of the Federal government bearing on this objective shall be designed to have the effect, directly or indirectly, of enhancing the stability and resources of the Negro American family.”

President Johnson expected to utilize Moynihan's report in a keynote address for his planned White House Conference on Civil Rights.  But the grievance industry of the time, already well-established (including some black “leaders,” white liberals, and HEW bureaucrats) objected, and the paper was suppressed.   Today, 55 years later, the rate of fatherless black homes with children is tragically three times its 1965 rate — and white illegitimacy is itself now at 27% or higher.

So yes, American blacks (and others) are victims, all right — of a welfare state which enriches certain self-appointed racialist mouthpieces, along with welfare-administering bureaucrats, activist teacher unionists, and other rent-seeking opportunists of all races.  It’s that story which needs to be told, not exhortations for captive-audience students to join an already overcrowded field of miseducated malcontents, marinated in a "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" propaganda stew.
What works is work.

In reality today, in school districts across the country, including SRVUSD, D.E.I. stands for Division, Exclusion, and Incitement.  That needs to change — soonest!  

 

Effects of Ideological Indoctrination on Academic Performance

 

In SRVUSD's recap of its California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress  (CAASPP), the District notes that in comparing the 2021-2022 school year to 2018-2019, "Overall 2022 SRVUSD CAASPP scores fell 2 percentage points in English Language Arts and 5.5 percentage points in math."

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Educational researchers Lance Izumi and Wenyuan Wu observe that "From 2020 to 2022, reading scores for nine-year-olds on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), often referred to as the nation’s report card, registered the largest decline since the 1990s, while math scores declined for the first time ever. These score comparisons were the first nationally representative snapshot of student learning during the pandemic."

And "While school closures and ineffective distance-learning efforts were important reasons for the slide in test scores, former North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue, who chairs the board responsible for the NAEP, warned, “We can’t keep blaming COVID.”

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An in fact, "Many students report that increasing ideological indoctrination in the classroom is leading to weaker standards and lower expectations.... The politicization of classroom instruction leads not only to indoctrination but also, as [a] California student noted, to lower student achievement. 'It’s not a school’s place to impose on the students any viewpoint,' he observes. 'What we need to do is really encourage achievement for all people.'"

Izumi is the Pacific Research Institute  author of Not As Good As You Think, a 2007 book which showed SRVUSD high schools performing poorly in State testing of college readiness, then averaging only 49% proficiency in English, for example. 

And before the State ended its Academic Performance Index (API) testing, SRVUSD used to average only 5.6 or 5.7 out of 10 in the API comparison with demographically similar schools.  Unfortunately (due to political pressures?), California's API program reporting was ended in 2013. 

But even the present CAASPP test data shows worrisome performance drops, especially in SRVUSD's middle schools and high schools (where ideological intrusions are most intense), and particularly in mathematics.  See the individual school data, below the District summary.  And now, here comes GRADING for Equity....

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