The "deep racism in the country" quote you pull out, Bill, has a qualifier on it which needs to be included. The full meaningful quote is "the historical legacy of deep racism in the country." I used that phrase to cover slavery, Jim Crow, the equivalents in the north, etc. On the latter point, the north, I forget whether it was James Baldwin or someone else who wrote that he preferred the American south, this was in in the 60s, because the racism was open. You at least understood where you were with folk.
Now to your question.
If the problem is that we keep blacks from learning with our school system, how do you account for the success of immigrant blacks who go to K-12 here in the this country?
That's not my argument. There are clearly achievement differences among blacks that are not simply accounted for on the basis of individual attributes. Living in some suburban areas makes a large difference; in fact, social class plays a big role here in which the children of privileged blacks do much better than others. Moreover, as we all know, some immigrant blacks do well in US school systems, as you note.
I don't think we live in an apartheid society in which all blacks are kept from achievement, and only a heroic few managed to crawl over the barriers. That would be a silly notion. But I do believe that we have forgotten the poor in urban ghettos, which is largely a black and hispanic population; that we all suffer from that forgetfulness; and that the most obvious lever to address that is public school education. In fact, on that latter point, the leverage in public schools, I would not be surprised if the notion of the public schools as an opportunity leverage were not built into Horace Mann's vision for the public schools. Don't know.
It is certainly built into the notion of the public library. Since I'm getting active in my local library, am on the board now, I've begun to read about its historical mission. It contains more than a little of that notion. |
