Category: ideological culture

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education and schooling ideological culture

Asian Privilege?

Seventy-three.

That’s the number that stood out to me in George Will’s Sunday column, “Anti-Asian racism disguises itself as ‘diversity.’”

Seventy-three percent of the smart students at Thomas Jefferson High School happen to be Asian. TJHS is a highly-rated STEM magnet school in Virginia’s Washington, D.C. suburbs, where entry had, until recently, been based on an admissions exam. 

That’s more than three times the percentage of Asian Americans among Fairfax County, Virginia, public school students. 

European-American students make up the largest racial block at 38 percent, but account for only 18 percent of attendees at this elite high school. Hispanics represent 27 percent of all students and African Americans 10 percent, but garnered, respectively, 3 and 1 percent of the coveted slots.

Are educators specifically advantaging Asian kids? 

Well, more than 80 percent of Fairfax County teachers are white, 7 percent black and only 5 percent Asian, says a separate Post report. Asian privilege seems unlikely.

So . . . what are Asian American students doing differently?

Studying? 

Will recounts complaints by the county superintendent about Asian American parents spending too much on test preparation and the Virginia Secretary of Education compared such studying to using “performance enhancing drugs” in sports.

Another factor in having “crazy” parents who obsess about their children doing well in school could be doubling the odds by having not one, but two parents — not to mention an extended family structure. Among blacks, Hispanics and whites, out-of-wedlock births account for 69, 52 and 28 percent of all births, respectively. But for Asian Americans, out-of-wedlock births are under 12 percent.

One can jigger the rules for getting into TJ High. Sure. 

Jiggering the rules for getting ahead in life? Much harder.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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family / mind / JG

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Discord Meets Democracy

San Francisco, schools

When it comes to public schools, “no city has experienced the level of discord as that in San Francisco,” reports The Washington Post. 

That’s because, as The Post posits, “the San Francisco school board has been operating” with “a heavy focus on controversial, difficult racial issues, and slow progress on school reopening.”

A sampling:

  • “In January, the school board voted to rename 44 schools” with purported “connections to slavery, oppression and racism” — though The Post notes “the alleged ties were thin or, in some cases, historically questionable or inaccurate.”*
  • One of the most controversial moves by the board was “[c]hanging the admissions process for the elite Lowell High School — eliminating grades and test scores and admitting students by a ranked-choice lottery.” As The Post explains, “the change means that students with the best grades and scores may not be admitted.”
  • The school board removed Commissioner Alison Collins as Vice President in March, after her anti-Asian tweets from 2016 came to light. She called Asian Americans (who happen to disproportionally earn entry to Lowell) “house n****rs” who employed “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’”**

“Through all this, the city’s school buildings remained closed,” notes The Post, “even as private schools in the area and public schools elsewhere in the region operated in person.”

Thankfully, San Franciscans have launched a recall campaign against three members of the seven-member school board: President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison M. Collins. 

The best thing for public education in Frisco will be to school these “first” recall targets in the power of the citizenry.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob. 

* Facing a lawsuit, the board voted unanimously to rescind their renaming of those “‘injustice-linked’ schools” — just a few months after the original vote.

** In response, Collins is suing the board for $87 million.

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ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

Lightfoot’s Dark Turn

Lori Lightfoot, Chicago

The mayor of Chicago is now refusing interviews with white journalists. Only “Black or Brown journalists” need apply.

The jabberwocky uttered by Mayor Lightfoot to justify her conduct provides no real justification. But her rationalization has something to do with the alleged virtue of conferring an unfair advantage upon individuals whose ethnic background is “underrepresented” in journalism.

There are many reasons that a person may lack interest in a particular profession or fail to find work in that profession. In any case, the appropriate response to actual injustice is obviously not to inflict further injustice.

Chicago Tribune reporter Gregory Pratt, a Latino and thus ethnically qualified to interview the mayor, has withdrawn from an upcoming interview in protest. Good for him. Ostracizing a mayor who is ostracizing persons because of an unchosen physical trait is one proper way to combat the mayor’s racist new policy.

Chicago voters are presently unable to recall their mayor, but state lawmakers have proposed a bill to give voters that power. It should be enacted. Immediately. Lightfoot should be booted. Immediately thereafter.

Like other personages in our culture, the worst of our politicians are working overtime to outdo each other in contempt for all rational standards. Having been taught that reason is irrelevant, they are acting on this assumption.

