John McWhorter, Ph.D.
The Wilson Quarterly, Summer, 2000
There is no surer way to get a whoop of appreciation from a
black audience than to affirm how strong black people are, how we have survived.
As the title of a popular motivational book for African Americans puts it,
Success Runs in Our Veins. Yet almost everyone would have to agree that when it
comes to schooling, our record of success has not been impressive. Almost 40
years after the Civil Rights Act, African American students, on average, record
the poorest academic performance of any major racial or ethnic group in the
United States, at all ages, in all subjects, and regardless of class level.
Despite decades of affirmative action and other forms of
assistance, the gap extends all the way from the bottom rungs of the American
educational system to the top. In 1997, for example, some 70,000 students
applied for admission to American law schools. Among them were only 16 black
students who scored 164 or higher on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT)-enough
to put them at least in the bottom quartile of the entering class at the
nation's top six law schools-and had a college grade paint average of 3.5 or
better. That year, 2,646 white applicants offered such credentials.
The victimologist mindset that prevails among black Americans, in the news media, and in other quarters of American society, ensures that the lagging academic performance of black Americans is viewed solely as a result of black suffering and deprivation. Victimologist thinking infuses almost all discussions of education with the assumption that "black" means "poor," and that the dismal school performance of black youngsters is the product of inequities in school resources, racism among teachers, and chaotic home lives. But today the majority of black children do not grow up in poverty. The black middle class is growing rapidly, yet its children, too, are falling behind in school.
As I will show, the victimologist roster of black
disadvantages provides only secondary causes. These disadvantages affect blacks'
performance in school the same way a weakened immune system leaves a person
vulnerable to the common cold. Many factors can increase a person's
susceptibility, but if the cold virus is not present, all the other factors
combined cannot cause the illness to emerge.
Why do students in other minority groups with similar vulnerabilities still manage to make excellent grades? Why do black students often continue to perform below standards even in affluent, enlightened settings where all efforts are made to help them? The chief cause is not racism, inadequate school funding, class status, parental education level, or any other commonly cited factor, but a variety of anti-intellectualism that plagues the black community.
This anti-intellectualism is the product of centuries of
slavery and segregation during which blacks were denied education, but it has
been perpetuated by the powerful strand of separatism in black culture, a legacy
of the 1960s, that rejects as illegitimate all things "white." The
worlds of the school and books are seen as suspicious and alien things that no
authentically black person would embrace-except perhaps to make money or to
chronicle black victories and the injustices blacks have endured. A black
teacher friend of mine calls this the African American "cultural
disconnect" from learning.
This attitude permeates black culture, on both a conscious
and a subconscious level, all the way to the upper class. Yet it goes
unrecognized because of the widespread insistence on viewing blacks as victims.
Programs and policies such as affirmative action, Head Start, campus minority
counseling, and African American studies curricula are all based on this
misconceived view. They have improved black school performance only a notch or
two-a neat measurement of how much black victimhood actually contributes to the
problem. Only by taking a deep breath and devoting as much attention to the
cultural problem as we currently do to victimhood can we really start black
students on the path to doing as well in school as anyone else-something that
has become alarmingly inconceivable to many Americans, black and white alike.
The size of the education gap comes most clearly into focus at that all-important break point in the American educational system, the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). For all the anxious discussions about SATs and affirmative action, few Americans are aware of the size of the performance gap between black students and others in this nationwide college entrance exam-and even fewer are aware that the gap remains large regardless of income.
The numbers are disheartening. In The Shade of the River
(1998), their important pro-affirmative action study of students at 28 selective
universities, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok found that almost three-quarters of
the white students who applied to five elite institutions in 1989 scored over
1200 out of 1600, while little more than one-quarter of the black applicants did
so. The practical implications of such differences can be striking. At the
University of California, Berkeley, where I teach, the top scores among black
freshmen in 1988 clustered in the lowest quarter of all scores at the
university. Nationwide, the black-white gap in SAT scores has changed little
since the late 1980s.
