Eric Holder and School Discipline
Joseph Kay, American Renaissance, May 1, 2012
At first glance, Eric Holder’s efforts to create strict proportionality in school discipline make no sense (see Jared Taylor’s feature article.) Just ask any teacher, including most black ones, about how the average black behaves compared to the average white or Asian. Differences are an indisputable reality, and I strongly suspect that for all but the most strident ideologues, they are a self-evident reality. So something deeper, less obvious must be the motivation for this policy of proportionate school discipline (this, of course, assumes that the DOJ is capable of devious machinations.) Four probably overlapping possibilities come to mind:
1. Devious economic motivation. White and Asian students would suffer if punishments were doled out by quota, and this would darken the school. The upshot would be more jobs for blacks, since few whites will work in a largely black school. Racial “fairness” is just a ruse to get jobs.
2. Psychological motivation. Blacks always want to feel good, and are thus happy to suppress data showing them to be miscreants. This is true even if the data would objectively help them, so in a contest between genuine improvement and self esteem, the latter triumphs.
3. Screw whitey. Secretary Holder and company know that whites would suffer under a “fair” discipline policy, and that’s the point: Punish whitey even if the school collapses in chaos. This is a little like what now happens in the Middle East: I don’t mind suffering, so long as my enemy suffers twice as much.
4. Exasperation. Every effort to close the academic gaps between whites and blacks has failed, no matter how costly or difficult to administer, and there is no promising solution on the legislative agenda. Yet, many black ideologues genuinely believe there is something that will succeed, so out of desperation they are willing to try the most hare-brained scheme. Who knows what will come next when this “fair punishment” nostrum fails?
All of this just confirms that the “civil rights” project is taking on the characteristics of a religion, and this applies equally to blacks and many, but not all, whites. Propositions that should be scientifically verified are now articles of faith, and those who even suggest the need for empirical verification are heretics. This religious devotion is reinforced by all the jobs that flow from keeping the faith.
Head Start is the perfect example. It makes no difference that all the evidence suggests it has not accomplished its mission of improving cognitive skills. It must be continued because it is part of civil rights dogma: The government is obligated lift up blacks and to give them jobs. Salvation does not come from tinkering with one policy or adjusting another but from keeping the faith.
Thus, year by year, the black version of reality further separates from the white version. Whites stress different policies — for example, using school vouchers or starting charter schools — while blacks harden their views, many of which have nothing to do with empirical evidence. Put another way, all the data-driven arguments that whites offer to blacks about uplift efforts fall on deaf ears. It’s like trying to convince the true believer that there is no God.