This kind of thing will probably get worse before it gets better. But let’s look on the bright side: there are only eight more decades of this century to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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De-colonize Our Music?

music, freedom

Music is, arguably, the crowning artistic achievement of our civilization. 

It grew out of many folk and ecclesiastical practices, but one of the great innovations that allowed both Bach and The Beatles, Beethoven and Broadway, Bartok and “beats,” is the theory of music. 

Which rests on that great innovation, musical notation.

Not my area of expertise, alas, but I tip my hat to the educators who know the physics and the art in precise and powerful ways.

Unfortunately, stupidly racist anti-racism has infected even music education. The latest example? The University of Oxford is considering a plan to get rid of teaching music through teaching notation.

“Sheet music is now considered ‘too colonial,’” explains The Telegraph, “while Beethoven and Mozart, and music curriculums in general, are believed to have ‘complicity in white supremacy.’”

While mainly an attack on classical music, our popular music rests upon a lot of basic western technique, too. The idea that musical notation is racist is itself bizarrely racist. Do these people think because whites invented musical notation, non-whites are oppressed by it? Yes, the opponents of western musical notation, who include “activist students” as well as “activist professors,” are apparently ashamed of a tradition focused on “white European music from the slave period.”

But until fairly recently, all civilization was “the slave period.” And Europe, which developed the tradition, wasn’t the world’s most slave-ridden society during the period of western music’s development: Africa and Asia were. 

Slavery is bad. Very bad. Freedom is good. Very good. But you don’t reject good things because they once upon a time touched bad things. We can have both freedom and music. 

And musical notation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Image from William Creswell

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Query Theory and “Microaggression”

microaggression, woke

“Microaggression” is the alleged sin of committing a verbal slip that the alleged victim, eager to be offended, aggressively interprets in the most invidious possible way. It’s one of many faddish notions used to rationalize the squelching of speech and to abrogate basic rights.

In October 2018, Kieran Bhattacharya, a medical student at the University of Virginia, attended a discussion on “microaggression.” He asked questions like: “Is it a requirement, to be a victim of microaggression, that you are a member of a marginalized group?”

Beverly Adams, an assistant dean, told him no, it isn’t, and the two argued about it for a bit.

Afterward, an organizer of the event, Nora Kern, filed a complaint against Bhattacharya that led to demands that he get counseling, and, ultimately, to his suspension. His protest was taken as proof that the complaint and demands made against him were justified.

Bhattacharya has sued the school for retaliating against him. His crime, so to speak, was nothing more than asking the wrong questions — or asking them wrongly. 

Even if he had asked them heatedly (which he denies), so what?

A district court says Bhattacharya has a point and is allowing his lawsuit to proceed: “Bhattacharya sufficiently alleges that Defendants retaliated against him. Indeed, they . . . suspended him from UVA Medical School, required him to undergo counseling and obtain ‘medical clearance’ as a prerequisite for remaining enrolled, and prevented him from appealing his suspension.”

Some kind of aggression is happening here, and it’s pretty macro.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Photo by Chen Dama

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Whitey Need Not Apply

UBI, black, white, slavery

“Oakland to give low-income residents $500 a month,” reads the headline, “no strings attached.”

Well, actually there may be just a little itty bitty filament attached to what CBS News calls “the latest experiment with a ‘guaranteed income,’ the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”

Though certainly not universal, “Oakland’s project is significant because it is one of the largest efforts in the U.S. so far, targeting up to 600 families,” notes CBS. It is different in another unique and important way . . . “it is the first program to limit participation strictly to Black, Indigenous and people of color communities.”

You read that right. 

But have no fear of excluding poor whites. The network immediately provided, “The reason: White households in Oakland on average make about three times as much annually than black households, according to the Oakland Equity Index.”

Even if accurate, how does this “on average” group statistic justify denying help to someone in poverty who is white? 

“It’s also,” CBS News informs, “a nod to the legacy of the Black Panther Party, the political movement that was founded in Oakland in the 1960s.” 

You see, the Black Panthers advocated for a basic guaranteed income or universal basic income. And so, since black people in a group with black in the name pushed the idea, it only logically follows that whites should be denied this assistance. Or, uh, hmm, er.

Oakland’s program is different in yet one more way: It is privately funded.

So, what’s the big deal?

Sure, people can privately send money to whomever they want, with whatever racial criteria they design. But, private folks may not create government-run programs that are racist even if they fund every penny of the cost.

This isn’t a pilot program for “guaranteed income” but for a racist America.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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