Is black poverty to blame? It is only a subsidiary factor.
Indeed, few poor black students take the SAT. Even those who aren't poor don't
do well. In 1995, the mean SAT for black students from families making $50,000
or more was a mere 849 out of 1600. Compare that with the mean score in 1995 for
white students from families earning $10,000 or less: 869. The level of parental
education is not a factor: In the same year, the mean SAT score for black
students whose parents held graduate degrees was 844, even lower than the
overall middle-class black mean.
Statistics can deceive, but here a simple headcount tells
the story: In 1995, exactly 184 black students in the United States scored over
700 on the verbal portion of the SAT-not even enough to fill a passenger
airplane. Only 616 scored over 700 on the math portion. (The top score possible
in each case is 800.) This was O.2 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively, of the
black test takers. Among white test takers, by contrast, the proportion scoring
over 700 was five times greater on the verbal portion and 10 times greater on
the math portion.
Bowen and Bok, the former presidents of Princeton and
Harvard Universities, respectively, highlight the fact that the SAT scores of
most blacks at top schools are above the national white average. The average
scores of black teens, they add, exceed the national average among all test
takers in 1951, the first year the test was given. But these points distract us
from the crucial question. Even if blacks at top schools have higher SAT scores
than the national white average, why are their scores still the lowest among
their peers at the elite schools? Even if blacks score better on the SAT than
some prototypically middle-American Archie Andrews did in 1951, why are their
scores still closer than those of any other group to the lower averages of
yesteryear?
Many critics attack the validity of SAT scores, asserting
that the tests do not measure the true competence of black students. Black
students may not score well on the SATs, it is said, but they go on to perform
as well as other students in college. During the debate that erupted at Berkeley
in 1995 when Californians endorsed Proposition 209 barring affirmative action at
state institutions, one Berkeley professor, mocking white objections to
affirmative action, put it this way: "We hear these abstruse philosophical
discussions: `I got a higher SAT score than you, it's not fair.' Let's know what
SAT scores mean!" But there are figures on what they mean, and lower SAT
scores mean lower grades in college for both blacks and whites.
The correlation between SAT scores and college performance is nowhere near a lock step, but it is significant. Even Bowen and Bok concede this point. After tabulating data from their 28 universities, they found that
“the simple association between SAT scores and grades is clear-cut. As one would have expected, class rank varies directly with SAT scores. Among both black and white students, those in the highest SAT interval had an appreciably higher average rank in class . . . Moreover, the positive relationship between students' SAT scores and their rank in class . . . remains after we control for gender, high school grades, socioeconomic status, school selectivity, and major, as well as for race.”
Indeed, studies have shown that SAT scores overpredict the performance of black students. In other words, black students tend to make poorer grades in college than white students with the same SAT scores.
Some critics, insisting that test scores are unrelated to students' performance in the classroom, argue that high school grades ought to be the central criteria in college admissions. Yet in Beyond the Classroom (1996), Temple University researcher Laurence Steinberg and his colleagues found that in nine high schools in California and Wisconsin, including both predominantly white suburban schools and inner-city minority-dominated ones, black (and Latino) students made the lowest grades regardless of family income. Lowincome Asian Americans regularly outperformed middle-class black students by a wide margin.
If some doubt the ability of the SAT to predict school performance, others doubt the validity of the tests in measuring intelligence at all. Some critics still claim that the SAT is culturally biased, but since the creators of standardized tests have become almost obsessed with eliminating such bias, the grounds for these complaints have vanished. A newer argument charges that the SAT measures only certain varieties of intelligence, what psychologist Howard Gardner calls "linguistic" and "logical-mathematical" intelligences. Gardner urges teachers to take into account spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, existential, and musical intelligences as well.
He may have a point, but unless teaching techniques change
radically, "linguistic" and "logical-mathematical"
intelligences will remain the most applicable to the tasks at hand: reading
critically, writing coherent papers, and doing problem sets. In any case, almost
every other group in the country manages to develop its "linguistic"
and "logical-mathematical" intelligences and achieve average scores or
better on the SAT. Why can't blacks?
The separatist impulse encourages some activists to believe
that African Americans possess a "black intelligence" separate from
wonky "logical-mathematicality," but this assertion recalls some
highly unsavory arguments. An America where black students are encouraged to
nurture their artistic and spatial intelligence out of respect for their culture
is an America where black people are our house entertainers and athletes. Last
time I checked, we were trying to get past that. Isn't this what Charles Murray
and Richard Herrnstein told blacks they should sit back and be satisfied with in
The Bell Curve ( 1994)?
To me, the depressing statistics about black academic
performance are not merely numbers. They have been sadly confirmed by my own
experience during five years on the faculty at Berkeley. I have taught large
numbers of students of every race, and I spent a long time trying not to give
credence to a pattern that ultimately became too consistent and obvious to
ignore, namely, that black undergraduates at Berkeley tended to be among the
worst students on campus. I tried my best to chalk up each experience to local
factors and personalities, but as one episode piled upon another it became
impossible to avoid the conclusion that there was a connection among them all.
There was the black student who, with a jolly smile, handed
in a test containing an answer to an essay question that consisted entirely of
two literally incomprehensible sentences. There was the student in a class in
which I had repeatedly told the students they could write on any pertinent topic
for their final paper except for one thing: They could not write a biographical
essay, since it would be too easy simply to parrot other books. Left under my
door two months after the end of the class was none other than a biographical
sketch of a performer derived entirely from one book.
The stories go on and on; for each one, I could tell
another two. One black student set out to write a senior honors thesis
transforming episodes of her family history into fiction. At the beginning of
the semester, she submitted a three-page selection she had written for a
previous class. As the semester passed, while my white senior honors students
were deeply engaged in research for their papers and consulting with me weekly
or biweekly, this student came by only twice, regaling me with tales of her
family history and promising written work "soon." I let her know that
she would have to submit some kind of written work before the end of the
semester. Even that was generous, but I got nothing from her until just before
Christmas break-her family tree, drawn in pencil on a piece of notebook paper. I
never saw her again.
A black student joined one of my linguistics department
classes. He had never taken linguistics before, but the nature of the subject
was such that this was not a great handicap. I assured him that I would help him
through any rough spots. He was very good at giving dramatic speeches about
discrimination when race issues happened to come up in class, but his homework
showed that he was simply not taking in the concepts of the course, and he did
not improve even after I had tutored him in my office several times. Shortly
before the final he vanished, and I did not hear from him again until months
later, when he said he had frozen at the thought of taking the exam.
I arranged for this student to take an African American studies course I also taught, hoping he would be able to cancel out the failing grade I had been forced to give him. But it was the same story: an almost strangely clueless first midterm and spotty attendance. He disappeared before the second midterm, later explaining that a relative had died. When he came back, I made up a few extra-credit research questions for him to take home and answer. What he gave me showed some effort, but little understanding.
These stories are painful to recount because I felt a certain kinship with these students, and many of them have been among my personal favorites. I have also taught some excellent black students, notably during a year I spent at Cornell University, but they are exceptions. In my experience, the stories I have told do not represent occasional disappointments but the norm, though the quality of black students at Berkeley has risen since the first post-affirmative action class was admitted in 1998. The behavior of these students has nothing to do with the `hood. Not a single one of them grew up penniless in the ghetto, or anything close to a ghetto. Black Berkeley undergraduates are almost all upwardly mobile, bright-eyed young people, many with cars, none of whom would be uncomfortable in a nice restaurant.
The urge is very strong to frame each of these students as
individuals and avoid "stereotyping," or to tacitly assume that racism
is ultimately to blame for their behavior. This is what I did during my first
years at Berkeley. But two other experiences made it painfully clear that
something else was at work. Twice during my years at Berkeley I have had the
occasion to teach the same course to nearly all-white classes and nearly
all-black classes. The contrast was too stark and too consistent to be explained
away.
One of the courses covered the history of black musical
theater. The first year, most of the students happened to be white or Asian
American, and the class was a success. The students loved the material, many of
them wrote great papers, and some of them kept in touch afterward. The black
version was another world. The white students had enjoyed the historical
material, such as anecdotes about bygone performers, old recordings, and weird
film clips. In presenting the same material to the black students, I might as
well have been reading out of the phone book. The glazed eyes, aggressive
doodling, and, in one case, comic book reading, were things I had never
encountered as a teacher. Attendance was terrible; after the first couple of
weeks I was lucky to have half of the class in the room on the same day.
Was it me? The other class had eaten up the same
material-and a class about singing and dancing is not exactly difficult to make
interesting. When Todd Duncan, the original Porgy in Porgy and Bess, died
during the semester, I did a little tribute to him, dimming the lights and
playing one of his recordings. A couple of weeks later, when we got to Porgy
and Bess, I showed a video of him being interviewed shortly before his
death. On the midterm, one question was "Name one of the principal
performers in the original production of Porgy and Bess." Only two people
out of about 20 wrote "Todd Duncan." Another named John Bubbles, who
played Sportin' Life. The others either answered incorrectly or gave no answer
at all. I had to curve way up to avoid flunking most of the class.
I couldn't help noticing a particular contrast. In the
white class, interest waned a bit as we passed the I970s. They got a kick out of
the vintage stuff. The Wiz and Once on This Island were more
recognizable and thus less interesting; they reveled in learning the unfamiliar.
The black students, on the other hand, perked up a bit just as we got to the
'70s-the official moment was when a few of them boogied in their seats to
"Ease on Down the Road" from The Wiz. They were happy when we
got to material they already knew, but the older material that required more
active concentration was a turnoff, even though all the artists were black.
Throughout the semester, however, I could count on a bit of a "click"
when I talked about the discrimination these black artists had encountered.
These students were open to reinforcement of the victimologist ideology, but
close-minded when it came to new information. New ways of thinking and close
engagement with the written word entail an openness, a sense of integral
commitment and belonging to the world of the school, that black students tend to
teach one another out of beginning at a very early age. Such "nerdy"
thinking is painted as incompatible with membership in the group.
In 1998, several months before the arrival at Berkeley of
the first entering class to be admitted after the demise of affirmative action,
I spoke to a black undergraduate who was involved in recruiting black high
school seniors. I asked why no one seemed terribly excited about the black
students who had made it in, a not inconsiderable number despite the sharp drop.
The response: "We're afraid that black students who perform at that high a
level aren't going to be concerned with nurturing an African American presence
at Berkeley."
There it was. The dissociation of "blackness" and
school is so deeply ingrained that the black student admitted to Berkeley under
the same standards as other students was regarded with suspicion. In other
words, black students are not supposed to be star students, because then they're
not exactly "black," are they? As it happened, come September, I heard
two new black students, quite unprompted, say they had encountered a certain
social coolness from black students in classes above them. Both were
disappointed, having come to campus as outraged at the ban on affirmative action
as the older students and having expected to take their place in the campus
black community. But in embracing school openly enough to compete with whites
and Asian Americans, they had almost unwittingly signaled disloyalty, even
treachery.
Black anti-intellectualism has deep roots. It first gained a hold on African American culture under the slave system, which cut off Africans from black intellectual role models in their indigenous cultures. A Jewish person can look back to countless generations of Jewish scholars; even the most uneducated Chinese knows that China has been home to millennia of scholarship. But African slaves came from dozens of different kingdoms and societies and were thrown together in the New World, which prevented any single African cultural tradition from predominating. Their African heritage survived only as a generalized, although rich, element in a new, American-bred mix.
After slavery, blacks in America were brutally relegated to
the margins of society and allowed, at best, only the most woefully inadequate
education. Generation after generation of African Americans thus lived and died
in a cultural context in which books and learning were actively withheld. The
ways of thinking that are necessary to scholastic success came to be classified
as alien or "other"-an idea powerfully reinforced by the separatist
mindset of recent decades. Indeed, it was that separatist tendency, coming to
the fore during the late 1960s, that helped undo the legacy of black academic
excellence at exceptional black institutions such as Spelman College and Howard
University.
When I finally recognized the pattern among black students
at Berkeley, I began to recall that I had seen such attitudes at other schools
throughout my life, as a graduate student at Stanford University, as an
undergraduate at Rutgers University, and earlier.
The very first memory of my life is an afternoon in 1968
when a group of black kids, none older than eight, asked me how to spell
concrete. I spelled it, only to have one of the older kids bring his little
sister over to smack me repeatedly as the rest of the kids laughed and egged her
on. That afternoon, the little girl was taught an explicit lesson: Disparage
black kids who like learning and, by extension, school.
This happened in one of the first deliberately integrated
neighborhoods in the country, Philadelphia's tree-shaded, middle-class West
Mount Airy, where I spent most of my childhood. Not long ago, on one of my
frequent visits back to the neighborhood, I ran into one of the ringleaders of
that encounter, now grown up, smoking on a street corner at two in the
afternoon. We shook hands in joyous surprise. But when I asked him what he was
doing these days, he said "not much." He is not the only member of
that old crowd who has not gone on to much, and yet he grew up in a quiet
middle-class neighborhood with a solid public school staffed with a good number
of black teachers. What did him in was not racism but a culture that taught him
not to commit himself fully to education.
Teasing is one of the important ways this cultural legacy
is kept alive. Berkeley High School Principal Theresa Saunders (who is black)
told the East Bay Express, "We see it time and time again: [black] kids
come in quite talented, and by the end of ninth grade, they're goofing off. The
peer culture is such that it doesn't acknowledge or reward academic
achievement."
The cultural disconnect from learning does not dissolve after childhood. For example, in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a much studied suburban school district that is half black, white parents vastly predominate in parent-teacher organizations and as volunteers in the schools. There is no doubt that black parents are deeply committed to their children's well-being, but such discrepancies reveal the lower priority accorded to "the books" in black culture. This often operates in subtle ways. The connection between education and earning power and status is too obvious to ignore, and many black adults do praise the value of education.
Indeed, academic credentials often have a higher value in
the black community than in the white-my own black students persist in calling
me Professor McWhorter or even Dr. John long after my white students have taken
to calling me simply John-but that is in part precisely because they are seen as
something won in an alien realm.
Studies suggest that black parents demand less of their
children in school than white and Asian American parents do. When asked in one
study to state the lowest grade their parents would tolerate, black students
specified a C minus, an average lower than whites and Asian Americans did. Many
Asian American students said their parents would tolerate nothing less than an A
minus! In a revealing study of eighth and ninth graders, education researcher
Clifton Casteel found that white students were more likely to say that they did
schoolwork to please their parents, while black students were more likely to say
they worked for their teachers.
Most discussions of black school performance remain
shrouded in myths of victimology. Many focus on the barriers to learning in
inner-city neighborhoods, as if "black" were synonymous with
"poor." When it is pointed out that poor school performance persists
among blacks in the middle class, the usual response is that a rise in income
does not guarantee a rise in class status. Black families considered
"middle class" financially are generally "working class" or
lower culturally, this response goes. The poor performance of the children is
traceable to their parents' lack of advanced degrees, the scarcity of books and
magazines in their homes, or the absence of conversations about current events.
But we have no trouble imagining a Chinese immigrant family that runs two
restaurants sending their children to fine universities. Such parents are not
very likely to talk politics over dinner or to read the Economist, but we
do not conclude that their children are cursed by a "working-class
culture" and condemned to low SAT scores.
What about racism? It is often said that the burdens of
societal racism hinder all but a lucky few from doing well in school. This
apparently sympathetic notion has mutated into nothing less than an
infantilization of black people. Only victimology makes black thinkers so
comfortable portraying their own people as the weakest, least resilient human
beings in the history of the species. Racism is not dead. Being a middle-class
black person in America still involves being classified as second-- rung in all
kinds of interactions. But this is rarely a matter of "endemic
hostility," as our Ralph Wileys and Derrick Bells would have it.
Imagine a young black man. This 18-year-old comes from a
twoparent suburban home; his mother is a social work professor and his father is
a public university administrator. He goes to good private schools, and on a
day-to-day level leads a comfortable existence that includes a number of white
friends and the same basic acknowledgment of his achievements as that accorded
to whites. Once in his life he has been called "nigger." He was once
explicitly denied a summer job because of his race. Once he entered a store only
to meet an expression of anxiety on the proprietor's face, and was then
followed. He can remember a few teachers over the years who, while well
intentioned, obviously had rather lower expectations of him than they had of
other students. On the first day of one undergraduate class, the professor told
him he must be in the wrong class, openly implying that no black person could be
interested in the subject. He is aware of media portrayals of blacks that are
subtly racist. In innumerable ways he is now and then aware of being perceived,
despite superficial and sometimes even excessive respect, as on a lower rung
than whites.
Do we spontaneously expect this young man's
experiences-yes, they are mine-to prevent him from achieving a grade point
average higher than 3.0 or an SAT score above 950? Is this the sort of
experience that makes a 20-year-old student turn in a family tree as three
months' work on an honor's thesis? Why, exactly, do we expect so little of the
black person but not of, say, an overweight Jewish woman who experienced some
anti-Semitism and cruel treatment for her appearance while growing up and whose
parents and grandparents, like his, endured various forms of discrimination?
We are underestimating black people. Frankly, it insults
me. Jews can survive centuries of persecution and a Holocaust and still expect
their children to reach for any bar; Chinese of the early 20th century can be
tortured on the streets of San Francisco and restricted to menial jobs and still
expect their children to excel. But pull a well-fed suburban black kid over for
a drug check one afternoon and subject him to a couple of teachers who don't
call on him as often as other students and he's forever subject to lower
expectations.
The victimologist party line claims that the typical black student regularly encounters a much more overt racism than this. "Under the banner of racial neutrality, white students have been encouraged to intimidate, terrorize, and make life miserable for African American students at many of our institutions of higher learning," John Hope Franklin declares in The Color Line ( 1994). Beverly Daniel Tatum writes in Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (1997):
"Whether it is the loneliness of being routinely
overlooked as a lab partner in science courses, the irritation of being
continually asked by curious classmates about Black hairstyles, the discomfort
of being singled out by a professor to give the 'Black perspective' in class
discussion, the pain of racist graffiti scrawled on dormitory room doors, the
insult of racist jokes circulated through campus e-mail, or the injury inflicted
by racial epithets (and sometimes beer bottles) hurled from a passing car, Black
students on predominantly White college campuses must cope with ongoing affronts
to their racial identity."
Portraits like these are more theater than reportage. Why
is being asked about one's hair a "racist" imposition? And wouldn't
Tatum be the first person to complain that black students felt
"invisible" and "marginalized" if they weren't asked about
their perspective in class? Openly racist episodes do occur, but they are very
rare. I have spent over half of my life as a black person on white campuses, and
the implication that white guys yell "nigger" out of passing cars on a
typical day, or that something remotely like this happens to a black
undergraduate even once in a typical year, is nonsense.
Victimologists argue that white teachers tend to grade and
discipline black students harshly. But in his extensive survey of 20,000
teenagers and their families, Lawrence Steinberg found not only that complaints
of racist bias among teachers were rare, but that Latinos and Asian Americans
registered the same levels of complaints as blacks-yet Asian Americans
nevertheless managed to turn in excellent school performances.
Moreover, black students do not perform appreciably better in schools where most or all of the faculty is black. Studies have found only fitful correlations between the presence of black teachers and high performance among black students, with the social class of the teacher as important a factor as race and the results varying significantly by subject. (Apparently, both white and black teachers of higher socioeconomic status get better results.) At the same time, the children of black African and Caribbean immigrants, who share a legacy of slavery with black Americans, usually perform at the same level as whites. In my own teaching career, I have taught American-born black students who did well, but every black undergraduate who has been among the best in a class I taught has been of Caribbean extraction.
The devaluation of education is local to black American
culture.
In his widely publicized 1992 study Information and
Attitudes, psychologist Claude Steele opened yet another front in the
victimologist argument. He showed that black students did better on sample tests
when they were not required to indicate their race or when the test was not
presented as a measure of racial ability. Steele also showed that black scores
suffered when the tests were presented as a gauge of "the psychological
factors involved in solving verbal problems." These experiments suggest
that the performance of black students is hindered by self doubt linked to the
stereotype of black mental inferiority. The "stereotype threat" was
quickly accepted in many quarters.
But any person's performance would suffer under such
conditions. Steele himself showed that women and even white men get lower scores
when told the results are to be measured against those of Asian Americans.
Considering that students are never required to indicate their race on their
schoolwork anyway, are Steele's findings really that meaningful?
He argues that the subtle presence of the inferiority
stereotype "in the air" interferes with black performance. Such a
stereotype does exist. But why isn't the stereotype of female mental inferiority
equally crippling for women? Why aren't Southeast Asian immigrants held back by
the hurtful stereotypes they encounter? Some may object that Southeast Asians
are not stereotyped as dim, but it would be difficult to tell this to a
Vietnamese or Cambodian teen hobbled by a thick accent and partial command of
the language, of which there are quite a few in some states.
Another widely cited cause of black-white education
differences is the funding gap between mostly black urban schools and suburban
white schools. Not only has the spending gap been closing, however, but funding
levels don't correlate well with the performance of schools or individual
students. More than onestudy has found that children of poor refugees from
Southeast Asia, arriving with limited English and going to school in the same
crumbling, blighted inner-city public schools considered a sentence to failure
for black kids, do very well in school and on standardized tests. In any event,
the notion that most black students attend bombed-out, violence-ridden schools
is an outdated stereotype. Forty-one percent of black children still do grow up
in poverty, compared with 27 percent of white youth, but it is no longer the
case that all but a lucky few black students are stuck in inner-city schools.
It is true, however, that many black youngsters are
"tracked" into "slow" classes in the public school. Thisis
said to snuff out their commitment to learning. There are two possible
explanations: One is that racist teachers are responsible, the other is that the
performance and commitment of the students themselves is the cause. Several
studies show that the latter is overwhelmingly the case; teachers place students
not according to any detectable racial bias, but simply on the basis of prior
performance. (See, for example, "Students, Courses, and
Stratification," by Michael S. Garet and Brian Delaney, in Sociology of
Education [1988].) At Berkeley High School, not far from the campus where I
teach, in one of the most "progressive" communities in the nation,
blacks have long been over-represented in the low track. But about 70 percent of
entering black students generally read below grade level, according to principal
Theresa Saunders, while perhaps 90 percent of whites read at or above grade
level.
Victimologist arguments are put to a fuller test in another
affluent community halfway across the country, the Cleveland suburb of Shaker
Heights. The community's excellent public schools spent about $10,000 a year per
student in 1998, compared with a national average of $6,842. The town is
affluent and racially integrated; half of the student population is black.
Students track themselves into advanced courses. There are after-school,
weekend, and summer programs to help children whose grades are slipping, and a
program in which older black students help younger ones. As early as
kindergarten, students needing help with language arts skills are specially
tutored. There are special sessions on taking standardized tests. A counselor
works with students who have low grades but appear to have high potential.
Shaker Heights is beautifully tailored to helping black students, and one would
be hard pressed to call the black families sailing through these wide streets in
their Saturns and Toyotas "struggling blue collar." Yet in four recent
graduating classes, blacks constituted just seven percent of the top fifth of
their class-and 90 percent of the bottom fifth. Of the students who failed at
least one portion of the ninth-grade proficiency test, 82 percent were black.
None of the old explanations work here. Teachers and
administrators in Shaker Heights are perplexed by the performance of their black
students. Straying beyond racism-based explanations is uncomfortable because it
seems to feed into the stereotype of black mental inferiority. "If it's not
racism," we think, "then what else could it be?"
It is not pleasant to think that blacks are held down by
black culture itself. But it is absolutely vital that we address anti-intellectualism
in black American culture honestly. To deny its pivotal significance is cultural
self sabotage.
We have arrived at a point where closing the black-white
education gap will be possible only by allowing black students to spread their
wings and compete freely with their peers of other races. More than 30 years of
affirmative action have shown conclusively that programs that let black kids in
through the back door will not solve the problem. Youngsters coming of age in a
culture that does not value educational achievement are not helped by a system
that only reduces the incentives to excel.
Affirmative action was a necessary emergency measure in its early years, and I believe it is still justified in the business world, where hiring and advancement are based as much on personal contacts and social chemistry as on merit. But to focus in the educational realm upon the fact that minorities are underrepresented in top secondary schools, that some white teachers may be less likely to give top grades to black students, that black students may suffer from a lack of confidence because of racist stereotypes, or that vestigial societal racism persists, is less to open avenues to solutions than to embrace capitulation.
These arguments imply that black students simply cannot do
their best except under utopian conditions, even as other students regularly
surmount similar obstacles. They cast black people as innately weak and
unintelligent.
Our interest, then, must be in helping black students shed the shackles of anti-intellectualism. Any effort that prepares black students to compete is laudable: For example, secondary schools should urge black children to form study groups, which have been shown to improve minority students' performance.
Immersing black students in extended academic work sessions
with fellow blacks counters the conception that school is "white."
Minority students should also be given standardized tests on a regular basis in
all schools, even those with insufficient resources. This alone will raise
students' test scores.
There are also strategies for encouraging
"diversity" without reinforcing black students' sense of separation
from school. Top universities should consider admitting high-performing students
from high schools that offer few or no advanced placement courses. Because
minorities are disproportionately represented in these schools, minority
representation will increase. But it must be a race-blind policy, applicable to
whites and others. Otherwise, we risk reinforcing the idea that academic
achievement is a superhuman feat for the black student.
In The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein told us
that we should eliminate affirmative action because black people are simply too
dumb to do any better. My reason for opposing it in higher education, by
contrast, is practical. We must eliminate this obsolete program not for abstruse
philosophical reasons, nor because it can rather laboriously be interpreted as
discriminatory against whites, but because it is obstructing African Americans
from showing that they are as capable as all other people. I have faith in black
American students. I have seen nothing whatsoever in my life to suggest that
they are incapable of performing as well as anyone else in school. But the
black-white scholastic gap will close only when black students are required to
compete under the same standards of excellence as whites.
[Author note]
>JOHN H. MCWHORTER is associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the
author of The Word on the Street: Fact and Fable about American English (1998), to be issued in paperback by
Perseus Publishing in November, and The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact
(2000). This essay is adapted from Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America, by John H. McWhorter.
Copyright (c) 2000 by john H, McWhorter. To be published this summer by the Free Press, a division of Simon 6
Schuster, Inc. Reprinted by permission.